Essay Winner Can Budget Her Resources

By LISA RICHARDSON

June 9, 1996 12 AM PT

TIMES STAFF WRITER

NEWPORT BEACH — The challenge was for students throughout Orange County to devise a program to improve safety in their communities, and in 10 minutes, persuade a mock city council and mayor to fund their program.

Sixty students participated in the second annual Hitachi Community Safety Ambassador Scholarship contest, six were finalists, and Saturday morning, a panel of community judges awarded the $5,000 prize to Sunny Hills High School student Rachi Rachel Shih.

Shih, an 18-year-old honors student who is bound for Harvard University in the fall, came up with a $5,000 spending plan for Drug Use Is Life Abuse, a countywide coalition of which Shih is a part.

“Drug dealers and addicted youth have always menaced the security of homes and cities. Such activity heightens criminal activity and violence, endangering citizens from residents to children to police officers,” Shih wrote in her award-winning essay. “Often, community danger is posed by young people with problems they cannot cope with. Luckily this distress can be rectified by counseling and friendship.”

In her proposal, Shih asked the “city council” to allocate $1,875 for educational booklets for elementary school children, $1,000 for junior high and high school programs, $1,000 for business information and seminars and $1,200 for red ribbons, bumper stickers and posters with anti-drug slogans for the public.

Judges for the contest were Stella Cardoza and Mayor Mike Ward of the city of Irvine, Paul Silverman, associate chancellor of UC Irvine, Ben Holden of the Wall Street Journal and Officer Andy Halpin of the Newport Beach Police Department.

“Drug Use Is Life Abuse is really neat,” Shih said after winning the contest. “There’s students like me, and like, [Sheriff] Brad Gates and other community leaders are sitting right there too. We’re all there trying help the county.”

It was natural for her to use the coalition for her essay and application for the Hitachi scholarship, she said, because its older members have touched and impressed her by their dedication to her generation.

“The people I work with at Drug Use Is Life Abuse have been absolutely inspirational,” Shih said.

The contest is an outgrowth of Hitachi’s efforts to participate in U.S. community life.

“In Japan, we are not involved in community safety at all because, well, it’s safe,” said Tsutomu “Tom” Gomibuchi, senior representative for Hitachi LTD. “In Japan the important things for society are taken care of by the government so the people are not as active. But volunteerism is getting more common there, in part because of the American influence.”

Nationwide, Hitachi has 67 subsidiaries and employs 18,000 people. In Southern California the company has 23 offices and 4,000.