CC Student Is Awarded A Mitchell Scholarship

"I don't know why they chose me," Sarah Elizabeth Wagner-McCoy, CC '02, said after being awarded the prestigious Mitchell Scholarship, but her love of literature and devotion to community service suggest the reasons for her receipt of the award.

The scholarship is funded by the US-Ireland Alliance and named after United States Senator George Mitchell, who is famous for negotiating a ceasefire in Northern Ireland, and it allows 12 students from across the United States to spend a year at an Irish university. In addition to providing tuition, the scholarship awards each recipient an $11,000 stipend. The scholarships are awarded annually to Americans who demonstrate Mitchell's spirit by combining outstanding academic distinction with dedicated community service records and leadership qualities.

In many ways Wagner-McCoy embodies the "practical and grounded approach with idealist goals" she said Mitchell brought to his work. She tries to teach children to have "imaginative mobility," the power to imagine their own futures, while organizing after-school programs for underprivileged children. She has a passion for causes like public school reform and has versed herself in the details surrounding such causes.

Wagner-McCoy described how her plan to spend next year studying Anglo-Irish literature at the University College in Dublin is connected to her passion for helping children.

"I see literature as a way into public service," Wagner-McCoy said. "The techniques of writing and constructing life are often very helpful when working with children."

Wagner-McCoy's interest in public service began while she was a child living in Queens and commuting to a private school in Manhattan, where she witnessed inequity "on such a massive scale that I just wanted to do something about it."

She began volunteering as an after-school tutor with the East Harlem Tutorial Program when she was 14. While in high school, she founded several volunteer programs, including a chorus that sang for people who were too ill to go out to see live performances.

Friend Anna Cash, CC '02, recalled a hat drive Wagner-McCoy organized during high school. "She got the entire school knitting hats in preparation," Cash said, adding that she "taught most of them how to knit herself."

In college Wagner-McCoy went on to work as a child advocate in the juvenile division of the Legal Society. She also started her own after-school tutoring program for children in Brooklyn; however, it collapsed due to a lack of funding when she went to Oxford last year on the Oxford-Cambridge Scholarship.

This setback did not keep Wagner-McCoy from beginning her newest project, an after-school program involving tutoring and creative activities for children living at Regents House. Regents House is a long-term family shelter run by the Volunteers of America, which Wagner-McCoy said is continually in need of volunteers. There she has taken the practical knowledge about problems like child homelessness that she has gained through advocacy and tutoring and combined it with her deep passion for literature and the imagination.

Wagner-McCoy is always sharing that passion with other people, Cash said.

"She has a very exciting mind," Cash said. "When she has an idea, she's always trying to puzzle it out by talking about it with other people."

She tries to make the tutoring experience "benefit both the kids and the tutors [by] trying to get both an education at the same time," fellow Regents House tutor Nick Manheim, CC '02, said.

Wagner-McCoy explained why she shares her love of literature with the children she is trying to help. "I think you can develop a lot of human sympathy from reading literature," she said. She described reading literature and other imaginative activities as "similar to traveling, in [their] introduction to a new mindset and the ability to make imaginative connections with universal values ... Once children have learned to harness their own imaginations, they can imagine other options for themselves."

One of Wagner-McCoy's greatest qualities, Cash said, is her creativity and daring. Once, Cash recalled, Wagner-McCoy dressed up as an anti-pollution superhero--cape, boots, and all--in a high school assembly.

Wagner-McCoy has incorporated her creativity in her latest projects at Regents House, which have included the construction of a milk carton city and production of several plays for children. Wagner-McCoy said these activities allowed the children to create spaces of their own and to use their imaginations to relate to their own experiences.

But Wagner-McCoy is not using literature to teach escapism, she explained; instead she is trying to teach people different ways to communicate their wants and to feel as though they have some control over their environments. She focuses her efforts on finding ways to build a bond with a child who might otherwise be alone. Her techniques include exchanging portraits with shy children, or teaching them to use their imagination in order to control their anger.

Wagner-McCoy said she hopes literature and imagination, combined with time and energy, can give people direction in life. The saddest thing she had to face as a volunteer, she said, was sitting on the steps with a girl who was being sent home and listening to her say, "I have no place to go," over and over again. Wagner-McCoy's idea is to teach people the skills they need so that they never feel like they have no place to go.