Singer Rihanna isn’t just a singer with great style, she remembers her roots and she's finally being honoured for that. The Grammy-award winning and m
Singer Rihanna isn’t just a singer with great style, she remembers her roots and she’s finally being honoured for that. The Grammy-award winning and multi-platinum selling singer’s new milestone isn’t for her music, but for her philanthropic work. Earlier in the week, Harvard University honoured the ‘Diamonds’ singer with Harvard’s 2017 Humanitarian of the Year award for the work that she has done to help build up her home country, Barbados, and its people.
Rihanna built a state-of-the-art art centre for Oncology and nuclear medicine for the diagnosing and treating of breast cancer in Barbados. Over and above this, she has also set up a scholarship fund, the Clara Lionel Foundation scholarship, for Caribbean children currently studying in the United States where the singer is based. In her acceptance speech, the singer began by saying, “So I made it to Harvard . . . never thought I’d be able to say that in my life. But it feels good.”
She went on to sharing what she believes to be a humanitarian, saying that one doesn’t have to have much in order to help others.
“You don’t have to be rich to be a humanitarian. You don’t have to be rich to help somebody. You don’t gotta be famous. You don’t even have to be college-educated. I mean, I wish I was, especially today . . . it’s true, I might come back,” Rihanna said.
She went on to say that people need to let go of the misconception that helping is hard.
“All you need to do is help one person, expecting nothing in return, to me, that is humanitarian,” she said.
“People make it seem way too hard, man. The truth is and what the little girl watching those commercials didn’t know is that you don’t have to be rich to be a humanitarian to help somebody. You don’t have to be famous. You don’t have to be college-educated.”
The singer concluded her speech by saying that if someone’s got a dollar, there’s plenty to share.
Rihanna, also supports the Global Partnership for Education and Global Citizen Project, providing children with access to education in more than 60 developing countries. She created the Clara Lionel Foundation scholarship program, named for her grandparents, for students from the Caribbean who attend college in the U.S. Previous winners of the award include actor James Earl Jones, gender rights activist Malala Yousafzai, UN Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon, and the late physician-statistician Hans Rosling.
