2014 Winners

Thaara Shankar is a junior at Sandy Spring Friends School in Sandy Spring, Maryland. She created her video as part of a class project for a population unit. “It was a cool way to use what we learned,” said Thaara, and she gained a lot more facts on population through the process of researching and filming her video. She chose the Global Poverty category because she believes it is an important topic that is not given enough attention.

“Two Dollars a Day” is Thaara’s first video that seeks to instruct and engage an audience on an important issue. She and her group thought it would be most effective to juxtapose the lives of people living in the developed world with those in developing countries. Thaara’s video not only reveals the extent of poverty but also how limited resources and population growth reduce the opportunities of people living in less developed countries. “We really wanted to make sure that people become more mindful to what’s happening to more than half of the world’s population.” Thaara believes that the first step towards change is education and her video serves as an informative glimpse into the reality of global poverty.

Thaara’s school is building an electric car for a local competition and she is considering using the money to help with the project. She also keeps busy by serving on the Maryland Youth Advisory Council, working at her school’s writing center, and serving as a peer counselor. After high school, she wants to pursue art and copyright law.