Watch the CNN Heroes videos on CNN.com
Shin Fujiyama ’07 has been recognized as a CNN Hero. While at UMW, Fujiyama founded the non-profit group Students Helping Honduras and has helped raise hundreds of thousands of dollars in aid money.
Each year, CNN honors unheralded people driven to exceptional achievement throughout the world. This is the third year of the initiative, which has received more than 3,000 submissions since January 2009. “CNN Heroes: An All-Star Tribute” will air at the end of this year and will honor the top ten CNN Heroes, as well as the CNN Hero of the Year as voted on by the public at CNN.com/Heroes beginning this fall.
“Everything started at Mary Washington,” Fujiyama said. “I’m just one piece of the puzzle. We’ve moved mountains, one shovel at a time.”
Fujiyama ’07 founded the student group Students Helping Honduras (SHH), a nonprofit organization with 25 chapters in colleges and universities across the country. The organization, begun at UMW in 2005, has thousands of volunteers who have raised more than $750,000 to provide economic and educational support to under-served people in Honduras. Throughout the year, SHH holds fund-raising events and sponsors service trips for students and business groups to help rebuild a village devastated more than a decade ago by Hurricane Mitch.
Fujiyama oversees SHH full time and has made more than a dozen trips to Honduras since the group’s inception. Under the leadership of Fujiyama and his sister, Cosmo Fujiyama, SHH has built two elementary schools, an educational center for an orphanage and homes for nearly 100 families. Recently, SHH has raised $95,000 toward a goal of $110,000 to build the village of Villa Soleada. Of that amount, the UMW chapter raised more than $25,000 to build a library in the village. SHH also is working toward building an orphanage, a water tower that distributes clean drinking water and an eco-friendly waste management system for the community. The organization has created a college endowment fund for an orphanage and has partnered with UMW economics professor Shawn Humphrey and his students to help families buy safe, ventilated stoves for indoor cooking and to establish a microfinance institution to provide small loans to help women start businesses to support their families. More information on SHH can be found at www.studentshelpinghonduras.org.
An international affairs major at UMW, Fujiyama received the 2006 Alex Naden Memorial Award for Service, the 2006 and 2007 Mary Siegrist Hinz Leadership Award and the 2007 Elizabeth M. Baumgarten Leadership Award for outstanding service to the university and community.