Pomona Scholar Awarded Smithsonian Leadership Fellowship

Earlier this year, Pomona Scholar Gianna Hutton González was selected for the Smithsonian Leadership for Change Fellowship. The program “recruits young people who are motivated to support their communities and advance social justice.” The opportunity includes an eight-week internship at a Smithsonian institution in Washington, D.C.

Gianna was placed with the Phillip and Patricia Frost Museum of Science, where she produced science education content for the Museum and The National Coral Reef Conservancy (ReeFLorida) environmental education campaign. While the museum is broadly focused on fueling innovation for the future, the campaign aims to educate Floridians on climate science and the specific environmental factors affecting local coral ecosystems. Gianna hopes the project will inspire people to act.

“Science communication sticks out to me as a way to ignite empathy,” she says. “We need to invest in education so that people actually understand what is at stake when we talk about climate disasters.”

We need to invest in education so that people actually understand what is at stake when we talk about climate disasters.

Gianna is no stranger to organizing and advocacy work. She was first exposed to science communications and youth organizing as a Conservation Teen Scientist at ZooMiami while in high school. The program invites students to get involved at the zoo, giving them a glimpse of zoo operations and access to detailed information about the animals. Gianna also participated in her high school’s GenCLEO program; a youth empowerment movement aimed at improving climate literacy.

“There is so much power in knowledge and community building,” she says. “It took me a long time to become confident in my identity as an organizer. To be an organizer is to commit yourself to eternal learning toward the end goal of making the world a better place.”

As a rising junior, Gianna is excited to welcome the new cohorts of Scholars onto campus and hopes to encourage them to think about how they can make an impact using the skills they homed in Pre-Collegiate Training.

“Posse gave me language to describe skills that I had been developing in my youth organizing spaces and created opportunities for me to work through difference with empathy,” says Gianna. “Having the community on campus to rely on made all the difference.”