Hamilton High West graduate Chinwe Oriji has been selected to receive a P.E.O. Sisterhood Scholar Award.
Chinwe Oriji, a Ph.D. student in African and African Diaspora Studies at the University of Texas in Austin, TX, is one of 85 doctoral students nationwide selected to receive a $15,000 Scholar Award from the P.E.O. Sisterhood. She was sponsored by Chapter AM of Pennington.
Oriji is the daughter of Ugochi and Friday Oriji who moved to Trenton from Nigeria in the 1980s. The Hamilton High West alumna earned a B.S. in Public Health and a B.A. in Africana Studies at Rutgers University and a M. Phil. in Modern Society and Global Transformation at the University of Cambridge, United Kingdom.
Oriji is interested in creating programs to allow youth to return to Nigeria through internships, language courses and community service incentives. She has begun constructing a website, Unispora.com, designed to give a platform for those living outside the country of their birth to submit articles, videos, poems, etc., focusing on their development as individuals from multiple cultural backgrounds. She has also begun to develop the I.AM.YOU Project, the aim of which is to connect prison rehabilitation programs in the U.S. and South Africa.
P.E.O. Scholar Awards was established in 1991 to provide substantial merit-based awards for women of the United States and Canada who are pursuing a doctoral level degree at an accredited college or university.
The P.E.O. Sisterhood, founded January 21, 1869 at Iowa Wesleyan College, Mount Pleasant, Iowa, is a philanthropic educational organization interested in bringing increased opportunities for higher education to women. There are approximately 6,000 local chapters in the United States and Canada with nearly a quarter of a million active members.
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