OP-ED: What the Truman Scholarship taught me about community
By Caden Nathaniel Ong Poblete
I want to tell you what it felt like to be chosen as Guam’s Truman Scholar for 2026, not the headline version, but the real one. And the truest thing I can tell you is this: I found a community that felt like home, and it all started because I already came from one.
Guam was never built by people going through it alone. We were founded on community, people looking out for each other, showing up with a plate of food before anyone even asks if you need one. No matter the differences in values we hold, we are family.
I grew up inside that. I didn’t know how deeply it shaped me until I found myself thousands of miles from home, sitting in a room full of strangers who somehow already felt like family.
That room was Truman Scholar Leadership Week in Missouri: six days of symposiums on public service, leadership conferences, and conversations with people from Congress and government offices. Nine policy teams worked on issues ranging from global education financing and climate change to road safety and public transportation.
Mine was the education group. Our mentor, Andy Cunningham, Global Lead for Education at the Aga Khan Foundation and a former Truman Scholar, worked with me and six other scholars to build a policy brief on global education financing. We proposed a way to bring governments, grant agents, and foundations to the same table, and then defended it before a panel of judges.
But the biggest thing I learned that week didn’t come from the policy brief at all.
It came from Terry, the Foundation’s executive secretary, and something she calls “constructive confusion”: the idea that we don’t have to solve all the world’s problems at once, and we’re not personally responsible for fixing them alone.
For the first time, there was no expectation hanging over me to come home to Guam and figure out every single problem on my own. Nobody in that room needed me to have the answers. None of us did.
We all felt the weight of our communities needing us to carry them, and for one week, we got to carry that weight together instead of alone. I got to just be there. Present. Surrounded by people who understood without me having to explain myself twice.
I sat with Trumans from Hawaiʻi and Puerto Rico, from the American South, tribal lands, immigrant neighborhoods, and rural towns nobody else pays attention to.
Within days, sometimes within hours, the distance between us disappeared.
We weren’t competitors. We weren’t strangers performing our resumes at each other. We were a community, built the same way Guam taught me: by showing up for one another, by listening without needing anything back, and by loving a place enough to fight for it.
That week I realized the love I have for Guam was never something I’d have to leave behind to go serve the world. It was the very thing that let me explore and find my own individuality.
I came home with more than a finished brief and a new set of friends. I came home having grown, sure of my own voice, less afraid to sit in a room I hadn’t earned my way into yet, and finally able to separate loving my island from feeling like I had to save it single-handedly.
So here is my invitation, UOG, and I mean it with everything in me: Apply for the Truman Scholarship. Apply for the opportunity. Apply for the network. Apply because it will hand you a family, a community of people from completely different corners of the world who will love you, push you, and understand what it means to serve where you’re from.
I owe this experience to more people than I can ever repay. Thank you to my mentors, Senator Vince Borja, Chirag Bhojwani, Mary Kate Soliva, and Ron McNinch, for guiding me with such patience and belief, and for teaching me that leadership is just love with follow-through. Thank you to my family, my first community, my always community, for loving me through every version of myself I’ve had to become to get here.
And to the UOG student wondering whether the Truman Scholarship is meant for you, whatever your major, if you are committed to making a difference for Guam and our communities, I hope you consider applying. You’ll have a community rooting for you and ready to support you, and I promise, I’ll be there for you too.
UOG students interested in becoming the next Truman Scholar can contact Mary Kate Soliva, UOG Truman Scholarship Advisor, at solivamk@triton.uog.edu.
Caden Nathaniel Ong Poblete is the 23rd Truman Scholar from Guam and a student at the University of Guam. He is a senior double major in Political Science and Public Administration and a senator in the 64th Student Government Association.
