June 4, 2012
What Would You Fight For? (National Public Service Announcement featuring L. Brown)
NOTRE DAME, Ind. — Former Notre Dame women’s soccer player Lindsay Brown (Newport Beach, Calif./Mater Dei) has taken her devotion to service for others to new heights, and as a result, she is one of five finalists for the 2012 “Pretty Amazing” Scholarship Contest from Seventeen magazine.
The award recipient is chosen through a combination of public voting and evaluation by a distinguished panel of judges (including Hollywood actress Emma Roberts, the niece of Academy Award winner Julia Roberts), based upon the winner’s inspirational accomplishments, her reliability and “it” factor. In addition to earning a $20,000 scholarship from Neutrogena Wave for Change, the recipient also will appear on the cover of the October 2012 issue of Seventeen.
Brown has spent much of her college career following closely along the path of Notre Dame’s mission statement, which notes that “the University seeks to cultivate in its students not only an appreciation for the great achievements of human beings, but also a disciplined sensibility to the poverty, injustice, and oppression that burden the lives of so many. The aim is to create a sense of human solidarity and concern for the common good that will bear fruit as learning becomes service to justice.”
To that end, Brown has spent the past two years working closely with She’s The First, a national non-profit organization that supports girls’ education in the developing world. During the fall of 2010, Brown (and current Fighting Irish senior goalkeeper Maddie Fox (San Jose, Calif./Leigh)) led a group of Notre Dame women’s soccer players in organizing a campus bake sale around the creation of special tie-dyed cupcakes. The treats were so popular that they sold out (all 200 of them) in 90 minutes, and Brown and her teammates (who would win in the NCAA national championship in December) wound up raising enough money to sponsor three young girls at the Kopila Valley Primary School in Surkhet, Nepal.
In addition, Brown and Fox traveled to San Diego in April 2011 to attend the Clinton Global Initiative University (CGIU), created by President Clinton in 2007 to engage the next generation of leaders on college campuses.
The following summer, Brown traveled to Nepal to serve as a teacher at Kopila Valley, and also form the school’s first girls’ soccer team. In a culture where women are not often accepted as equals, Brown’s efforts to give these young girls a team of their own were groundbreaking.
When Brown returned to Notre Dame in the fall of 2011, she had a new goal — to expand her cupcake sales and reach a wider audience. Through the She’s The First web site, Brown shared her cupcake recipe with high school and college groups around the country, sparking a movement for a national tie-dyed cupcake bake sale during the first week of November. More than 100 schools from 35 states took part in the event, and collectively, Brown and She’s The First raised more than $22,000, enough to sponsor the education of an additional 48 Nepalese girls at Kopila Valley.
Eventually, Brown’s devotion to service led her to decide that her future lay in helping others, rather than continuing her playing career with the Fighting Irish. With the full support of Notre Dame head coach Randy Waldrum and her teammates, Brown stepped away from the soccer pitch to focus her extracurricular energies entirely on helping those less fortunate.
Supporters of Brown may vote as often as they like by going on-line to: http://www.seventeen.com/fun/articles/pretty-amazing-voting. While there, visitors also may see a special video compiled by Brown detailing her story.
For more information on the Notre Dame women’s soccer program, join the Fighting Irish women’s soccer news Twitter page (@NDsoccernews) or sign up for the Irish ALERT text-messaging system through the “Fan Center” pulldown menu on the main page at UND.com.
— ND —