Amanda Britter and Shailey Shah were selected arsenic recipients of the 2025 Engaged Student Leader Award for the Western Region Continuums of Service Engagement Awards.
This designation celebrates pupil leaders who person demonstrated an exceptional committedness to civic and assemblage engagement, the advancement of acquisition equity and the improvement of sustainable, reciprocal partnerships that code captious assemblage issues.
Britter and Shah, some fourth-year Smittcamp Family Honors College students, person made a singular interaction connected their field and beyond done their roles arsenic LEAD California Community Engagement Student Fellows. Together, they dedicated implicit 400 hours of work to the readying and improvement of the first-ever “Student Track” for the 2025 CWestern Regional Continuums of Service Conference successful Seattle. Their enactment included designing subcommittees, collecting and analyzing data, curating pupil presumption proposals and securing a keynote talker — demonstrating vision, enactment and a committedness to pupil empowerment crossed the region.
Recognizing a request for student-focused spaces astatine nationalist conferences, Britter and Shah created a level wherever pupil leaders could present, web and collaboratively code assemblage challenges. Their enactment not lone sets a caller modular for pupil inclusion successful nonrecreational civic engagement spaces but besides paves the mode for aboriginal “Student Tracks” astatine the conference.
Outside their fellowship, Britter and Shah are engaged successful academic, probe and work initiatives. Britter, a spiritual studies major, is progressive successful sustainability and doctrine clubs, volunteers successful faith-based and carnal payment efforts, and plans to prosecute a master’s grade successful seminary and nonprofit enactment astatine Yale University successful the fall. Shah, a biology large and aspiring physician, conducts probe with UCSF, mentors younker and leads work initiatives done the Jan and Bud Richter Center for Community Engagement and Service-Learning.
Their shared content successful the powerfulness of work to alteration individuals and communities is evident successful each facet of their work. The Engaged Student Leader Award is simply a testament to their innovation, empathy, and dedication to fostering civic-minded, socially liable pupil leadership.
During the 2023-24 world year, much than 4,200 Fresno State students participated successful 198 service-learning courses – helping the assemblage provide over 1 cardinal hours of work to the assemblage for the 15th consecutive year.
(Story by Taylan Parker, Richter Center)
