Amiera Blankenship
Emerging Leader Award
YWCA Greater Pittsburgh’s Emerging Leader Award goes to Amiera Blankenship, a youth advocate and 10th grader at Brashear High School. Amiera Blankenship is a passionate youth advocate for equity, inclusion, accessibility, and justice. She first got involved in the social justice movement through volunteering with the Black Political Empowerment Project (B-PEP) and the Greater Pittsburgh Coalition Against Violence (CAV) when she was 11. For the past two years, she has been highly involved in planning the Youth Thriving Summit, an event supported by The Pittsburgh Study that most recently welcomed over 200 youth from across 40 agencies. In 2023, she spoke on a panel about youth participation in research at the Annual Conference on Adolescent Health, a national event hosted by the University of Michigan. In 2024, she took part in local discussions about community violence prevention and later joined Youth Leadership in Action, a violence prevention program of the University of Pittsburgh School of Medicine’s Department of Pediatrics. Amiera has completed the City of Pittsburgh Youth Civic Leadership Academy and is now actively involved in designing the City of Pittsburgh Mayor’s Youth Commission.