Emma Fenton’s winning 2026 Duxbury for All scholarship essay

Grow up in Duxbury, I’ve learned that one can appreciate and love their town while still understanding that things simply must change. I remember being in middle school when I heard the news of the “Duxbury football scandal.” I, who had just gotten social media and was thus starting to see a greater scope of the world, decided I neededto help make a change so that no more football players named their plays after concentration camps while everyone actedlike everything was fine.

In my freshman year, I joined A World of Difference (AWOD), a club sponsored by the Anti-Defamation League, where we educated not only ourselves but the greater community on the multifaceted nature of prejudice, experiences of others with identities besides our own, and the way that diversity must be embraced rather than hated. We began in the middle school, creating and teaching lessons in personal identity and community, in hopes that their understanding of the pieces that make them who they are would foster that same acceptance for others, even if theyshared nothing in common. We created a safe space in classrooms to discuss the realities of the world and the ways that simple words can accumulate into something much greater. We lead activities in the middle and high schools about various holidays as well as history and awareness months, showcasing the unique experiences and lives of all.

Like a diseased plant, the ignorance in our town needed to be tackled at the root cause, and so, by my junior year,when I was elected Vice President of the club, our reach had expanded from the high school all the way into Alden School. Here, we simplified our lessons, and I took on the responsibility of creating my own unique lesson plan andactivity, later named “Towers of Power”, to intervene in the 5th Grade’s bullying problem, even polling data on the nature of this bullying to deal with specifics head-on. However, that same year, AWOD was dissolved by the Anti-Defamation League, and our roles were transferred to the next best place: the Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion Student Advisory Council, where I was, and still am, a senior chair of the Bridge Builders initiative. Here, I continued my lessons in the 5th grade, and we even stepped into Chandler School to educate students on perseverance.

Over my last four years, I’ve come to find that students calling each other names and making insensitive jokes to their “buddies” was only a surface-level issue, a symptom of a greater ailment that had been sickening our town. So, in these groups I’ve joined over the years, I’ve tried the best I could to nurture the minds of our school community.Beginning with younger students, we talked of compassion and resilience to build the proper foundations so that they could grow to be thoughtful and educated people in the world, who do not despise or mock, but embrace others becauseof their differences, knowing diversity makes us strong. Often, to make a change stick, we must start small, and so, I’ve taken my time trying to prompt a generation to be more thoughtful with themselves and others, to appreciate who theyand the rest of the world are, too. Even if all of my lessons and hours in classrooms only affect one singular student, I have done my job better than I could have imagined, because that is how true change starts, one person at a time.