Recent Pine View graduate Minnah Stein received a national Diller Teen Tikkun Olam Award from a San Francisco foundation for her work creating EmpowerU, a program that educates students about consent, safety and sexual harassment and assault. (Tikkun Olam is the Hebrew concept of “repairing the world.”) Stein, 18, is now studying business at Florida State University. “Whatever I do in the future,” she says, “social justice is going to be part of it.” 

“In the summer of 2014, I heard an NPR story that one in five girls will be sexually assaulted in college, as will one in 16 boys. I was shocked. Nobody was talking about it. How could such an important topic not be a required subject in schools?”

“I joined the advisory board of the national Stop Sexual Assault in Schools, which created the video, Sexual Harassment: Not in Our School! I took it to the Sarasota school system and got it approved [for screening]. Now we’re working on getting it implemented in the school system; we’re almost there.”

“People ask me, ‘how do you measure success?’ I base it on the questions students ask. It’s such a hush-hush topic. The most important part of solving this is starting the conversation.”