LYNN — Lynn native Abigail Mariano is being inducted into Salem State University’s (SSU) 2020 Civic Engagement Hall of Fame on Monday. The Hall of Fame award inducts SSU undergraduate and graduate students, alumni, faculty and staff or administrators annually to recognize their continued dedication and passion to addressing social and environmental challenges faced by a variety of communities.
Mariano graduated from SSU in May of 2020 with a degree in political science and a minor in educational studies. She received the award last year, but the pandemic forced the event to be postponed. Instead, she will be honored alongside the inductees from 2021.
During her time as an undergraduate, Mariano was the president of the Community Service Initiative, where she took part in local events and activities geared toward families in Salem and neighboring communities.
One of these events was the “Let’s Move Salem” initiative — a field day for over 200 families to promote healthy eating. This event consisted of healthy eating booths, which provided information and tips on good nutrition, and also featured members of the local nurse association taking blood pressure and offering advice.
This community service initiative connected Mariano to Habitat for Humanity, where she spent two of her spring breaks building houses in Myrtle Beach, S.C. and Missouri.
Mariano was also one of 10 Civic Engagement Fellows in the Center for Civic Engagement at SSU, where she participated in volunteer work at Haven for Hunger and toured community locations including the North Shore Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC).
Mariano said she also learned about issues such as affordable housing, and she also learned how to advocate on behalf of community members she encountered.
Mariano has a passion for education reform and said she wants to continue to be involved in this topic in the future. She said her passion comes from remembering that we’re all humans.
“With that comes kids and wanting them to have opportunities,” she said. “That’s where everything that I do comes from. I do the community service stuff because I have the ability and the time to, and I just really care about this.”
As an underclassman, Mariano worked with the advocacy group One where she spent time reaching out to her elected officials to encourage them to support education for girls around the world.
“One is an organization that works towards eliminating extreme poverty in Africa, and their whole thing is reaching out to elected officials through letters and making phone calls and looking at bills,” she said. “We looked at the foreign aid budget and promoted that they spend more money there.”
Mariano visited Washington, D.C. with One during her sophomore year to lobby for the foreign aid budget.
She then returned to D.C. a year later during the summer of 2019 as an intern for Sen. Edward Markey. Mariano spent the summer attending briefings and hearings and writing memos for education that she then passed on to Markey’s education staffer.
She also completed a research project to promote internships at state schools.
“I found that I was the only one from a state school,” she said. “Pretty much all of the interns everywhere were from ivy league schools. I researched all the state schools in Mass., and made a spreadsheet of all of their contacts for internships so Markey’s office could reach out to them.”
Mariano is now an English as a Second Language (ESL) teacher at the Martin Luther King, Jr. Charter School of Excellence in Springfield through Teach for America, where she has a two-year contract that also allows her to pursue her Masters in curriculum development at Boston University.
“I really am passionate about changing the education systems in lower income communities, like where I grew up in Lynn,” she said. Mariano attended Lynn Public Schools and graduated from Lynn Classical High School in 2016 as the class president.
Mariano said she hopes to move back to D.C. to do work that supports students in need.
“I know that I want to have something to do with kids in my future, but then at the same time I also have a passion for housing insecurity and hunger for kids, so I want to try to find a way to put all of that together,” she said.
Other students being honored on Monday include graduate student Cleziane Oliveira, who is an international student from Brazil; Sam Lim of Salem State University: LEAD Office; and undergraduate student Toiell Washington of Black Boston.
Alumni, staff and faculty were inducted into the Civic Engagement Hall of Fame during a virtual ceremony last Thursday that included alumni Pedro Soto of Lynn; Rosario Ubiera-Minaya, Executive Director of Amplify Latinx; staff member Ronnette Wongus in the World Languages & Cultures department at SSU; SSU Academic Affairs Provost David Silva; and faculty members Jaysharee Ranga in the Chemistry and Physics Department and Gretchen Sinnett in SSU Art and Design.
To learn more about Mariano and fellow inductees’ work in the community, SSU extends an invitation to the Civic Engagement Student Hall of Fame virtual ceremony on Monday, April 26 from 6 p.m. to 7:30 p.m.
Allysha Dunnigan can be reached at [email protected].
