The Live Like Sam nonprofit organization and Woodward Park City announced the winners of the Live Like Sam & Woodward Park City Latinx Scholarship on Monday. The four lucky recipients will receive a week-long camp experience at Woodward Park City this summer.
The scholarships are an effort between Live Like Sam, Woodward Park City, the Solomon Fund, Bright Futures, and SOS Outreach and are aimed at providing summer camp opportunities to well-deserving youth in the local Latinx community.
Applicants had to be between the ages of seven and 17 and Daniela Monzalvo, Jorge Hernandez, Sherlyn Sanchez, and Franco Alvarado were each chosen after writing essays or submitting video clips explaining how they spread kindness and why attending a summer camp at Woodward Park City is important to them.
The winners will have the choice of attending either the week nine or week 10 summer camp at Woodward, which both take place at the beginning of August.
The Live Like Sam organization is named for internationally-ranked freestyle skier and Park City local Sam Jackenthal. Sam tragically lost his life in a 2015 ski accident while training for the upcoming competition season when he was only 16 years old. The organization’s programs award merit and need-based scholarships, create educational platforms with personal development-based curriculum, build strong community partnerships, and provide youth with opportunities to volunteer and serve their communities.
Ron Jackenthal is Sam’s dad and the founder of Live Like Sam. He said Woodward has been a long-time partner of the organization and teaming up with them to provide opportunities for members of the community that might not otherwise participate in action sports was a no-brainer.
“We were collaborating on how do we create some scholarship opportunities using Live Like Sam’s platform in the community where it might do best and we kind of landed on summer camps, so, one of their $700 weekly camp programs," explained Jackenthal. "We jointly decided that we would actually target this towards our Latinx community in Summit and Wasatch County.”
Jackenthal said around $3,500 in total were given out through the scholarships and Live Like Sam and their partners were even able to gather enough funds to provide camp days to each applicant, regardless of if they were chosen as a winner or not.
“To me, I just think as a community, we have a responsibility to take care of each other where and when possible," he said. "A lot of the Live Like Sam principals are around community, athletics, responsibility, and education, we actually call it CARE. I just think we all have a responsibility to each other to try to give our fellow neighbors and community members as much equal access and removing barriers where possible.”
More information on the Live Like Sam & Woodward Park City Latinx Scholarship can be found here.
