DANBURY, CONN. - Senior Olivia Muhn of the Yale women's ice hockey team was announced as the 2024-25 Women's Project Rousseau Community Service Award Winner. She is the first winner of the community service award coming after the announcement of the partnership between the ECAC and Project Rousseau in April 2024.
Muhn has made a huge impact both on and off the ice, playing in 133 career games and being named to the ECAC All-Academic team three times. She has helped communities across the world through her efforts, most prominently through being a services coordinator for Speroway, a Christian community service organization located in her hometown of Burlington, Ontario. Their mission prioritizes access to food, education, and healthcare for underprivileged children across the globe. She had first hand experience through a service trip to the Dominican Republic back in 2023, and continued to be involved through her college career.
Within the Yale community, Muhn connected with other student-athletes through Yale's Student-Athlete Advisory Committee, in which she played an active role in organizing efforts such as the Undergraduate Learn to Skate Program and Mandi Schwartz Bone Marrow Drive.
About Project Rousseau
Project Rousseau is a non-profit organization that helps young people in communities in the highest need to reach their full potential and excel through higher education. We primarily serve refugee and asylum seeking youth and families, homeless youth, and reservation-dwelling Native American youth. We provide four pillars of programming to holistically address the needs of our beneficiaries: 1) Student Needs (Legal Services and Social Services), 2) Academics, 3) Community Service, and 4) Broadening Horizons.
Founded in 2011 as a one-to-one mentoring program for young people in the Harlem community, Project Rousseau has grown based on two guiding principles: to serve the absolutely highest need young people we can possibly find, and to continuously grow our services to meet all of the needs of the young people we serve. Overall, we serve over 2500 youth and families. Our students go onto attend Ivy League Schools, MIT, Stanford, and many other universities, while others go onto community college and to pursue extraordinary vocations. We also have a program in which we hire our own beneficiaries, for they are the ultimate experts in their communities and our services.
