Aly (Alycia) Gideon, a senior at High School North, received the inaugural Holocaust Genocide Awareness Award from Kidsbridge and Mercer County Holocaust Genocide Commission. Actively involved in STAND (Students Taking Action Now: Darfur) since she was a freshman, Gideon served as the club’s secretary as a sophomore and president for both her junior and senior years. The group has raised more than $10,000 for Darfur Peace and Development.
The most notable event that she organized to raise awareness was Dine for Darfur with invited guests Jerry Ehrlich, a doctor from Doctors Without Borders, and Paul Winkler, executive director of the State Commission on Holocaust Education.
Gideon has received recognition for her efforts since eighth grade, when she set up stands in front of area businesses to distribute flyers and collect donations. She raised close to $2,000 the first summer. She has held 45-minute presentations on the genocide in Darfur at both the West Windsor and Plainsboro libraries, as well as in classrooms in the district.
Gideon has partnered with Eileen Chubik-Kiws, a teacher at Community Middle School, so that STAND could hand out informational materials at school dances. She has also paraded the streets of Princeton with flyers to collect donations.
Also a member of North’s Kids-for-Kids organization, Gideon tutors underprivileged children in Trenton. She also teaches English to immigrants at an area church. Editor-in-chief for the school’s newspaper and president of Model Congress, she is also a peer leader for the school and mentors younger students and mediates student disputes. “Alycia has managed to skillfully balance her participation in a multitude of extracurricular activities while keeping her academics a priority and holding a part-time job,” says Melissa DeMurth, her guidance counselor. “She is a wonderful young lady who is very deserving of the accolade.”
Gideon, who actually has two part-time jobs, works at the Bent Spoon in Princeton and in child care at Can Do Fitness Center in Forrestal Village.
Gideon and her family have lived in West Windsor for 15 years. Her parents are Diane, a housewife, and Richard, a consultant with his own business. “They have always been completely encouraging and supportive of my various involvements in volunteering and the community,” says Alycia. “While I always wanted to travel and go abroad to volunteer, my mom always told me that you don’t have to leave your home to do good in the world and make a difference, and I have really valued that lesson. That encouraged me to get involved where I could, in my school and in WW-P, to bring even just a small change to the student body.”
That is all changing now. Gideon has deferred enrollment at Barnard College to take a gap year and travel to India, where she will be doing an internship with American Field Service, a non-profit, high school exchange program. “I will be living with a family there and be commuting to AFS’s office in Delhi on a daily basis,” she says. “I spent last summer in India living with the same family and taking classes at Amity International School on an National Security Language Initiative for Youth scholarship, and I loved it so much that I just had to go back!”
