Dorchester resident Joyce Linehan received the Champion of Courage Award last Thursday (May 23) at the annual Children’s Celebration luncheon at Venezia in Neponset that was sponsored by the Boston nonprofit MAXCourage.

The event highlighted the work of many Boston and New England-area sixth graders with the publication of their essays as part of the Max Warburg Courage Curriculum’s annual capstone essay contest, where students addressed the prompt “How have you experienced courage in your life?”

According to MAXCourage’s executive director, Carrie Coughlin, another Dorchester resident, Linehan was “single handedly” responsible for recruiting dozens of new local judges for the essay contest over the past year, and that was a major reason why she will be receiving the award this year. The Champion of Courage Award has gone out over the last decade to volunteers who have gone above and beyond for the organization, Coughlin said.

“She’s a connector, but she’s also a collaborator,” Coughlin said. “She has had an incredible impact on our Essay Judging Day, recruiting volunteers with an intent to diversify the pool of those who read and judge the essays.”

“I love this program and am in awe of what the Warburg family has built, and the work that Carrie has done to reach more communities and students,” Linehan wrote to the Reporter. “One of my favorite annual events is Essay Judging Day. The student stories are touching, funny, and wise. I love recruiting people with diverse backgrounds to be essay readers, and everyone who has said yes has loved it.”

Coughlin said it was important that judges represent the population of the students they’re judging in order to reduce bias. Linehan, who previously served as chief of policy for former Mayor Marty Walsh, now sits on MAXCourage’s advisory board and uses her connections to recruit judges.

“Most important, besides the kids who write the essays, is who we recruit to judge them, and how we judge them,” Coughlin said. “We judge them blindly, not based on grammar or semantics, but on how well they tell a story.”

Named for the founders’ son, who at age 11 in 1991 died from leukemia, the Max Warburg Courage Curriculum encourages middle-school-aged kids to appreciate the value of courage and how to navigate the world around them while increasing their proficiency in language arts. While mainly focused in the New England region, the curriculum has reached classrooms across the country and even across the globe, to places like Belize, Cambodia, China, Lebanon, Mongolia, Spain, Pakistan, the United Kingdom, Turkey, Yemen, and many others, according to its website.

The program doubled in size domestically from 2021 to 2023, Coughlin said, who estimated that since its inception, it has served more than 225,000 kids. She added that each year, they receive about 6,000 essays, but only about 2 percent of them are chosen for publication in their annual volume, “The Courage of Children: Boston and Beyond.”

You can read this year’s edition of “The Courage of Children: Boston and Beyond” at bit.ly/Courage-of-Children, and find out more information about MAXCourage and its curriculum at maxcourage.org.