Next month, the Bread & Roses Community Fund will honor four young gay men for their leadership within the community.
The Jonathan Lax Scholarship is given to gay men who have demonstrated commitment to community engagement and academic success and who aspire to use their education and experiences to contribute to the LGBT community. The scholarship is named for inventor, entrepreneur and native Philadelphian Jonathan Lax, who hoped to provide opportunities for out gay men to pursue higher education and become leaders within the LGBT community.
The scholarships, totaling $20,000, will be presented to Saidzhan Abdullaev, Matthew Steele, Kemar Jewel and Rick Mula.
Bread & Roses executive director Casey Cook said it is integral for the community to recognize its upcoming generation of leaders.
“It is important to recognize and support young LGBT leaders who are advancing movements for change in our region,” Cook said.
Abdullaev, 22, a 2013 Point Foundation scholar, is a youth ambassador for the United Nations, is interning at SAGE and founded Youth for Peace, an international foundation for youth service, leadership and social-justice advocacy. He is a political-science major in his final year at the University of Pennsylvania.
“I think it is such an amazing school,” he said. “I have a lot of visions for the world and a lot of dreams, so Penn is a place that supplies resources so my dreams and goals can be a success.”
Jewel is an administrative assistant at The Attic Youth Center and panelist at its Bryson Youth Institute, where he has used his personal story to help youth-service providers enhance their LGBT outreach.
“Kemar has a phenomenal presence in a room,” said Bryson Institute director Kelly Kroehle. “He is an incredibly impactful storyteller who speaks truths in a way where the listener does not get caught up in defensiveness but is able to genuinely identify their personal and professional areas for growth. Kemar is an organic agent of social change.”
Jewel is a theater major at Temple University who aspires to direct stories to combat homophobia and intolerance.
Steele, 27, hails from Seattle. After earning his undergraduate degree from the University of Washington in 2010, he moved to Philadelphia to take a job at the University of Pennsylvania as a research assistant. He is currently pursuing a dual master’s degree in city planning and urban spatial analytics.
Steele founded the Cooperative Food Empowerment Directive in Seattle and expanded the organization to the East Coast. It was in Seattle where his LGBT activism started.
“I worked as commissioner for the Seattle LGBT Commission and I helped plan LGBT festivals and provided outreach to LGBT allies and did public-health outreach,” he said.
He has continued his outreach work in Philadelphia, with his involvement in such organizations as the Kensington Community Food Co-op and the Mid-Atlantic Food Co-Op Alliance.
Steele said his interest in economic development prompted him to pursue the graduate degrees.
“I’ve been primarily interested in thinking about economic development from a collective public perspective: how to approach spaces and places to develop it, so it spawned from that,” he said. “Urban planning is a combination of sociality and business and it is very fascinating.”
Mula, 24, is hoping to make the world a more accepting place for the LGBT community.
Mula is from Kingsport, Tenn., and said as a young gay man, he experienced discrimination in his hometown, which furthered his motivation to enroll in law school at the University of Pennsylvania.
“I wanted to make a difference in the lives of LGBT people,” he said. “Our community has a lot of needs and I thought going into law would help address them.”
Mula worked as a summer intern last year for both the National Gay and Lesbian Task Force and Lambda Legal.
“At the Task Force, I was able to participate in a trans equality event where we went to Capitol Hill and talked with congressional representatives about various issues that the LGBT community is facing,” he said.
At the time, the group was focusing on the passage of the Employment Nondiscrimi-nation Act and comprehensive immigration reform, issues he saw the full impact of firsthand during his time at Lambda Legal.
“I got to work at the help desk and people would call us and talk about their legal problems. We got a lot of calls about immigration and employment discrimination,” he said. “It was resounding because employment discrimination is real and there are people being fired from their job because they are gay, trans or however they identify.”
There will be a reception for the four recipients from 5:30-7:30 p.m. Sept. 5 at William Way LGBT Community Center, 1315 Spruce St. For more information, visit www.breadrosesfund.org.