2021 High School Winners

Emmy Yang is a 9^th grade student at Eastside Preparatory School located in Kirkland, Washington. Emmy first found out about the contest last year when it was assigned in one of her classes. She and her partner are previous contest winners. They won first place in 2019-2020 for their video, ‘Breaking Free from the Cycle of Poverty,’ submitted to the middle school Ensuring Economic Opportunities category. This year, she decided to participate again as a high school student. Emmy shares that she decided to create a video for the Promoting Environmental Justice category because, “I thought that justice has been a big topic recently and environmental justice is something that has not been talked about yet.” Her video, which focuses on water justice, was inspired by the fact that, “there are many people who do not have the privilege of clean, potable water coming from a tap in their homes and have to drink dirty water that can cause many diseases and illnesses.” She shared, “I knew that there are a lot of people who don’t have access to clean water but what surprised me was that 2.2 billion people still don’t have clean water. That’s more than a fourth of the total population!”

In deciding what style to use for her video, Emmy ultimately chose animation because, “I felt that animation was something I really like to do and I really enjoy drawing so I felt that a hand-drawn video would represent me the best.” Filmmaking is not new to Emmy, who, in addition to being a past contest winner, has created educational videos for the Tomorrow Project, a nonprofit youth-led organization started by students at her school. This time around, Emmy incorporated new software and shared, “the most challenging part of the process for me is figuring out how to use a new program, since I used to use Premiere Pro but for this video I switched to Adobe Animate.” Consequently, her advice to future contest participants is, “try out new things! Even if it is challenging at first, it will pay off in the future as long as you really want to do it.” A future World of 7 Billion topic that Emmy is interested in is, “Natural Resource Depletion, because if all the resources have been used up, what would happen? I think it would be important to spread the word about switching to more sustainable solutions.”

In her free time, Emmy likes to draw and animate, and her afterschool activities include ballet and Chinese traditional dance. She is also learning to code and has started getting into robotics. Emmy has a cat named Mae who likes to sit on her drawing tablet while she’s working. Emmy finds inspiration in her community and noted that, “I am not inspired by just one person but as a collaboration of many people around me such as my friends and family.” While, remote learning has been a bit disappointing due to its limitations, Emmy shared a silver lining. “Virtual learning has given me some free time saved from the transportation time to get to school and back to try out new hobbies and interests.”