Devin Mercier from the small town of Madison, Maine will be representing Yuda Bands as the 2015 winner of the Humanitarian Heart Scholarship. Devin will be heading to Guatemala in July where he’ll participate in humanitarian projects, help with a leadership conference, and meet Elsa, the young girl whose scholarship fund he helped build through his Yuda Bands project last fall.
Devin credits the Yuda Bands project at his school with instilling a sense of service that not only affected the students, but the entire community as well. Devin explained in his scholarship entry essay, “Everybody wanted not just one of the trendy new bands, but they wanted to feel that same feeling that was coursing throughout our community: a sense of purpose, a sense that we were doing something to better our world.” Through reaching out to the community, Devin and his Yuda Bands committee sold twice as many Yuda Bands as the number of students in their school, a statistic that shows just how far reaching their efforts were.
As the Humanitarian Heart Scholarship winner, Devin will see first hand the effect Yuda Bands has on students like Elsa and her community in impoverished Guatemala. Devin looks to continue his own humanitarian efforts in the future with a variety of projects beginning in his own community. “I believe that little things can add up to more than the sum of their parts,” Devin says, “My hope is that the people I have affected continue their efforts at home and that these efforts spread to unimaginable places.
