2020 PLV Scholarship of Orange County Winner: Alexis Votran on Everyday Activism

I could not be happier or prouder to introduce Alexis Votran of Costa Mesa as this year’s recipient of the PLV Scholarship of Orange County. Her application essay embodies the spirit of this scholarship program — it was raw, honest, and painfully jarring in places, but filled in equal parts with hard-earned resilience, mature insight, and a commitment to transform her own experiences into vehicles for positive change. Alexis emerged as a deeply compassionate young woman who feels called to impact her community and the broader world for the better, always pressing onward with bold and brave steps.

Since Alexis’s own words express her story more powerfully than I could, I’ve drawn extensively from her application essay while writing this post. Because her interview responses were so beautifully complex, I’ve decided to break up her scholarship winner’s post into two parts: Part One (here), which shares her story; and Part Two (to be posted soon), which will feature her interview responses. Now on to her story.

In her final year of elementary school, Alexis experienced a level of bullying and harassment that left her feeling broken — like “a shell of a person,” as she phrased it. By the time she reached Costa Mesa High School, she had long resented “the exclusion, animosity, and slander” that characterized the worst parts of the adolescent (and indeed, human) experience. But she was also just starting to recognize several important truths. The first was the paradox that the pain of isolation is, in fact, a feeling shared by many others. In Alexis’s words, she remembers thinking:

Is this my reality? Is this exclusive to me?  […] Even though my school consists of a mere 1,200 students, that is potentially 1,200 individual worlds of pain, sadness, and fear without an outlet of support or safety.

Loneliness is indeed a phenomenon endured by many. But since our thoughts, feelings, and perceptions shape our subjective experience of the world, negative emotions can cloister and confine us; our minds really do shape our realities.

Alexis began to consider the glaring disparity that exists between the acquisition of formal educational knowledge in high school and the skills needed to simply be a well-functioning person:

The social climate my school cultivated concerned me because I knew that, on campus, students will learn more than what is written in the curriculum. What students experience here will be carried with them throughout the entirety of their lives. How are students expected to get through eight hours of Trigonometry and Physics when all they want to learn is how to make a friend? How is a student supposed to look forward to school when they are surrounded by the roots of their anxiety and depression as soon as they step onto campus? As that student, I knew that there was no class like “Courage 101” or “How To Find Your Voice.”

Alexis’s essay proceeded with another flash of insight, the piece that gave this pain a purpose: the social climates that frame people’s lives are not fixed, but can instead be re-shaped by directing one’s focus first inward — through processes of self-awareness — and then outward — by living in congruence with one’s values. Self-determining individuals hold at least some degree of power, however small, to change their environments, helping to counter fear with acceptance and hate with love:

From that moment, I maintained a responsibility and eagerness to help my peers become the best they were capable of becoming. I recognized the need for a reliable outlet of support in the wake of the disorienting challenges of high school and strived to be the pebble in the water that triggered ripples of patience, kindness, and understanding.  I discovered my passion for a lifestyle of empathy, service, and everyday activism: manifesting an environment where women, people of color, and members of the LGBTQIA+ community feel safe, welcome, and heard through daily, meaningful interactions.

Alexis describes an instance in which she witnessed a female student facing vicious sexual harassment on campus. She was outraged to discover that this young woman had already approached school administration for help. The boy’s punishment? Picking up trash during lunchtime one day.

As student body president, Alexis decided that this kind of behavior would not be tolerated on her campus. She brought this information before campus security and administration. Not only was the young man suspended, but additional instigators were identified. This kind of small-scale activism impacted several people’s lives for the better, sparing future victims the dehumanization that accompanies the most vile forms of bullying.

She went on to pursue projects that promoted the better vision she had of her school, including Suicide Awareness Week, Spread the Love Festival, Gay-Straight Alliance, and peer mentorship. She also immersed herself in her passion for photography; and even Alexis’s photography had a social purpose:

I shot women of diverse ethnicities, body types, and facial features amongst themes of nature to display the natural beauty of femininity. This aimed to encourage others to embrace a diverse range of beauty, one that included more than what was shown on magazine covers and Instagram ads. I wanted to positively impact my peers and foster their confidence and self-love.

Some of Alexis’s striking portraits are featured on this page. They are part of her broader mission:

[T]o let my peers who were hurting but didn’t have a voice to ask for help know I was eager to be their person in their time of need. To foster a community where it was encouraged to tell the truth, forgive each other for being human, and accept each other’s differences […]

Being a voice of change in her community — even if this means making one person’s day just a little brighter through some small, humble act of kindness — is an idea worth spreading, and especially during a time of increasing ideological division. Alexis concluded her essay with the following words:

No matter how small the scale, whether I am impacting one person or 1000, if I can positively influence others, I feel alive. Every day, I wake up with the goal to be the friend who is always there, the classmate to stand up for what is right when injustice is recognized, the person who I needed when I was growing up, the person who, although she may not be able to help everyone, helps at least someone.

Alexis graduated valedictorian and is now a pre-med student at UCLA who intends to pursue a double major in Communications and Neuroscience and a minor in Public Health. To hear more about Alexis’s thoughts on causes that are meaningful to her, be sure to check out her interview, which will be posted soon.