Ceil Cirillo

Ceil Cirillo can’t help herself.  She is a fixer. 

Although she retired in 2008 from her job as director of the economic development and redevelopment agency in Santa Cruz, California, Cirillo remains passionate about her community and making it a better place.  Lauded for leading the rebuilding of downtown Santa Cruz after the 1989 Loma Prieta earthquake, Cirillo’s commitment to getting things done remains a beacon of inspiration in Santa Cruz and beyond. 

Ceil Cirillo

The many organizations in which she has been involved in over her professional years have included the California Redevelopment Association, from which she received a Lifetime Achievement Award as well as, the California Housing Consortium and Goodwill, and Cirillo’s passions are the arts, health and education.  She’s generous with her time and meets regularly with non-profits, community groups and business owners to offer advice and help build consensus to move projects along. 

Cirillo has volunteered countless hours to affect change for the economic advancement of the Santa Cruz area. Recognized for her service with a 2015 Be The Difference Award from the Volunteer Center for Santa Cruz County, she is known for tackling difficult political and financial issues head on.  She also works overtime identifying and mentoring new volunteers for a variety of boards and causes.

The Connecticut native adores her adopted hometown, a beautiful place situated on the northern end of Monterey Bay.  Before she retired, Cirillo spearheaded the development of the Tannery Arts Center, a reuse of a former industrial tannery into a series of affordable spaces for artists and arts organizations to thrive.   Although there were plenty of naysayers, the Arts Center became a reality, and she still serves on its board.

A typical day for Cirillo involves two or even three meetings.  IN the morning she may be chatting with a developer working to create a San Antonio-like riverfront along the San Lorenzo River downtown.  Over lunch, she’s having another meeting to discuss fund raising plans with a colleague at The Land Trust.  Then in the afternoon, it’s a third powwow to discuss student candidates for a healthcare scholarship she created and funded at the local community college.

“I’m trying to give back to the community however I can,” she said.  “That’s how I want to spend my time now.”

Isabella Lovain

Among the 2,600-plus students at T.C. Williams High School in Alexandria, Va., Isabella Lovain stands apart as a civic service advocate for local and national action. She educates her peers about voting power.

As a student liaison in the Inspire Program  – part of the national civic engagement program Project High Hopes – she uses social media to engage fellow students, motivating them to get involved in the electoral process. As of the 2012 Presidential election, only 38 percent of 18-24-year-olds voted. Lovain wants to see improvement.

Isabella Lovain

After becoming a student liaison during her junior year, she organized voter registration drives to boost her classmates’ voting participation. Getting them civically engaged, she said, helps them take actions they can believe in.

“Voting is the first step to being an informed, engaged citizen. It’s much easier to convince a high schooler than an adult to start voting because high schoolers’ opinions and ideas are still forming,” she said. “If a high schooler realizes the importance of voting and being engaged, they are more likely to lead an informed and engaged life, creating a generation of inspired voters.”

Lovain trained in the Inspire Leadership Academy. She led her school’s voter registration and participated in election simulations. Additionally, she attended regional meetings with college mentors, learning how to connect and engage with communities on civic-action projects to meet local needs. She also took next steps to see the fruits of voter turn-out, participating in legislative experience days, talking with elected officials about their work.

Ultimately, she said, voting is a universal responsibility.

“Almost everyone cares about their city/state/country and what happens to it, at least in some aspects,” she said. “It can come in many forms, whether it’s voting, volunteering, or being part of a club. It just means trying to make a difference in the community or country you care about by taking action in the way you want.”

Camryn Magsby

According to a 2011 report by The Food Trust, significant numbers of people living in lower income communities in Tennessee, including in the city Nashville, don’t have easy access to affordable and nutritious food.  The children in these communities suffer the most.

To 16-year-old Camryn Magsby, a junior at Hume-Fogg Academic Magnet High School, that situation is unacceptable. She found a way to make a difference, by teaching kids at the summer camp program Crop City about urban gardening, meal planning and healthy nutrition.

Camryn Magsby

Hands On Nashville’s Crop City   is a free six-week youth development program designed to impact young people’s knowledge, skills, and behaviors about healthy eating and nutrition. All the action happens at the five-acre HON Urban Farm in south Nashville, with as many as 60 kids, ages 6 to 18, participating.

“I love interacting with kids about how to become healthy,” said Magsby, who started working as an Urban Agricultural Teaching intern with Hands On Nashville in 2014.  “Trying to grow food was new to me too, but when I started working in the community garden, I saw anybody could really do it.”

Magsby is developing her leadership skills as she mentors her charges. “At first they kind of resist opening up and trying new things,” she said. “I understand, I was the same way.  I try to get them to open their mind and have fun trying new things.”

Besides her HON internship, Magsby develops lesson plans for elementary school students about health and fitness at an after-school center twice a month and serves on the Youth Volunteer Corps’ International Youth Advisory Board.

There is an important connection between nutrition and exercise and scholastic performance, Magsby said.  “We all need a sound mind,” she said. “Making a difference in a child’s diet can make a difference in that child’s mind.  And show him that there’s more to life than where he is right now.” 

James Bailey and Blayne Alexander

Meet Daily Point of Light Award honorees James Bailey and Blayne Alexander. Read their story and nominate an outstanding volunteer, family or organization as a Point of Light.

James Bailey (front, center) stands with Boy Scout Troop 100 leaders, scouts and volunteers.

Impressed by his barber’s flashy Mustang, 11-year-old James “Jay” Bailey determined he, too, would become an entrepreneur – fast.

A year later, he achieved that goal by starting a car stereo installation business called The House of Boom. Before he was 30, he made his first million, investing in Atlanta real estate.

But it was the quick downward spiral he suffered after mismanaging his fortune that would lead to the work he does today. With the Phoenix Leadership Foundation, a nonprofit he co-founded, he’s ensuring that the city’s young black males get the experience and encouragement they need to succeed. 

“I had money, cars, houses, but I had no one to guide me,” Bailey says. “I had nothing to really show for my success. I wasn’t leaving a mark.”

Struggling to recover from his losses, he opened a regional office for the global nonprofit Operation HOPE, which focuses on economic empowerment, and soon expanded its reach in the Southeast to 19 offices. 

He thought he could do more.

Blayne Alexander and James Bailey

Talking with his fiancée, Blayne Alexander – a news anchor in Atlanta, where the two live – he had an epiphany.

“I began to see that the thing that most leads to a poverty mindset is lack of exposure,” he says. Statistics help drive that mindset – only about a third of black males in urban areas graduate from high school, and a similar proportion serve time in jail at some point in their lives.

“The thing that drew us together is this desire to mentor kids,” says Alexander of Bailey. “I had great models in my parents. We lived a charmed life. They embodied the concept of ‘exposure’ for me. I saw right away that what Jay said made sense.”

The idea gelled into the Phoenix Leadership Foundation, which has the motto, “We will change the way the world sees young black men.”

But, really, says Bailey, the nonprofit is about changing the way young black men see the world.

“I’ve worked with kids who get excited about just riding on the highway or seeing a big house out of the bus window,” Bailey says. “They’re just not used to going beyond their neighborhoods. So, that’s what we’re doing with the foundation. We’re saying, ‘You want to be a doctor? Let’s get you in front of one.’”

In the fall, the foundation will launch its Leadership Institute, a six-month program for about 50 boys – nominated by teachers and counselors and chosen via a competitive process – who will shadow professionals, attend college classes, meet with civic leaders and enjoy the kinds of field trips that, says Bailey, “schools don’t offer anymore.”

This year, Bailey says, the foundation’s overall goal is to engage with 5,000 youth through its various mentoring programs.

“We want to put as many kids as possible in the position that tells them they are worthy and everything they want is possible,” he says.

Alvin Irby

Today, on the Martin Luther King, Jr. Day of Service, we honor Alvin Irby with a Daily Point of Light Award for his commitment to childhood literacy. Read his story and nominate an outstanding volunteer, family or organization as a Point of Light.

As a kid reading wasn’t fun for Alvin Irby – but it was fundamental.

“My mom was a schoolteacher. For her, reading wasn’t something we did for a few minutes before bedtime,” he says. “It was sitting down at the kitchen table for a reading lesson instead of playing outside. It was work.”

Ultimately, for Irby, it laid the foundation for a passion that developed much later.

These days, the 30-year-old is rarely without a book, and as a former New York schoolteacher himself he understands the difference that the love of – and proficiency in – reading has made in his life.

His Barbershop Books program brings his passion for reading to young boys by creating small reading areas in urban barbershops.

As we observe Martin Luther King, Jr. Day, Irby remembers how Dr. King fought for the disenfranchised and “how today we still have so many children who are forced to attend sub-par schools with no libraries or ineffective literacy programs. Reading is a civil rights imperative.”

Irby got the idea for Barbershop Books after he noticed one of his students squirming and staring out the barbershop window while he waited for a haircut.

“I thought, ‘He should be using this time to practice his reading.’”

Barbershops are one of the few places in the African-American community where black men and families from different socio-economic levels interact, Irby says. “They seemed like a natural place to encourage kids to read.”

Research shows that young black males score lower in reading than nearly all other student groups. Irby believes this is partly due to a lack of adult black male reading models. Only two percent of U.S. teachers are black males and a majority of black boys are raised by single mothers.

Luke Taliaferrow reads a book from Barbershop Books while getting his hair cut at Levels Barbershop in Brooklyn, New York.

As a result, “many black boys don’t identify as readers,” Irby says. “Reading is essential to participating in the knowledge-based economy of the 21st century. Once you learn to read, you can read to learn.”

So far, about a dozen barbershops in the Harlem neighborhood and the borough of Brooklyn have devoted space to the small libraries, which typically feature 15 or so curated books and a chair.

“Seeing little kids get excited about reading is the greatest feeling in the world,” says Dennis Mitchell, owner of Harlem’s Denny Moe’s Superstar Barbershop. Mitchell – who made sure his own children always saw him with a newspaper in his hand – laughs when he adds that “sometimes it can be hard for me to get a kid to put down his book and get in the barber chair.”

For the future, Irby – who recently completed a master’s degree in public administration at New York University’s Wagner School of Public Service and is also pursuing a career as a standup comedian – says he plans to deepen the program’s impact by finding creative ways to help turn barbers into local literacy advocates.

He’s also working on a fun literacy app that can help kids read better as well as developing a curriculum unit and lesson plans using jazz-themed children’s books.

Barbershops across the country have taken notice of Irby’s innovative idea and set up similar programs.

He says he appreciates the feedback he receives from barbers, parents and community members. It means a lot to him to walk into a barbershop to replace a book and see a grandmother sitting there reading with her grandson. Or when barbers send him pictures of the kids.

“Children who read for fun even just once or twice a month do significantly better on reading tests, so these visits matter,” Irby says. “And that feels good. I don’t have it all figured out, but I couldn’t stand by and do nothing. Barbershop Books is my something!”