Raina Kadavil, White Plains, NY
White Plains High School, 2015

Raina Kadavil is one of the most recent recipients of a travel grant to attend Stockholm University in Sweden for Nobel Week. This past December, Raina and 18 other NSHSS members experienced Nobel Week, a time during which the Nobel Prize Award Ceremonies, the Nobel Lectures, the Nobel Week Dialogue, and numerous other festivities took place in honor of the 2014 Nobel Laureates. Raina describes her experience, explaining, “I truly feel that experiences like these are the stepping stones of inspiration and empowerment that turn ambitious teens into Nobel Laureates.”

Raina has served as the president of the White Plains Mayor’s Youth Council since 2011. She is the co-founder and president of Global Ambassadors, which educates and empowers students in her school to use technology, fundraising, and art to positively affect the global community. Raina is also the co-founder of REACT News, which provides newscasts that highlight both local and global issues and varying worldviews to partnering schools internationally. She assists elementary students in developing their reading and literacy skills, K-12 students in their respective curriculum, and she also teaches children to read, write, and speak Malayalam, a language of India. Raina co-founded a Digital Media and Production program for middle school students. She is also a dancer and a writer. Her Young Adult Fiction novel, The Voice of Thunder, is in the publication process. Raina plans to major in International Relations and Political Science, and she aspires to work for the United Nations.

Currently, Raina is interning for the Friendship Ambassadors Foundation, an NGO and also one of NSHSS’s newest partners. More information about the August 2015 Friendship Ambassadors Foundation Youth Assembly at the United Nations will be available in the coming weeks.

Keep up the amazing work, Raina!