About the Jefferson Awards

The annual Jefferson Award program recognizes people who make a difference . . . individuals who have made Washington and the world a better place. The Jefferson Awards, sponsored each spring by the Seattle Post-Intelligencer and the American Institute for Public Service honor ordinary people who do extraordinary things for other people, their community, their nation or the environment. Since 1977, when the program began here, hundreds of Washington state people have earned Jefferson Awards honors.

A panel of judges each year selects five nominees to receive a Jefferson Award medallion at a civic celebration in March. One of the winners will represent the people of Washington state at a national awards ceremony in Washington, D.C., in June.

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Jefferson Awards: Educating women
in poorest countries

Programs deliver technology, teachers and scholarships

By Claudia Rowe, Seattle Post-Intelligencer Reporter

Thousands of children in the world's poorest countries might never have known what a computer looks like, much less learned to use one, if Mahnaz Aflatooni Javid had not decided to act.

The Mona Foundation, which she founded five years ago with three other friends and runs between 7:30 p.m.—when she leaves her day job as a Microsoft trainer—and 7:30 a.m., when she begins work, has brought education technology to students in Africa; paid for teachers, scholarships and computer labs in Panama; and taught children in a Honduran orphanage how to support themselves as adults.

There are similar programs in India, Haiti, Brazil, Chile and the Crow Reservation in Montana, and it all started with Javid and two friends doodling their ideas on a napkin outside of a hotel conference room in Florida. Today, Javid will be honored with a Jefferson Award for Public Service.

At the conference, she had been learning about socioeconomic development in the Americas—how "teaching someone to fish was better than fishing for them," she says. Any number of would-be do-gooders might have nodded with understanding, then sighed helplessly, paralyzed by the magnitude of need. Javid did not.

"We could do that!" she said to her friends.

Her determination had been brewing for decades. Javid remembered her parents in Iran sending her to the United States as a teenager, convinced that superior education was essential for girls as well as boys. She thought of her father, a physician, taking food off the family table and giving it to others who had less. She recalled, too, the deadening bureaucracy witnessed in American public schools: the ways children might be labeled as slow or difficult and funneled into programs where they languished.

Outside the Florida conference room, all those memories coalesced and the Mona Foundation—named after an Iranian girl who'd been executed for standing up for her principles and for teaching children—was born. "She did not back out of what she believed in," says quietly of her group's namesake. "Even under the most painful circumstances."

Mona's founder has known a few of her own. After her American high school experience, Javid was desperate with homesickness for Iran. But once there, she found herself so changed by her stay in the States that she no longer fit in.

"I had tasted the freedom to act as my conscience allowed, and I just could not readjust. I couldn't go back to those restrictions."

Since then, Javid has seen thousands of young women, deprived of education and almost guaranteed to remain in poverty.

She has also been around long enough to heed the lessons learned through watching other high-minded types stumble once confronted with the nitty-gritty of bureaucracy. With Mona, she resolved to proceed cautiously, like the corporate officer she is, carefully screening potential projects and scrutinizing her impact each time.

"It's just the way she does things," said Ruth Moen, a lawyer in Renton who met Javid four years ago during a campaign to raise money for a Russian orphanage. "I think she stays up all night, thinking about these people who don't have a break in life. Everyone says, 'Why don't you do the work in this country?' But who's to say where the next Einstein will come from?" In Tanzania, Javid points out, the cost of funding one girl's education—a year of schooling, clothing, books, room and board—is $340. "I go to Costco and come out spending more than that!" she says. "For us, a little bit makes a big difference. It's not a matter of millions of dollars. It's a matter of $340."

Since its founding in 1998, the Mona Foundation has raised and disseminated about $1.5 million in cash, computers, software and other equipment, Javid says.

Most recently, Microsoft granted the foundation $106,800, plus $37,000 worth of software, to pay for 15 solar-powered computers headed for children in the jungles of Panama. Javid herself is a similar hybrid of tradition and modernity. She wears red lipstick and sleek black outfits, but lives her life by ancient axioms.

"There is a saying in the developing world—educate a woman and you feed a village," she says, then quotes United Nations statistics to confirm it: "Educating women is the second-highest way to eradicate disease and poverty in the developing world. The first is achieving equality between the sexes."

After her own brief attempt to return to Iran, Javid came back, got a degree in literature and business from Old Dominion in Virginia and worked as a translator at the United Nations, where she spent days talking with refugees and victims of political persecution. Here were planted the first seeds of the Mona Foundation.

"The U.N. is a microcosm of the whole world," she said. "Not only in its problems but in possible solutions. When I was there I started a global initiative inside my head."

It remained there, simmering, through Javid's subsequent move to Massachusetts, the years she stayed home raising two sons, and during her return to school for an advanced degree in educational technology at the University of Washington.

But when a young boy she knew committed suicide, Javid's vague wish to act hardened into resolve.

"I couldn't sleep for a week after that," she said. "I'd thought I knew him, but I didn't, really. I committed myself then to the idea that I wasn't going to let another kid slip through my hands if I could do something about it. And I haven't."

Now she is sowing similar drive in a new generation, teaching college students her own principles of sustainable socioeconomic development. The subtitle of her course: Knowing Ourselves, Knowing Our World and Making Our Mark.

"There are hundreds of thousands of people, noble and giving, who want to do something, but when you're one drop of water you can't do much. When you're two you can do a bit more. When you're thousands you're a full glass and that becomes potent."

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