Sisters make a difference

Mount A third-year fine arts student Clare Halpine (’09) was one of five students in North America to be awarded a $10,000 scholarship recently for an essay she wrote on poverty.

She was the only Canadian amongst the winners.

The essay was written for the Boston-based Social Equity Venture Fund (S.E.VEN), a virtual non-profit entity that is run by two entrepreneurs and its strategy is to "increase the rate of diffusion of enterprise-based solutions to poverty."

Clare's scholarship-winning essay addressed the statement, "Poverty can be regarded as a matter of exclusion from networks of productivity, and not simply as having an unequal portion of what is imagined to be a fixed number of economic goods. In that sense, ending worldwide poverty is serious business. Describe enterprise-based solutions to poverty in this context."

But, perhaps Clare's winning shouldn't come as a surprise.

As it turns out, Clare is surrounded by family members who have more than just a passing interest in world issues, whether it's poverty, AIDS or hunger.


Clare's older sister Anna Halpine (’99) was only 21 when she founded the World Youth Alliance (WYA) shortly after she graduated from university.

Read more: Sisters make a difference (Times and Transcript)

Visit the World Youth Alliance web site: http://www.wya.net/