She has dreamed of founding the institute since she began working with the Children's Defense Fund in high school. Talking about her years as a counselor in their summer LEAP program in inner city New Haven, Connecticut, Moses' voice quiets and intensifies. If you come in saying, 'I want to make a difference,' then everything is worth it. One of her goals is to create a media literacy curriculum for public schools. She hopes to teach children what the media does and how it might affect them.
Television is their teacher.
They need to learn how to grow from it instead of being grown by it. So when children are five years old and they watch Disney's Snow White, they understand not just that Snow White is a perfect little princess who has pale skin and black hair, but that you don't have to be like Snow White to be good, and you don't have to be fair to be pretty. Ndidi Moses, a McNair Scholar, graduated in May 2000 with a B.A. in media studies from the College of Communications. She was the overall winner of this year's Undergraduate Research Fair. Her research paper was published in the 1999 McNair Scholars Journal.