There was a moment in high school when I held a knife to my chest. Not because I wanted to die, but because I hated myself so deeply in that moment that I did not know what else to do with the pain. That was the version of me most people never saw. I was struggling with body dysmorphia that made every mirror feel like an enemy. I was carrying a private addiction I was ashamed to name. I came from a family that loved me, but also made me feel from a young age that I was supposed to save everyone. On the outside, I was taking IB classes, preparing for the ACT, and smiling enough that nobody thought to ask if I was okay. On the inside, I was drowning. The hardest part was not only the pain. It was the silence around it. Nobody in my world had language for what I was feeling, and I did not know how to start the conversation by myself. Art became the first place where I could tell the truth without having to explain everything. When I got to Morehouse, something in me shifted. Away from the expectations that had been crushing me, I found stillness for the first time. I started painting, building, and creating again, not to be perfect, but to process what I had never been able to say out loud. Making things with my hands helped me understand that my painful moments were not proof that I was broken. They were proof that I had survived something real. Healing also made me realize that I did not want to be the only person who found a way out of that silence. That is why I collaborated with STSU to host a Paint and Sit event for Black men on campus. The idea was simple: no pressure, no performance, no forced vulnerability. Just brushes, paint, music, and a room where brothers could breathe. But once people started creating, conversations began to open. Men talked about pressure, grief, family expectations, insecurity, and the things they had been carrying alone for years. Something changes when you are creating with your hands beside people who look like you and understand what silence can cost. Art lowers the guard. It gives the body something to do while the heart finds the courage to speak. In that room, I watched men set down weight they had been carrying for a long time, even if only for an hour. That event changed me because it showed me that impact does not always have to be loud. Sometimes impact is giving people a room where they finally feel safe enough to be honest. That is the future I am building toward. I want to create spaces where young people, especially Black men, can confront pain without shame and discover healing through art, community, and truth. I know what it feels like to suffer quietly because you do not think anyone will understand. I also know what it feels like to finally enter a room where you do not have to pretend. The teenager who once could not look at himself in the mirror is now becoming someone who helps others see themselves more clearly. My destiny is not just to survive what tried to break me. My future is to build spaces where others can survive, heal, and create too.

I didn't grow up with a hero who wore a cape or had a Wikipedia page. Mine wore paint-stained Timberlands and smelled like spray cans and hard work. My uncle Brian is a self-taught graffiti artist from Chicago. He never went to art school or never had a gallery show. What he had was a wall, a vision, and a neighborhood that needed color. He built something out of nothing, the way Black men in Chicago have always had to. But here's what most people don't see: Brian works full-time as an electrician. He clocks in, does the job, comes home tired. And then he picks up a can and goes back to the walls. Not because it pays. Because it has to exist. Because he understands, in a way I couldn't articulate until recently, that art is not a luxury for communities like ours. It's a record. It's resistance. It's proof that we were here and that we made something beautiful even when the conditions weren't beautiful at all. He never stopped teaching either. Younger kids in our neighborhood watched him work. He let them. He'd explain the technique, the layers, why certain colors pop on brick and why proportion matters even when nobody's grading you. He wasn't a teacher by title. He was one by practice, the way Addie James Hamerter was a leader long before anyone gave her that title. Brian is the reason I became a fashion designer. Watching him turn a wall into a record of something real, I started asking what my version of that could look like. Mine became clothing. I founded BLANC Kanvas, a brand built on the idea that what we wear carries history, that a garment can hold a story the same way a mural holds a neighborhood's memory. I work with upcycled and scrap materials because he taught me, without ever saying it directly, that you don't wait for perfect conditions to make something meaningful. He never wasted a surface. I don't waste fabric. That's what connects me to Addie James Hamerter. She didn't wait for permission either. She showed up with what she had and the conditions around her shifted because of it. Brian does the same thing on a Chicago side street with the same refusal to let the world stay ugly when you have something to offer. I mentor in my community the same way he mentored without a title. At By The Hand Club in Chicago, I worked with young people who reminded me of myself watching Brian. They didn't need a lecture. They needed someone to show them the process and trust them with it. This scholarship would help close a financial gap at Morehouse College, where I'm studying and building. But more than that, it would be a signal that the kind of impact Brian modeled, showing up for your community through art even when the world doesn't make it easy, is worth investing in. He never stopped. Neither will I.

For most of my adolescence, I was at war with myself in silence. I grew up in Chicago carrying things I did not have words for. Body dysmorphia that turned every mirror into an enemy. A private addiction I was ashamed of that drove me to my lowest points. A grandmother with dementia who could no longer remember my name, even though her hands had helped raise me. And a family that loved me but also placed the weight of their survival on my shoulders before I was old enough to carry it. By junior year of high school, taking IB and AP classes while everyone around me said you are the one who is going to save us, I was drowning and no one knew. Mental health does not always look like crisis. Sometimes it looks like a teenager with good grades and big dreams who cannot look at himself in the mirror. That was me. What started to crack that open was not a therapist or a program. It was people experiencing homelessness at the churches where I volunteered. I showed up thinking I was there to serve. They ended up preaching to me. They told me about their mistakes, their rock bottoms, their regrets, and they looked me in my eyes and said do not go down this road. People who had lost everything were still fighting, still learning, still choosing life every single day. Their resilience taught me something no classroom ever did: that surviving your story does not make you broken. It makes you honest. When I got to Morehouse College, something shifted. Away from the environments and gazes that had defined me, I found something I had never had before. Stillness. Clarity. Permission to be imperfect. I began to understand that the painful parts of my story were not flaws to hide but the very things that made me who I am. My cracks were not evidence of failure. They were evidence of survival. And slowly, I started to love myself because of them, not in spite of them. That is why mental health awareness is personal to me. And it is urgent, especially for young Black men who are taught from birth to carry everything quietly and ask for nothing. Going forward, I want to create space where that silence can break. Through my brand BLANC Kanvas, my community work, and every room I am given access to, I want to model what it looks like to be honest about struggle and still keep building. Tammurra Hamilton wanted people to feel seen and heard. I know what it is like to be invisible inside your own life. Honoring her legacy means making sure fewer people stay there.

The fashion industry is the second largest polluter in the world. It contaminates freshwater systems with toxic dyes, floods landfills with 92 million tons of textile waste annually, and releases microplastics into the air we breathe. Everyone talks about what comes next. New fabrics, new tech, circular economy models. Nobody talks about the mountain of clothes that already exists. I learned that before I ever learned the statistics. Growing up in Chicago, I watched my mother throw away clothes without a second thought. Shirts I had outgrown, jackets that still had years left in them, straight to the trash. It hurt in a way I could not name yet. Because when I donated my clothes to my cousins who could not afford new ones, those same pieces became their entire wardrobe. They wore them with pride. They wore them with love. A shirt I almost forgot about became someone's favorite outfit. That is when I understood what a second life actually means. Chicago also taught me something else. Walking past people experiencing homelessness in the cold, people who needed exactly what was being thrown away a few blocks over, I started to feel the weight of that contradiction. So I started hoarding clothes. Taking what would have been trash and reconstructing it. Cutting, sewing, layering, making something wearable and new again out of what someone else had already written off. That instinct became BLANC Kanvas. Every garment I create starts with a donated or salvaged piece, sourced from small vintage shops, nonprofits, and families who want to reduce waste rather than add to it. I do not begin with new fabric. I begin with what already exists, because the problem already exists. New technology is valuable, but it does not address the 92 million ton pile sitting in front of us right now. Reconstruction does. Upcycling does. Community does. The clearest proof of that was Fashion and Furious, a fashion show I organized at Morehouse College where the ticket was not money. It was a garment. Every attendee had to bring a wearable, feasible piece of clothing to get in the door. We partnered with a nonprofit and donated every item collected to people experiencing homelessness in Atlanta. We did not just talk about the waste problem. We moved it. We redirected it. We turned a cultural event into a supply chain for people who needed it most. That is the model I am building toward. Not just a sustainable fashion brand, but a community infrastructure. A modern Black Wall Street where sustainability is not a marketing layer, it is the foundation. Where the business and the neighborhood feed each other. Where reducing environmental impact and building economic equity are not separate goals, they are the same one. Caring for the planet is not optional. I have known that since I was a kid watching clothes hit a trash bag that could have kept someone warm. My profession is fashion. My field is sustainability. And the work has already started.

What does it cost a community when its most creative minds never get the chance to build? That question lives with me every time I think about my grandmother, who ran a boutique with nothing but vision and will, or my uncle, a self-taught graffiti artist whose talent was undeniable but whose path was shaped more by what he lacked than what he had. No mentorship. No business infrastructure. No community built around sustaining what they created. They gave everything to their craft and the system gave them nothing back. That is not a personal tragedy. It is a pattern that has repeated itself across Black creative communities for generations. The creative industry profits endlessly from Black culture while keeping Black creatives locked out of ownership, leadership, and the economic infrastructure needed to survive long-term. Talent has never been the issue. Access has. And when access is denied long enough, entire lineages of creative potential go unrealized. I watched it happen in my own family. I refuse to let it continue in mine. BLAnC Kanvas is my response to that reality. It’s my clothing brand built around the belief that clothing can be more than aesthetic. It is a canvas for opportunity. Through wearable technology embedded in our pieces, wearing BLAnC Kanvas connects people to a living ecosystem. Engaging with the brand, attending local events, supporting partner businesses, and showing up to galleries and pop-ups earns real rewards that circulate back into Black owned businesses and community spaces. Every interaction is designed to strengthen the economic web between Black creatives and the communities that raised them. The canvas is not just the fabric. It is the community itself. This vision is rooted in the spirit of Black Wall Street, a historical proof of concept that Black communities can build self-sufficient economic infrastructure when given the conditions to do so. BLAnC Kanvas is that model applied to the creative industry today. The brand builds credibility and community simultaneously, with a long-term evolution into BLAnC Kanvas Studios, a membership-based creative space offering affordable access to tools, mentorship, and the business knowledge that transforms talented individuals into sustainable entrepreneurs. Social equity in the creative industry means Black creatives seeing themselves in leadership, owning the spaces they inhabit, and having access to systems that reward participation rather than extract from it. My career goal is not simply to run a successful brand. It is to prove that when business innovation is built with community at its core, it can permanently shift what is possible for underrepresented creatives. Not one generation at a time. But by changing the infrastructure itself. This scholarship would directly accelerate that mission. The resources and network it provides would allow me to deepen the business foundation beneath BLANC Kanvas, move the Studios vision closer to reality, and continue building something that does not just represent Black creativity but invests back into it. My grandmother and uncle deserved that kind of support and now the next generation of Black creatives deserves to inherit a system that was actually built for them.

My mother spent her nights delivering babies she would never meet again so that I could have opportunities she never had. As an OB-GYN working long hours, she carried the weight of other families while quietly building a better future for our own. Her sacrifice allowed us to leave a dangerous part of Chicago for the suburbs, where I gained access to schools, programs, and possibilities that many people in my community never received. It took me years to fully understand what that cost her. When I think about Sgt. Albert Dono Ware's legacy of service, sacrifice, and bravery, I think about her first. Watching my mother work taught me that sacrifice is not simply endurance. It is investing in a future you may never personally enjoy. That lesson became the foundation of how I approach everything, from my education at Morehouse College to the work I am building through BLAnC Kanvas. Like Sgt. Ware, whose bravery was not about personal reward but about something larger than himself, I have come to understand that true service means ensuring the opportunities you receive do not stop with you. My entrepreneurial journey began early. At 12, I launched a manga company and coordinated a team of 20 people to bring my vision to life. In middle and high school, I taught myself to airbrush and paint custom shoes, building real income from a skill I developed entirely on my own. These experiences were not just business experiments. They were lessons in what becomes possible when someone gives you access and believes in your potential. A Nike apprenticeship at Pensole Lewis College later sharpened that instinct into discipline, teaching me design thinking, consumer validation, and how to build solutions around real problems. Through that work, I grew increasingly aware of one of the greatest challenges facing the African diaspora: not a lack of talent, but a lack of ownership, infrastructure, and connection. Across my family and community, I have watched brilliant artists, entrepreneurs, and creatives have their potential redirected by financial pressure, limited resources, and the absence of mentorship. BLAnC Kanvas began as a clothing brand, but it has grown into something larger. I see fashion as a canvas for community building, a way to connect people to culture and history while building an ecosystem where Black creatives and entrepreneurs can thrive on their own terms. The most critical reform needed is building entrepreneurship and ownership pipelines long before students reach college. Too many young people are taught how to become employees but never how to become owners. Partnerships between public schools, HBCUs, Black-owned businesses, and community organizations can change that by providing mentorship, startup funding, internships, and practical business education from an early age. The key stakeholders are not only policymakers, but also HBCU administrators, local business leaders, philanthropic institutions, and community organizers who understand that sustained economic change requires both systemic investment and cultural buy-in. Talent is everywhere. Access isn't. My mother sacrificed so that opportunity would not stop with her generation. Sgt. Ware served so that others could live with more freedom and possibility than he may have experienced himself. I carry both of those examples with me. My goal is not simply to build a successful company. It's to help build communities where creativity becomes ownership, culture becomes opportunity, and success becomes something that can be shared across generations. Service, to me, means making sure the door does not close behind you.