Bay Area Jews are well represented on two prominent national lists of people making a difference in the world.
The Jewish Daily Forward’s just-released list of 50 Jewish change-makers includes five from Northern California, and a second list recognizing 10 young Jewish innovators and activists — all younger than 21 — features five from the Bay Area.
The results were published Nov. 7 in the Forward.
The recognition of young Jews, based on reader nominations, is a new accompaniment to the Forward 50, the national newspaper’s annual list of Jews making significant contributions in politics, the arts, sports, technology, education and more.
The five young activists from the Bay Area include Nittai Malchin, an 18-year-old freshman at the University of Southern California. Malchin was a junior at Palo Alto High School when he was inspired to start his nonprofit, One Love Advocates, while watching news of the devastating aftermath of the 2010 earthquake in Haiti.
After learning that the earthquake destroyed more than 5,000 schools, Malchin decided to focus on using technology to improve educational opportunities for Haitian children. The One Love Advocates computer initiative, which buys laptops for teachers to share with students, has helped to equip four teachers with 50 laptops that cycle through tent schools in Port-au-Prince, Malchin told the Forward.
Tatiana Grossman, another Palo Alto teen, has been working to promote literacy in impoverished African nations for four years — since she was 12 and led a book drive to benefit villages in Botswana as her bat mitzvah project. Now 16, Grossman is founder of Spread the Words, a 3-year-old nonprofit that has provided digital resources, libraries and more to 115 villages.
In 2010, Grossman became the first American finalist for the International Children’s Peace Prize, and in October, she won the 2011 World of Children Youth Award along with two other honorees. “I’m proud of how successful I’ve been,” Grossman told j. in 2010, “and that I’m a role model for kids in Africa. I think kids are more excited to read because of me, and I’m proud that I had an effect on how their lives will be in the future.”
Erin Schrode, a 20-year-old from Ross and a dean’s scholar in her third year at NYU, has been called the “face of a new green generation” by San Francisco’s 7×7 magazine. As the co-founder of the Turning Green campaign, she’s been promoting global sustainability, youth leadership, environmental education and conscious consumerism since she was a high school sophomore.
After working in disaster relief in Haiti, she launched the Schoolbag, a youth education project that has provided sustainably produced school supplies to almost 15,000 Haitian students.
Rachel Levenson, a 20-year-old from Mountain View, has devoted two years to researching money lending in rural African communities. Now a senior at Wesleyan University in Connecticut, her research — initially inspired by time spent with the Jewish Community Teen Foundation, an initiative of the S.F.-based Jewish Community Federation — has become part of a larger initiative by several universities studying informal lending practices in developing countries.
Levenson told the Forward she plans to work in sub-Saharan Africa after graduation and approach “development work with a critical eye, so hopefully the money that is donated is reaching and actually helping the people it’s intended for.”
Alyssa Breetwor, 21, also from Mountain View, started Pathways, a fitness program for at-risk and formerly incarcerated teens, in Walla Walla, Wash., where she’s a senior at Whitman College. Breetwor founded the nonprofit two years ago and already has seen benefits: Physical exercise helped to raise teens’ self-esteem and build social and academic skills, she told the Forward.
Northern California adults on the Forward 50 list are Sheryl Sandberg, Facebook’s COO, in Palo Alto; Jaron Lanier, a Berkeley scientist, musician and author; Michael Tilson Thomas, music director of the San Francisco Symphony; Berkeley resident Adam Mansbach, poet and author of last year’s surprise hit children’s book “Go the F**ck to Sleep”; and Philip Levine of Fresno, U.S. poet laureate.
To see the complete lists, visit www.forward.com/forward-50.