UMW Grad Wins Another Victory for Honduras
Shin Fujiyama ’07 has generated much attention for his charitable organization Students Helping Honduras – including a cover story in the spring ’07 edition of TODAY. But among the most valuable recognitions he and his nonprofit group have received, at least monetarily, is the $10,000 won last October in a voting contest hosted by Razoo, a website designed to promote social good and encourage global involvement.
Fujiyama, a pre-med and international affairs major, founded Students Helping Honduras (SHH) with his sister, William & Mary graduate Cosmo Fujiyama, as a way of helping families in the village of Siete de Abril. The refugee community is in El Progreso, a coastal town devastated by 1998’s Hurricane Mitch, in the severely poverty-stricken Central American country of Honduras.
The primary missions of SHH are to provide educational and economic opportunities to communities in Honduras and to get American students involved in service projects there and in fund- and awareness-raising at their respective schools.
Already, the Fujiyamas and their organization, which now has chapters at universities throughout Virginia and Washington, D.C., have built a village school and completed other projects in Siete de Abril. They hope to build more than 70 permanent homes there in the next few years.
Their efforts also have spawned an independent-study class at UMW created to tackle deadly indoor pollution caused by cooking in poorly ventilated shacks.
Fujiyama plans to use the group’s recent contest winnings to build another school in Honduras, according to a Razoo.com press release, and to buy seeds for the people of La Mosquitia, where crops were annihilated last year by Hurricane Felix.
In another online contest hosted by GrabLife GiveLife last spring – this one, a web competition among charitable projects created on college campuses – SHH was awarded $20,000.
The Internet might not be the first tool that comes to mind for philanthropic fundraising, but as Fujiyama has seen, it works.
“That is what I have learned at Mary Washington,” he told TODAY last spring. “Problem solving. It’s all about finding ways to solve a problem and doing them.”
For more information on the nonprofit organization Students Helping Honduras, visit www.studentshelpinghonduras.org.