UC Santa Cruz: Coming Together To Heal

Scotts Valley CA

19 April, 2022

3:59 AM

Description

Press release from UC Santa Cruz: April 15, 2022 Lakas Shimizu was a gentle warrior, a deeply caring, generous, and empathetic young man who had a gift for drawing people together. Lakas unexpectedly passed away at the tender age of eight. In his memory, his family—parents Dan Shimizu and Celine Parreñas Shimizu, brother Bayan Shimizu, and grandfather Robert Shimizu—established a scholarship at UC Santa Cruz. The scholarship honors Lakas' spirit by supporting students in the arts who engage in artistic and creative scholarly practice, and who organize people together to make an impact for inclusion and equity. Lakas was always interested in helping people and making sure they felt included, his parents share. He went out of his way to make friends with new kids at school, and had a special talent for making people feel welcome. "He made bringing people together look fun!" He was also the peer-selected "judge" on his elementary school playground—other students would turn to him to adjudicate when issues or disagreements arose. "Lakas had a very strong sense of right, and was absolutely fearless about implementing it," says his mother, Celine. " He had unflinching self-acceptance and self-presentation in a world where there is such a hierarchy of what a leader looks like." When Lakas was six years old, he told his parents that his dream was for everyone to be treated the same. "Lakas had a natural eight-year-old's awareness about race and difference," says his father, Dan. "When he drew self-portraits, he always gave himself dark skin. He internalized that he's a person of color without voicing it directly. If he had been older, he would have been interested in promoting diversity. He didn't have the words diversity and inclusion, but he would have been all in." "Lakas was a very special human being," says his grandfather, Robert Shimizu. "We were fortunate to have him in our lives. Lakas cared about people and bringing them together. This scholarship celebrates who he could have been by helping other people achieve their hopes and dreams." The family wants to help transform opportunities for scholars by ensuring that finances are not a barrier for students pursuing higher education in the Arts. "Equal access to education is very important to us," says Celine. "We were living in Hillsborough, California, at the time (of Lakas' passing). It's a very wealthy community and yet just across the street, just across El Camino, it's a very different environment. There's poverty, there's hunger, there's homelessness. It's not visible to everybody but it's something that really concerned Lakas." The family hopes that the scholarship will create opportunities for UCSC Arts students. Celine Parreñas Shimizu joined UC Santa Cruz as Dean of the Arts Division and Distinguished Professor of Film and Digital Media in July 2021. She brings a passion for continuing the division's culture of welcoming students as professional artists the moment they step onto campus. She encourages students to dig deeply into their pain, their suffering, their joy, and their differences to create art that is meaningful to them. Lakas leaned into his strengths, he understood the responsibility of becoming great, and identifying what you're good at. The family says they learned so much from him, and the spirit of the scholarship in his memory reflects that. They want to amplify his approach to cherishing being together and doing great things in a way that invites a person to be themselves fully. This press release was produced by UC Santa Cruz. The views expressed here are the author's own.