Celebrating Muhammad Ali's Core Principles with Humanitarian Award Winners at the University of Louisville

On September 11, 2019, the Muhammad Ali Institute for Peace and Justice welcomed three Muhammad Ali Center Humanitarian Award winners.  Each year the Center recognizes young leaders, under the age of 30, who embody one of Muhammad Ali’s core principles: Respect, Confidence, Conviction, Dedication, Spirituality, and Giving. Confidence, Conviction, Giving, and Spirituality. 

UofL’s campus community had the opportunity to learn directly from the inspiring award winners representing Spirituality, Confidence, and Giving. Several Muhammad Ali Scholars had the opportunity to interview the awardees during this event.  We welcomed:

Jared Hiakita – Spirituality:

Jared Hiakita is from a tribe in Aotearaoa, New Zealand – the Ngāi Tūhoe people – whose identity and existence is owed to a place they revere - Te Urewera Forest which has sustained their ancestors. His leadership is centered on his relationship with Te Urewera, and what he understands as a fundamental principle of human existence, that the prosperity of humanity depends on the vitality of the natural environment.

Majd Almashharawi – Confidence:

Majd Mashharawi, a resident of war-torn Gaza, observed first-hand the acute need for access to construction material to rebuild damaged buildings and infrastructure. She founded GreenCake in 2015 to meet this need by creating environmentally friendly bricks from ash and rubble. In 2017, she developed SunBox, an affordable solar device that produces energy to alleviate the effects of the energy crisis in Gaza, where access to electricity has been severely restricted, sometimes to less than three hours a day.

Michele Madison – Giving:

Michele Madison is the founder of Farming the Future, a Tallahassee-based business that designs and builds greenhouses and aquaponics systems in schools, juvenile detention centers, low income/food-desert communities, private backyards, and commercial-scale farms. This system is used as a tool for STEM, agricultural, and vocational training, and all of the food grown goes to school cafeterias, women’s shelters, homeless shelters, and other charitable organizations.