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October 2020 Accolades

Abe Baker-Butler (2020) launched FroshVote, a nonpartisan organization with 2020 Coke Scholars Peyton Barsel, Tarun Amasa, Patrick Newcombe, and Aisha Chebbi to get swing state college freshmen voting where it matters most. They just hit the milestone of 1,200 swing state college freshmen reached, and they currently have over 70 ambassadors in 27 states and counting, including several more of their fellow 2020 Scholars. They were also featured on the Today Show.

Alissa Anderegg (2012) was named Miss World America! Miss World America, or America’s Miss World, celebrates “beauty with a purpose,” and is the official United States preliminary to Miss World, the oldest running international beauty pageant. Alissa will represent the United States at the Miss World competition in late 2021.

Taylor Fogg (2013) was in the top 15 of the Miss World America competition and was the fitness winner.
Mary Zhu (2017) co-founded Develop for Good, a nonprofit that offers free mobile and web app development services to nonprofits through volunteer university students and recent graduates.

“Our goal is to connect our volunteers with opportunities to gain technical, collaborative project experience, all while creating real-world social impact. We currently have ongoing projects with 46 major nonprofits including UNICEF, World Health Organization, Smithsonian Institution, World Bank, Dana-Farber Cancer Institute, and The Nature Conservancy. Since our inception in March 2020, we have housed over 300 volunteers on our projects for a total of roughly 20,000 volunteer hours, with our ongoing projects projected to save our nonprofit clients over $2 million in development costs. Our volunteers hail from universities around the world, with the majority from Stanford, MIT, UC Berkeley, Columbia, Harvard, Cornell, and Brown.” Mary said.
TeKay King (1989), Assistant Professor in Communication Studies and Theatre at Southwest Tennessee Community College, received the 2019-2020 Faculty Award in Leadership Skills and was elected to a three-year term appointment as a Humanities Division Senator for the Faculty Senate.

He also serves as a Moderator for Theatre Memphis’s Read to Relate play selection series and the Executive Council on Inclusion and Diversity to help diversify Community Theatre stages in Memphis. The first play that they are discussing is Saturday Night Sunday Morning, written by Katori Hall (1999)!
Nola Weinstein (2001), Global head of culture and brand experiences at Twitter, was named to AdAge’s list of people 40 Under 40 shaping the marketing, media and agency industries.

From AdAge: When she joined Twitter in 2014, Weinstein helped develop the company’s “executive briefing center” in San Francisco, which served as a welcome mat for people with high-profile accounts. “To help them learn to better leverage Twitter and to drive their own thought-leadership perspectives and, in turn, have an impact, not just on their brands but on the world,” Weinstein says.
Robert Accordino (1999), Quartet Health’s Chief Mental Health Officer, was named one of Modern Healthcare’s Top 25 Emerging Leaders.

Jolene Loetscher (1997) and husband Nate Burdine’s company, Mud Mile Communications, won a w3 award from the Academy of Interactive and Visual Arts for the video above, Reveal, which features local Coca-Cola bottlers and Scholar alumni surprising students in their area with the news they had been named 2020 Coca-Cola Scholars.

The w3 Awards honors creative excellence on the web, and recognizes the people behind award-winning sites, marketing programs, social content, mobile site/apps and online video. In honoring the best of the Web, the W³ Awards is the first major web competition to be accessible to the biggest agencies, the smallest firms, and everyone in between. Small firms are as likely to win as Fortune 500 companies and international agencies. Having just finished its fifteenth season, the w3 Awards received over 3,000 entries from Advertising agencies, PR Firms, Digital Agencies, In-house creative professionals, Web Designers, and Graphic Designers.