CAIS is proud to share the spectacular news that SF Mayor Daniel Lurie announced seventh grader Lottie N. as the city’s first ever AAPI Youth Changemaker Award winner. This honor recognized Lottie for her distinct impact through community service. Upon learning of the announcement, eighth grade Chinese teacher Sisi Zheng, who is one of the faculty sponsors for Lottie’s CAIS club, shared, “Wonderful news and a well-deserved award!”
Lottie founded Creative Righters, a nonprofit dedicated to encouraging kids to write, make art, find their voices and share their stories with the world. (More than 60 of the young authors and artists are CAIS students.) In addition, she created the Candy, Crafts, and Community Club at CAIS, bringing over 100 CAIS kids together to make hundreds of care kits to benefit recovering kids at UCSF and CPMC. (See her article about the club in the Student Takeover edition of the Middle School Update.) She’s extending the effort into the summer, when she’ll be hosting a Candy Crafts & Community Club Event at SF Public Library’s Ortega Branch.
Lottie accepte the AAPI Youth Changemaker Award with a speech at the APA Heritage Awards held Thursday, May 1 from 5:00-7:30 p.m. at Herbst Theater, 401 Van Ness Avenue, San Francisco. This ceremony was among the first of 100+ events the City lined up to celebrate Asian American Heritage Month.
Coverage Roundup
Excerpt from Official Award Ceremony Video from SFGov
From Middle School Head Joe Williamson’s Middle School Update
As you have undoubtedly heard, our own Charlotte (Lottie) N. ’26, is the first ever recipient of the AAPI Youth Change Maker Award in the Middle School category. I had the privilege of attending the APA Heritage Awards at Herbst Theater on May 1 to see Lottie accept the award for her creation of the Creative Righters program, as well as the Candy, Crafts, and Community Club she created for our Middle School clubs period at CAIS. For the CAIS club, she built partnerships with CPMC and UCSF Children’s Hospital and assembled more than 125 student volunteers to help. Overall, Lottie’s club has donated over 500 Art Therapy care kits to help young patients recover from treatment, through positive messaging, artmaking and storytelling.
A quote from Lottie’s acceptance speech that night at Herbst theater resonates with the objectives of the Eighth Grade Power Project:
“’What do you want to do when you grow up?’ I hear that a lot.
But why wait until you’re a grown up?
Why not do something to make someone smile — today?”
Congratulations to Lottie for making the Kindness Firedragon especially proud and for being a great exemplar of the CAIS mission tenet to contribute to a better world.