Social Issues
Inspired by her son, Isidoro, who has cerebral palsy and epilepsy, Annah Abetti Korpi is working to make school playgrounds inclusive for children with disabilities. Korpi began a campaign that raised nearly $365,000 to finance a playground renovation at her son’s school, Alexander Elementary School, in Albany, Ohio.
An accomplished scholar of European and global history, Deborah Cohen has led the Northwestern Roberta Buffett Institute for Global Affairs since January 2024. During this time, her team has launched a raft of programs that build on the institute’s mission of fostering interdisciplinary teaching and research about the world beyond U.S.
Our alumni will travel the world for a scoop. Meet the foreign correspondents, filmmakers and producers who are shining lights on stories from India, Colombia, Israel, Ukraine and elsewhere.
Harris Forbes ’19 serves as associate producer and postproduction supervisor for America in Black. Produced by CBS News in partnership with BET News, the show airs monthly and covers a range of stories about Black America, from profiles of prominent movers and shakers to deep dives into the Black maternal health crisis and the fight to teach Black history in schools.
The voices of people incarcerated in Illinois are rarely heard outside their institutions’ walls. Students in the Northwestern Prison Education Program (NPEP) are changing that.
Stage adaptations of books, movies and even music albums are nothing new. But this spring Christina Rosales ’11 brought an unusual production to Northwestern’s Wirtz Center Chicago: a stage adaptation of a video game.
In May, Northwestern sent six student representatives to join the Ocean Plastics Recovery Project. The students spent a week under the Alaskan early summer sun near Prince of Wales Island, where they cleared beaches of 15,000 pounds of marine debris.
Co-founded by Andrew Youn ’06 MBA, ’19 H, One Acre Fund is a nonprofit that provides training and equipment to 4 million farm families across nine countries in eastern and southern Africa.
When his dreams of directing theater fizzled, Art Johnston ’75 MFA instead took up the fight for queer rights in Chicago. Together with his husband, Pep Peña, he co-founded Sidetrack, an innovative gay bar that’s now the largest in the Midwest, and lobbied for passage of groundbreaking civil rights laws that have made Chicago a welcoming place for the LGBTQIA+ community.
As dean of career programs and continuing education and director of apprenticeship partnerships at Olive-Harvey College, Cheryl Freeman-Smith ’92 creates opportunities for students from low-income communities to gain the specialized skills required for the modern economy.
