SOPHIA GARCIA: This university doesn't know what they got themselves into by accepting me.

I'm running through their resources like a tomb raider.

ELLA HAMILTON: My dad hands the rope to me.

I grab the rope.

I take my ice axe.

I jam the ice axe in the ice.

I take a step.

I've got this.

AMITH SALIGRAMA: I finally realized this wasn't just about bathrooms but about human dignity and fairness.

And I realized how I'd been blissfully unaware.

WES HAZARD: Tonight's theme is "On a Mission."

♪ ♪ Within any worthwhile personal mission, there is the determination that drives us, the anthem that inspires us, and the force that keeps us pushing through the harshest of challenges.

Tonight, we'll hear stories from young people who channel their passions, aspirations, and, yes, even their hardships into missions that change not only their own identities but the world around them.

♪ ♪ GARCIA: I'm Sophia Garcia.

I'm from Revere, Massachusetts.

I'm a political science student, an activist, and a restorative justice practitioner.

And for anyone watching who might not know what that is, can you please just give us a little insight?

You know, what is restorative justice?

What does it mean to you?

Why were you drawn to it?

Restorative justice is a practice that's borrowed from indigenous communities from around the world.

Um, and the idea is to cultivate community, to restore relationships when harm has been done, and to allow people a safe space to present their best selves forward, to see one another for the first time, truly see one another, and take accountability.

I know that you have shared your personal story, uh, before, in a setting like this.

I'm wondering, how do you feel that storytelling is effective in the bigger picture of social change?

Storytelling, great storytelling, causes people to realize the truth, that you and I dream the same thing.

Your dreams are my dreams.

I am you and you are me.

I feel like I'm the one that stabbed him.

I wipe my hands, disturbed, there's nothing on them, and yet I can't shake the feeling that there's blood on my hands, too.

This is my first time watching the movie Parasite.

The film follows a poor family in South Korea as they scheme and execute being employed by a wealthy family.

It's all social commentary.

I knew that, but I just saw three people die.

And then the father of the poor family stabbed the father of the rich family.

I am frozen.

This is when I realized I don't really understand the film, but I'm only really watching it so I can finish my graduation requirements and join Revere's class of 2020.

I don't need to fully understand it, I tell myself.

I just need to be able to write about it.

But COVID-19 starts spreading and school shuts down.

My teacher tells me to just forget about the assignment and stay alive.

I listen.

Almost a year later, I'm standing outside of my university's dorm for the first time.

I've dreamt of this moment since middle school.

I'm 17 now.

I finished my graduation requirements early and graduated at 16.

Technically, I didn't skip a grade, but that's never stopped my family from saying that I followed in my mother's footsteps.

My mother was born and raised in Ecuador.

When she was in the sixth grade, her and her mother fled poverty and political unrest that shut down her school for an entire month.

When she came to the United States, she was the youngest in her class.

She learned English as fast as she could, and she placed so well in her placement exams that she skipped a grade.

She even went on to study at university in Boston.

And it was here that she met my father, a farmer from Puerto Rico.

They fell in love, got married, and had three kids.

Growing up, they used to always express the importance of going to college.

So my older brother and I were both accepted into prestigious universities with generous financial aid packages.

My younger brother fully plans on going to university, too.

But it's standing here in front of my dorm that it all finally feels real.

I mean, like, yeah, I'm taking on a full course load so I can keep my financial aid.

And I took out a loan so I could be here.

And there isn't enough money at home to send me any, so I am working full-time.

But this feels like the moment my life is going to begin.

First I'm gonna find myself a friend group.

And then, I-I don't even know, maybe I'll visit every library on campus and run through those books.

This university doesn't know what they got themselves into by accepting me.

(smattering of laughter) I'm running through their resources like a tomb raider.

(laughter) Sorry to anybody behind me, 'cause I'm taking everything I can get my hands on.

My professors hear about my busy schedule and offer to help me navigate it.

My social sciences professor stops me after class to let me know that she used to work and study, too.

She promises to make sure that her class will never be a burden to me "because success is written all over me," she says.

She just wants to nurture that.

At work, my HR representative tells me that she, too, is studying and working.

She wants to take me under her wing and show me how to grow here, "because people who come from money live differently," she tells me.

Very quickly I realized university is nothing like back at home.

I come from a neighborhood full of immigrants and the children of immigrants.

We don't have a lot of money.

There's not even enough desks and seats for us in our schools.

But where there isn't money, there's unrelenting community.

There are profound interpretations of the human condition and an understanding that we are the underdogs, that we have to be the ones to make it out.

So some of us go to trade school or start a business, or like myself, choose to go to college.

But it's April now, and I've only been at university for a few months, and I'm looking in the mirror and I don't know who's staring back at me.

I used to have long, beautiful, curly hair, but it became too exhausting to maintain every day, so I shaved it all off.

I used to sleep for at least eight hours every night, but these days everything is a blur and I can't remember the last time I slept for more than two hours.

I don't eat anymore, just survive.

In school, I completely fall behind.

The promises of help seem to have dissipated, and I'm only ever reminded of the assignments I'm late on.

I still try to make friends, though, and it works.

I bond with my peers over food and our upbringings, but then they start to talk about how their parents are millionaires, and they're just so bored of all the free time they have away from school.

They tell me that they're jealous of me, jealous of the fact that I work and study, but then are horrified at the small amount of money I make and the long hours I work to make ends meet.

At work, I feel like I'm going back and forth with customers about policies I cannot break.

They demand a manager.

My HR representative comes out, makes an exception for the customer and then berates me.

"I don't know where you come from," she tells me, "but we have rules and standards around here.

I don't expect someone like you to understand."

The same woman that promised to help me when I got here.

This place is so exhausting.

I understand the film now.

Eventually, I realized that I need to leave, so I do.

I leave university, I leave my job, I leave the people, I go home.

I know that I saved myself by leaving university, but when I came home, I was called a failure.

I was continually reminded of all the people whose time I had wasted in supporting me because I was supposed to defy odds and I didn't.

I spent the next year experiencing what can only be described as an ego death.

I tried career programs.

I tried cosmetology school.

I tried countless jobs.

I put on hat after hat after hat.

None of them fit.

A friend happened to tell me about a local community college and how affordable it was.

I figured I had nothing else going for me, so I'd look into it.

I remember logging into orientation, and they were playing "All I Do Is Win" by DJ Khaled.

There were faculty members dancing freely in their Zoom screens.

And then a dean started to talk about how that's the motto for all their students.

All they do is win.

Since then, my hair has grown.

(laughter) I sleep very well.

I'm still studying and working at the same time, but it's different this time around.

My courses aren't any easier.

It's just manageable.

I'm not drowning.

And even if I was, someone to relate to is always just a few steps away.

In the past three years, I've had to learn that I'm only human, that I'm so small in the grand scheme of things.

It's a simple, beautiful revelation.

And understanding this, I know that I don't have to defy all odds.

I don't have to be the underdog.

My only job in this life is quite literally to just be.

So my dean was right.

I've always been a winner.

But not by anyone else's accord.

Only ever my own.

Thank you.

(cheers and applause) ♪ ♪ HAMILTON: My name's Ella Hamilton.

I'm from Boston, Massachusetts.

I am going to University of Vermont next year for elementary education, and I love the outdoors.

That's fantastic, and you're getting ready to go study education.

What inspired you to choose that field?

It's been one of those things where, like, ever since I was in kindergarten, I've always wanted to be, like, a teacher.

Like, I'd line up my baby dolls (Wes chuckles softly) and I'd give them a class, or I'd love writing on the whiteboard whenever my teacher would let me.

And I teach swim lessons now, and I really enjoy, like, watching the kids grow and learn, and it's always really rewarding to see them, like, take on a new skill.

And it's just something I want to continue at, um, an elementary school teacher level.

That's wonderful.

And are you-- Is this, tonight, is this your first time ever sharing a story on stage?

- Yeah, it is.

- How you feeling about that?

I'm excited.

I've watched my aunt do it for a while, and my dad's a really good storyteller, just, like, around the dinner table.

So I'm excited to give it my own little shot.

When our audience hears your story tonight, what would you want them to most take away from it, that experience?

That it's about the journey and not the destination, and taking whatever comes at you and doing what you can with it.

♪ ♪ I don't have a good surprise face.

Or at least when you give me a gift, and I'm not exactly sure what it is or how I'm supposed to react to it, I'm not very good at hiding it.

So you can only imagine the face I had to muster up on Christmas morning when I opened my box and an ice axe laid in front of me.

(laughter) My dad went on to explain that he had gotten his friend Sam to help take us up the winter route of Mount Washington later that year.

The white mountains in New Hampshire were no stranger to me or my family, so we thought we had this in the bag.

For context, Sam could call Mount Washington his second home and nobody would bat an eye.

This man, before we had convinced him to take the extra bed in our room at Joe Dodge Lodge, was planning on sleeping outside, alone, in the Great Gulf Wilderness.

What?

(laughter) Sam knew what he was doing.

We did not.

Over breakfast the morning of the hike, my dad and Sam made it very clear that we were probably not gonna make it to the summit of Mount Washington that day.

The forecast called for driving snow and winds up to 100 miles an hour.

They were like, (joking imitation): "Completing any part of this hike is it an accomplishment in and of itself."

(laughter) What?

I'm a competitive person.

I'm an Aries and an older sister.

It's just who I am.

We are so gonna make it to the top of this mountain.

(laughter) The first two miles of the hike were nice and gradual.

Eventually, we made it to the turn off to Lion's Head Winter Route.

We grabbed a snack, some more water, threw on a couple layers and headed towards the wall of ice.

I remember seeing it for the first time, looking up at it and thinking, "You want us to go up that?"

But sure enough, Sam scurried right by, right up the ice, tying off a rope for me, my dad and my sister.

My dad hands the rope to me.

I grab the rope.

I take my ice axe.

I jam the ice axe in the ice.

I take a step.

(whispers): I've got this.

I take four more of these steps, getting six feet off the ground.

My legs start shaking.

I don't got this.

(laughter) I would be lying if I said I remember making it the rest of the way up that wall.

I think my fear of heights kicked in and I completely blacked it out.

What I do remember is making it to the top of that ledge, looking down at my dad and my sister and thinking, "How in the world are we gonna get back down?"

But I'm sure our mountain goat has a plan.

(laughter) The next hour of the hike was grueling.

The mountain was so steep that we were sidestepping so we didn't slip back down.

Eventually, we made it to tree line, which is where the trees stopped growing, and the mountain started to even out a little bit.

But the temperature dropped 20 degrees and the wind was blowing so fast, it felt like I was standing outside of a moving car.

After about half a mile more of walking, we found a rock to hide behind to get away from the wind for a while.

Reconvening, I had decided, we're not making it to the top of this mountain.

(laughter) Fine by me.

I'm ready for hot cocoa back at the lodge.

Let's go.

But my dad and Sam said we should keep going for, like, 20 more minutes for the experience and to reach our turnaround time.

So, climbed out from behind the boulder, took 30 more steps.

The snow got so deep that I was sinking up to my hips, so I had to start crawling.

Sam stopped first, and slowly we all gathered around him and, shouting over the windy gusts, we declared this spot "summit one."

(laughter) Now, even though we didn't make it to the top of that mountain, I still felt pretty badass.

(laughter) That is, until we made it to the top of the ice shelf again.

Ahead of us was a group we had sailed by on the way up.

They must have turned around before we did, and they were stuck halfway down the wall.

It was a young couple accompanied by a guide from one of the local mountain stores in the area.

They were clinging onto their ropes, refusing to move, consequently meaning we couldn't get down.

There's only enough room for one party at a time.

You hear stories of people getting stuck or lost or freezing to death in the wilderness, and I don't think I had ever really understood that reality until I was standing on top of that mountain.

We had been moving uphill all day, so my base layers were wet and sweaty, and standing still for that long had turned my sweat to ice cubes.

We stood there for two hours.

I was starting to get nervous.

My dad tried to have us keep moving up and down that mountain.

All I wanted to do was fight him every time he said, (masculine voice): "Keep walking."

(laughter) My sister, who is the chattiest person I know, was quiet.

I remember leaning up against a tree, feeling more out of control than I ever had in my entire life.

I tried to keep telling myself that in three short hours, we're gonna be in the car, pumping that heat, laughing about how good of a story this is gonna be to tell one day.

(laughter) But I couldn't feel my feet.

My legs ached, and my back was screaming.

What if we don't make it off this mountain?

What if we don't make it back to the car, I don't ever eat ice cream again?

I never get my own license, don't graduate high school, don't see my friends or go to college?

Eventually, Sam and the guide were able to get the couple in front of us to move.

And as soon as they cleared the way, we grabbed onto that rope, we belayed ourselves down the rest of the ice shelf and scurried off the rest of the mountain.

I still haven't made it the top of Mount Washington in the wintertime.

One day.

(audience chuckling) I'm headed to college in the fall, and in some ways, that feels like a whole new summit of its own.

And this time, I'm ready.

I know not everything's gonna be in my control, I know not to bet on success, and I'm ready to look for the little victories.

It's time to find the next "summit ones."

Thank you.

(cheers and applause) ♪ ♪ SALIGRAMA: I'm Amith Saligrama.

I'm from Weston, Massachusetts.

I'm a senior in high school, and I am really interested in history and politics, but I think I'm more interested in also giving back to my community.

I'm wondering, where did that motivation come from?

Was it an experience, a person in your life that really sort of got you on that path?

Well, I think that it's definitely, um, from my grandmother and my father.

Both of them were teachers, and they really taught me how to, like, explain something to someone and make sure that they understand something.

And I think I really enjoyed that and really was inspired by how they, you know, have dedicated their lives to helping others understand.

I'm wondering tonight, you know, in your prep for sharing a story with us here on stage, what did you learn through the process of crafting that story?

What were the challenges?

How are you feeling?

When I was writing the story originally, I just wanted to sort of be truly just, like, just fact-based.

And, like, this happened and this happened and this happened and that happened, which is, you know, how sometimes I would have to write, like, college essays, but, you know, storytelling is completely different.

It's sort of more about how I felt when I was doing all that stuff.

And so sort of trying to bring out how I felt, not only in what I'm saying but also how I'm saying it.

I think that's been a great experience.

♪ ♪ My grandfather, whom I called Tata, would visit us every few years for months at a time.

And in 2020, he was here when lockdown started.

As there was really nothing to do, my friends were wary of hanging out in person, and school was canceled at the time.

Tata and I resorted to taking long walks together to pass the time.

I love him very much, and as the youngest grandson, I felt a very close and special relationship with him as we walked through the neighborhood together.

And while walking, we discussed proverbs in Kannada, which is our mother tongue.

But after some time, he decided to stop going on walks with me, and I finally worked up the courage to ask him, "Tata, what's wrong?

I thought you loved going on walks with me."

And he puts down his newspaper and hesitates.

"I-I still do.

It's just that "when you're outside, where do you go when you got to go?"

(smattering of laughter) I really wanted to solve his problem.

I wanted to try and see if I could find a walking path with bathrooms on it so he'd feel comfortable, so we could resume the walks.

But searching online for public bathrooms near me yielded incomplete or outdated answers.

Sometimes, you know, you would get listings of bathrooms that ended up not even existing anymore, and you would get other ones that were from a private business, which we weren't allowed to use.

So I then was kind of stumped.

I didn't really know where to proceed.

I knew I could count on maybe a town hall or a public library, but past that, I was really unsure, and I was thinking maybe a public park would have a porta-potty, or, you know, a public building might allow people to go in.

So I was looking up, you know, listings of public buildings in the towns near me and public parks.

And at the bottom of every page, there was a "contact us" link.

So I decided that I might just email them.

And I inserted a lot of apologies of wasting their time with my stupid little request that, you know, I was just trying to find a walking trail for my grandfather, but I needed a list of bathrooms so that I would know where to map it out.

I hacked away at these emails for different municipalities, but only a few days later, I got one email back thanking me for my effort, but they didn't have a list of bathrooms.

And up until this point, I don't think that I'd ever understood how to solve a problem on my own, because as the youngest, I always had my older brother or my parents or my grandparents to ask.

And they would either have paved the road ahead for me, shown me steps on how to solve a problem, or would have solved the problem for me.

But here was my grandfather asking me this question, and growing up in the Internet age, you could always search online for these sorts of things, but Google was failing me in this case.

I didn't really know what to do here.

And I finally had the realization that my grandfather wasn't the only person suffering from these issues.

Of course, other elderly people would have his condition, and there would be people who have different conditions.

And there are parents with toddlers who would need to find restrooms.

And especially there would be people whose jobs took them out and about, like taxi drivers or delivery drivers.

And so these people must know where to find restrooms, right?

And I decided to poll social media.

I decided to ask the neighborhood Facebook, the subreddits for taxi drivers and delivery drivers, and I asked them, "Where do you find bathrooms when you're out and about?

Where do you go when you got to go?"

(laughter) Echoing my grandfather's plea, and over 200 stomach-churning responses flooded in.

I read about taxi drivers having to relieve themselves in wide-mouth bottles in their cars, and I read about racial minorities who were arrested for trying to use retail restrooms.

I finally realized that this wasn't just about bathrooms but about human dignity and fairness.

And I realized how I'd been blissfully unaware while Tata was silently struggling and my community was failing its most vulnerable.

I then emailed the city officials again, hoping that I could naively convince them that public bathrooms were a problem and that they needed to be listed and they needed to build more of them.

But I was met with benign skepticism and, uh, and assertions that existing facilities were already sufficient.

And more often than not, I was met with: "We do not have a list, stop emailing us."

(laughter) I started complaining to my Tata.

I kept-- I video called him and I almost cried.

I was saying, "They're not taking me seriously, I'm just a kid."

But he was never one to tolerate self-pity and he offered a proverb.

"Learn how to count to comprehend the world," he said.

And inspired, I decided to gather more concrete data to make my case.

I decided to, instead of pestering city officials to give me a list that they clearly didn't have, instead to go to each listing and call just about one public park or one public building.

Does that specific one have a restroom?

I called 3-1-1 numbers, police stations, fire stations, town halls, public libraries to get their bathroom availability, wheelchair accessibility, stall counts, just to make sure that they had a bathroom and all of its information.

And my painstakingly curated online map grew to over 400 restrooms, and it's become a key resource for residents and visitors alike.

And my work even got awarded by Congresswoman Ayanna Pressley, and it was mentioned in many news stories.

And to this I called Tata again, and I...

I was ecstatic.

I was bouncing.

I said, "Tata, "they mentioned my work on NBC Boston.

They-- Somerville is building three new restrooms."

"How did they manage that?"

he asked.

"Well, I did what you told me," I said, "learn how to count to comprehend."

And he beamed.

He said, "Actually, the full proverb ends with "As you can't change what you can't comprehend."

(smattering of laughter) And as usual, he was right.

I've come to understand that convincing people that public bathrooms are important is the easy part, but navigating bureaucracy to influence change is much, much harder.

I'll keep trying, even though there are no easy buttons, to make sure that one day Massachusetts leads the U.S. in helping people relieve themselves with dignity.

But for now, I can't wait until Tata visits next year.

I picture us teasing apart his favorite path in Somerville, which is now restroom accessible.

Thank you.

(cheers and applause) ♪ ♪