Two Henrico students recognized as community leaders by Bank of America program

Christian Washington was trying to find ways to get students at his majority white high school to come to meetings of the school’s Black Student Union. And what’s the best way to incentivize high-schoolers to sit in a classroom during free period? Food.

So when Washington started bringing chips, fruit snacks, and other goodies to the meetings, he was glad to see that more people started coming. But then he noticed that students weren’t just enjoying extra snacks, they were stocking up on food that could be one of their only meals that day.

“I’m like, ‘well, hold up. What am I not looking at?’ Because I didn’t understand that we have food insecurity in Henrico,” Washington said. “People were like, ‘I don’t eat at home’ or ‘the school lunches are my only lunch and it’s not good.’ So I’m like, ‘we got to do something about this.’”

And Washington did do something about it: he used funds from his parents and his own youth-led cookie business, Cookies & Crust, to create the Black Student Union Food Pantry. Each Thursday, Washington loads up his car with as much food as he can fit and heads to Douglas S. Freeman High School to hand out food to his fellow classmates. On Fridays, he provides extras so that students can get food for the weekend if they don’t have enough at home.

Now, Washington says that almost every Black student at Freeman has joined the BSU.

“It’s an incentive for them to come and learn, but it’s also an incentive for them to eat something,” he said. “We have games, we have food, we have talks, we have panelists, we have speakers. We want to create a sort of community."

Washington, a rising senior at Freeman, was one of the four students from the Richmond area selected for the 2023 Bank of America Student Leaders program, an eight-week paid summer internship that places community-oriented high schoolers with nonprofits in their area to learn about community activism and advocacy.

The program, which draws students from all around the country, recognizes 300 rising juniors and seniors each year. Local nonprofits select the student leaders who will represent their community, placing an emphasis on supporting first-generation college students and those from diverse racial backgrounds.

When Washington heard about the program, he knew that it was “right up his alley.”

“This aligns so much with what I want to do with advocacy, and I work in nonprofits as well,” he said. “Through this program, I’m able to advocate for my community and on a broader scale, because these are people who will listen to my problems and who will listen to my community’s problems.”

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Washington was selected along with Judy Ma, a rising senior at J. R. Tucker High School, to represent Henrico County. Both students spent seven weeks working with the YMCA of Greater Richmond. Then from July 17 to 24, they joined Bank of America student leaders from all across the country for the program’s leadership summit in Washington, D.C.

Ma is no stranger to nonprofit work. She created her own nonprofit, Stitchin’ for Good, to inspire other high school students who enjoy knitting, crocheting, and working with fiber arts to make items that can be donated. She even received a request from a local neonatal intensive care unit for crocheted octopus toys to comfort premature babies.

She also realized how much joy Stitchin’ for Good can bring to the students that join. She expanded the nonprofit from her highschool to other schools in Henrico, then to other schools in Virginia, and then to schools across the country.

“We’ve really helped emotionally with a lot of students. I know there was one student at my school’s branch who actually had surgery and she couldn’t do anything while she was recovering from it,” Ma said. “But crocheting really helped her get through it. And she ended up making 80 items for our organization during her recovery.”

The nonprofit idea stemmed from her interest in fashion. Ma has her sights set on eventually making it to the New York fashion world, but her interest began from being introduced to Chinese culture and Chinese fashion when she was younger.

“Growing up as an Asian American, my parents really, really, really wanted me to be connected to my culture,” Ma said. “So I was really lucky that my parents enrolled me in Chinese classical dance classes, they told me things about China, so I felt connected.”

Her high school is the most ethnically diverse in Virginia, and Ma wanted to bring out that diversity by directing a fashion show for Asian American Pacific Islander Month.

But she recognized that not everyone at her school was used to embracing and expressing their cultural heritage to their fellow peers. She wanted the fashion show to help students become more comfortable with this aspect of themselves.

“When I looked around at my peers, I didn’t feel that everyone was comfortable with expressing their culture and heritage,” Ma said. “So I really wanted to help people at my school to show a side of themselves that they don’t usually show to their friends at school, that maybe they just keep to their families and relatives.”

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The Bank of America Student Leaders Program has partnered with the YMCA of Greater Richmond for the past 10 years. Ma and Washington were able to help with several YMCA programs, working with youth camps for kids who can’t afford to pay for summer camps. They also helped with the YMCA’s Help1RVA assistance programs, which provide food, housing, child care and other needs to those in the Richmond area.

“We helped out with a food pantry and we saw how that would really impact the community. And that community was generally an immigrant community,” Ma said. “So not only were they just helping out with food, they were also taking care of the kids, they were also teaching the mothers how to speak English.”

“On the surface, it looks like just a gym. But the Y does a lot more than that – not to be a walking advertisement,” Washington said. “They do a lot of philanthropy and we got to see, what does that look like?”

The BOA Student Leaders program is notoriously selective; more than 80 applicants, double the number from last year, applied to the program from the Richmond area – four, including Washington and Ma, were selected.

Founded in 2004, the national program has accepted nearly 3,500 students during the past two decades, according to BOA Community Relations Manager Keith Sanders. Bank of America gets the most applicants in the Richmond pool from Henrico County, with typically one to two Henrico students selected each year.

But Richmond and Henrico County are still some of the least selective markets for the program, with areas in California and New York seeing 400 applicants each year. Social media has helped “tremendously” to promote the program, according to Sanders, and BOA hopes to see more applicants from Henrico in the coming years. Even the students post on their social media to get others to apply, according to Washington.

“We do a lot of work on our end trying to get the word out about it on social media,” he said. “Because people are asking me, ‘Oh my god, you’re in Bank of America? What is this? What are you doing?’ So we just show our day-to-day lives of us having fun and us being out in the community.”

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The Student Leaders Summit is also a big draw to the program. This year is the first year that the D.C. summit has been in-person since 2019, according to Sanders. The week-long summit involves a lot of exploring of the city, visiting museums and Capitol Hill, but also leadership workshops and opportunities to get to know the other Bank of America students.

“It’s really nice to see them go back to Washington, D.C., to get the experience of networking with other student leaders, Congressmen, see the museums, meet other people,” Sanders said.

“You get to meet new people and new personalities from all over,” Washington said. “You’re in a room with the best and brightest in the nation.”

For Washington, being in the room where decisions are made is a sharp contrast to the experience of his aunt, who grew up among the hardships and deprivations of the Jim Crow South. Her experience has inspired him to voice his concerns, stand by the people in his community and “show up for others with an open mind and an open heart.”

“Because my aunt went through those hardships it made me want to use my platform for social change, because there was a time when all she needed was a platform or someone to hear her voice,” he said. “So now I strive to be a voice for others who may not have one of their own.”

Washington is now the president of Freeman’s Black Student Union and along with the other board members, has grown the club to 200 members, the largest chapter in Henrico. He received the Equity Youth Ambassador Award from Henrico Schools as the top student in the county for his activism. He sees himself at his dream school, University of California - Santa Barbara, after spending his senior year helping out as much as he can in his community and then passing on the work “to the next generation.”

Ma wants to grow her nonprofit and her YouTube channel dedicated to sustainable fashion before heading off to college in New England, so she can be close to New York. She also wants to spend her senior year of high school pursuing a number of artistic activities, working on her school’s literary magazine and playing second chair for violin in her school’s orchestra.

At 17 years old, both students have accomplished an incredible amount, according to Sanders – not only for themselves but for their community.

“These students really rose to the top,” Sanders said. “It’s really wonderful to see us build the workforce within our own community. It’s truly priceless.