Centre College Junior Named Truman Scholar
Centre College junior and Lincoln Scholar Lorena Bonet Velazquez ’23 has been named a Truman Scholar. She is one of 58 students selected nationally for the 2022 award.
“We are delighted that Lorena is a Truman Scholar,” says Milton C. Moreland, Centre president. “Centre’s mission includes preparing students for lives of service. Lorena’s extensive record of campus and community service and her longstanding commitment to improving immigrants’ access to healthcare epitomizes the service and advocacy that the Truman Scholarship seeks to support.”
First given in 1977, the scholarships recognize President Harry S. Truman. He envisioned a program for students that would encourage educated citizenship and political responsibility. Scholars are selected as college juniors based on their leadership potential, high academic achievement and commitment to careers in public service.
The highly competitive award provides up to $30,000 toward a public service-related graduate degree, leadership training, career counseling, and special internship and fellowship opportunities within the federal government. This year, the Truman Scholarship Foundation received 705 nominations from 275 colleges and universities.
An international studies major and social justice minor, Bonet Velazquez is passionate about reproductive health and immigrants’ rights. She intends to earn a master’s in public health with concentrations in health equity, social justice and human rights.
After earning the M.P.H. degree, she plans to return to her hometown of Louisville to work as a community health worker at the local level. She may also consider a run for Congress, where she would seek to advocate for affordable healthcare and work to break down barriers that hinder immigrant women’s access to reproductive and sexual healthcare based on their legal status.
“I was drawn to Truman by the opportunity to be part of a network of change agents dedicated to addressing and dismantling the structural problems facing various communities,” says Bonet Velazquez. “I believe that change is only possible when done with and for communities, and as a result I am thrilled to be part of a community of scholars who will support and work with each other to enact positive change.”
Edmund Sauer ’00, an appellate lawyer in Nashville and a Centre Truman Scholar himself, participated in a mock interview to prepare Bonet Velazquez for her Truman interview.
On learning that she had been named Centre’s fourth Truman Scholar, Sauer said, “I’m delighted that the Truman Scholarship Foundation recognized Lorena’s extraordinary talents, passions, and leadership potential. She has a very bright future and will benefit so much from the Truman network.”
Bonet Velazquez is interested in immigrants’ issues, especially healthcare inequalities. The child of Cuban immigrants, she is fluent in both English and Spanish. She often served as interpreter to her family and their friends, seeing firsthand the linguistic challenges many immigrants face.
Robert Schalkoff, director of both the Office of Fellowships and the Lincoln Scholars Program, points to Bonet Velazquez’s ability to act when she sees inequities.
“As a high school student, she created a student organization to address curricular gaps for ESL students in her school district,” he says. “At Centre, she recognized her own and peers’ lack of knowledge regarding sexual health and pleasure, so she worked with partners to create a plan to increase body literacy,” says Schalkoff. “Next, she wants to tackle the way citizen status negatively affects access to healthcare. The Truman Scholarship is a way to prepare herself to move us closer to a more just world.”
Bonet Velazquez has studied abroad twice through Centre. In January, she did an academic internship working on women’s issues in Merida, Mexico, and she also spent a semester at the University of Reading in England. She is past president of Centre Feminists, a current executive for Centre Students for Prevention, Education, and Advocacy in the Community (SPEAC), and was a tutor and English as a second language (ESL) coordinator with Centre’s after-school mentoring program for K-12 students. She has also been an intern with the Shepherd Higher Education Consortium on Poverty through which she worked with the Asylee Women Enterprise (AWE) in Baltimore, Maryland, last summer. AWE is a nonprofit that helps asylum seekers and other forced migrants navigate the immigration process.
She began working with Centre’s Title IX office more than a year ago to help prevent sexual violence and to promote sexual health on campus. She has continued to work on making sexual health resources and information more accessible. As a Title IX intern in January 2021, she developed social media health education campaigns.
“Ultimately, my work and partnership with the Title IX Office is ongoing, and I plan to continue spearheading and collaborating on sexual health projects on campus until my time here comes to an end,” she says.
Bonet Velazquez is a Lincoln Scholar, an internationally competitive full-ride-plus Centre scholarship, and separately received eight weeks of funded summer research through the Center for Teaching and Learning’s Creative Thinking Immersion Program to research sex education at the college level.
Ellen L. Prusinski, an assistant professor of education at Centre who mentors (with Schalkoff) Centre’s Truman applicants, is impressed by how Bonet Velazquez consistently includes the perspectives of the most marginalized in society.
“Her advocacy in one of my classes led, for example, to the inclusion of a documentary on the experiences of garment factory workers in Bangladesh,” says Prusinski. “This documentary not only enriched our academic understanding of the topics at hand, but also provided another lens through which to reflect on whose voices are represented in movements for equality—and whose are largely pushed aside.”
Bonet Velazquez is quick to thank the many educators and mentors throughout her life who have helped her grow toward her highest potential. In addition to Prusinski and Schalkoff, she specifically calls off her professors Kiyona Brewster and Jamie Zuehl Shenton ’06, who advised her and wrote recommendations for her application.
She also credits Sarah Cramer ’14, Centre’s Sexual Assault Prevention & Education Manager, who works to prevent sexual assault through programming and teaching.
“She is a source of inspiration in my desire to go into public health and has modeled for me what it means to create a safe and healthy environment for all students to thrive,” Bonet Velazquez says. “I owe the opportunity and space on campus to pursue my passion for sexual health to her and couldn’t imagine what my time at Centre would be like without her unwavering support.”
