Grad School Lauds Frazer As Volunteer
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Suzanne Frazer
Suzanne Frazer has won the University of Hawaii Graduate Student Award for Excellence for “outstanding service to students, the university and the community.”
Frazer came to UH-Manoa from Australia in 2000 and is nearly finished with her master’s degree in dance. But the Hawaii Kai resident hasn’t just been tapping her feet for six years.
She was honored by the Graduate Student Organization Assembly for devoting more than 4,000 hours of service to improve UH policies and procedures for grad students, conduct beach cleanups from Hanauma Bay to Kailua, hold dance seminars for teachers, and produce a series of smoke-free dances in Honolulu.
“My mind is always going,” Frazer explained. “I like to feel like I’m making a difference.”
In her adopted community, that difference started with a walk at Sandy Beach. “I thought it would be nice to be able to walk on the beach for one hour without seeing (litter). I couldn’t do it.” So she and her good friend Dean Otsuki organized cleanups with the East Oahu Lifeguard Association. (To continue the effort to change attitudes about litter here, Otsuki recently founded the non-profit group Beach Environmental Awareness Campaign Hawaii.)
Frazer speaks about marine debris during a
conservation program in July at Hanauma
Bay. Photos by Dean Otsuki.
At a cleanup last July at Bellows, unlucky Boy Scouts from San Jose seized the chance to help the ‘aina even though they’d just lost all their cameras and luggage in a much-publicized car theft.
“You never know what your drop in the ocean will do,” Frazer said.“The e-mail and press coverage from that day resulted in $3,000 and donations for them.”
Though she loves Hawaii Kai, Frazer’s mind is still ticking off some ideas to improve it: “It would be a great thing if shopping centers and beaches were to have recycle cans next to the trash cans.”
Frazer also initiated a dance at a smoke-free nightclub - after persuading the club to ban smoking for a night. The concept worked and led to many more. It continues today, and Frazer’s been told its success was an important “spark” to the current smoke-free law. She also produced Latin Dance Night for nearly three years, with proceeds going to the AsiaAfrica Earthquake/Tsunami Relief Fund.
Back to dancing. It’s a means to an end. In Australia Frazer created a dance curriculum to help children from urban and outback homes get acquainted and ease racial tension during exchange visits.“It was a wild but amazing week with 20 kids in a 10-bedroom house,“she recalled,“but there have been reports of less tension since.
“Teaching dance,” she explained, “is to understand ourselves and others and to bridge the differences to a peaceful world.”
And her master’s thesis? “Ethical Issues of Teaching Multicultural Dance.”
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