George Boston, ′13, isn’t the first person many would have expected to play for a Division I football team.

When he started high school in New York City, he couldn't play football because the school only had a track team. In fact, the school didn’t have a lot of things. Boston knew if he wanted to attend college, he was going to have to make some changes.

When Sharon Lim, ’16, talks about the many ways she’s exploring education inequality, it’s hard to believe that just two years ago, she had no idea her college experience would be dedicated to the issue.

She has always been an active volunteer. She spent her free time in high school working at a local hospital and teaching children to read. Her work inspired an interest in social justice so when she applied to Richmond, she also applied to the Bonner Scholars program.

Kelsey Ensign, ’15, remembers the exact moment she decided to transfer to University of Richmond. Following a conversation with Bonner Scholar Emily Blevins, ’13, who attended Ensign’s Chattanooga, Tenn., high school, Ensign logged into her computer to learn more about the work Blevins was doing through the University of Richmond’s Bonner Center for Civic Engagement (CCE).

“I vividly remember sitting in my dorm room exploring the CCE home page,” Ensign says. “I looked at all the community partners and thought I could learn a lot about civic engagement and myself at University of Richmond.”

In nearly four years as a Spider, Russell Gong, ’11, has never looked back on his decision to pass up offers to play Division I lacrosse and instead attend the University of Richmond. With his record of leadership and civic engagement on campus — plus a consulting job waiting for him after graduation — why would he?

Gong, who grew up in Singapore and Fairfax, Va., was a regional lacrosse standout and was captain of his high school’s varsity lacrosse and football teams. But athletics captured only part of his attention; ever since a summer restaurant job washing dishes, he has wanted to work with refugees and immigrants.

“In the kitchen, I witnessed traumatic abuses against Mexican immigrant workers,” he says. “From there, I focused my college efforts toward social justice and community inclusion issues.”

Good afternoon.

For those of you who don't know me very well, I'm Sean Hickey, a senior intern for the Bonner Scholars Program. Before becoming a senior intern, I volunteered at Henderson Middle School as an after-school program leader with the Middle School Renaissance (MSR) program.

My time there caused me to ask many questions of myself, of the public school system, and of volunteering/service writ large. These questions were almost always stimulated by theoretical concepts I studied in courses taken here at UR.

The most grandiose of these questions was, if what we do today is later found to have a bad result, even though we think of our actions and service as good, than have we been doing bad things all along? Does this then mean we should always assume that our service is inherently bad or wrong in order to critically and constantly question our service and ourselves?

The Bonner Scholars Program and the Jepson School of Leadership Studies sold Colleen Connolly, '14, on the University of Richmond when she visited campus as a high school student. Now Connolly is combining a double major in leadership studies and political science with her Bonner Scholars service in order to study children in educational settings from many different perspectives. In the process, she has learned not only how to serve, but how to lead.