The Camden Conference announces winners of Bill Taylor Award

The Camden Conference is pleased to announce the awarding of the Bill Taylor Awards to three high school and three college students for their essays written related to this year’s Conference topic Refugees and Global Migration: Humanity’s Crisis. Bill Taylor, a long-time supporter of the Conference, created this award in 2014 to promote student research in support of his strong interest in education.

Education programs of the Camden Conference are designed to promote knowledge, perspectives, and dialogue opportunities on world affairs with high school and college educators and their students. Several Maine high schools and colleges offer academic courses based on the annual Conference topic. Twenty percent of the more than 1,000 Conference attendees are high school and college students who receive Camden Conference scholarship funding to defray their registration cost. The students who enter the essay contest do not have to be enrolled in a Camden Conference course, but they do have to have attended the Conference.

The format for the high school contest was based on the National High School Essay Contest for 2016-2017 from the United State Institute for Peace in partnership with the American Foreign Service, which challenged students to examine closely the causes and impact of the current global refugee crisis. First prize in the high school contest went to Zoe Bean from Gould Academy, for her essay Afghan Refugee Crisis. Lena Downes from Piscataquis Community Secondary School, won the second prize for her essay The US should help Turkey expand its refugee programs. Third prize went to Sam McMillan from Gould Academy, for his essay A Case for U.S. Responsibility and Iraqi Partition.

The basis of the college student contest is the submission of an evidence-based paper focused on one specific challenge that confronts international refugees today as discussed during the 2017 Conference. First prize for the college contest went to Jonas Eichenlaub from the University of Maine at Rockland, enrolled as a High School Aspirations student, for his essay entitled Refugees Can Be Part of the Solution: The Challenges of Lebanon. Second prize went to Zoe FitzGerald-Beckett from the University of Maine at Augusta for her essay entitled Climate Change Refugees: “What’s in a Name?” Third prize was awarded to Brad O’Brien from the University of Maine at Augusta for his essay entitled Oh, Child Left Behind: The Next “Lost Generation”. 

The Conference congratulates our winners. All of the winning essays are posted on our website: www.camdenconference.org.

The mission of the Camden Conference is to foster informed discourse on world issues. For more information, visit www.camdenconference.org, email info@camdenconference.org, or call 207-236-1034.