With some stops and starts, Laila began her process towards becoming vegetarian in seventh grade. In her junior year, she helped to establish a new club called Sprouting Change, which had numerous campaigns around food justice, animal rights, and sustainability.

Laila is in the Culinary Academy at her high school. She brought up the idea to her chef that they make vegetarian recipes at least once a week, and worked towards creating an alternative curriculum for students who wish to pursue a plant-based pathway. As a result of her efforts, the instructor Chef has adopted more vegan-friendly practices. For example, instead of having students in his class cook chicken wings, students are assigned to prepare buffalo cauliflower bites. Steak skewers were swapped for mushroom skewers with a vegan bordelaise sauce after Laila suggested this in her sophomore year.

Laila Jeffries-El was a co-captain of her school’s ProStart team, which competed in the New Jersey Restaurant and Hospitality Association statewide high school competition, where they present a business plan to industry professionals. She suggested they make the menu completely vegan, and developed a Filipino restaurant concept with menu items, marketing tactics, a SWOT analysis (Strengths, Weaknesses, Opportunities, and Threats), interior décor elements, kitchen layout, and even a mock floor plan. Menu items included shiitake mushroom steamed buns, green papaya salad, a peanut stew called kare-kare, and ube donuts for dessert. Laila wrote, “We aim to serve traditional Filipino food, while fostering sustainable practices in doing so… We are choosing to opt out of supporting meat production. By providing alternatives to meat and other animal products, we seek to help customers realize that food can be delicious while helping to reduce the carbon footprint.” Her team took second prize in the statewide contest.

Laila wants to continue “fighting for justice in my community. I hope that we will make improvements in the future generations in regard to racial equality … I plan to pursue Business and Economics in college. I will continue to educate myself on the inner workings of monetary and finance, and how I can use these skills to inform others. I would also love to be in a world where we no longer have to worry about global warming … I strive to promote the benefits of a vegetarian lifestyle to a broader community.”

For information on other winners and applying for the next Vegetarian Resource Group college scholarship contest, see https://www.vrg.org/student/scholar.htm

Deadline is February 20 of each year.

To support additional VRG scholarships and internships, donate at vrg.org/donate, call (410) 366-8343, or mail contribution to The Vegetarian Resource Group, P.O. Box 1463, Baltimore, MD 21203.