By – Jun 13, 2025 | 0 comments
Zonta Club of Concord presented thousands of dollars in scholarships to seven New Hampshire women and girls at the start of June. The awardees across the state include Annabelle Cattabriga of Dunbarton, Preesha Chatterjee of Bow and Valerie Lingner of Loudon.
The organization is an all-volunteer non-profit group which has provided volunteer service and financial support to NH women and girls for 66 years. The international version of the club dates back to 1919. Cattabriga and Chatterjee won the Young Women in Leadership Award, given to women, aged 16-19, who demonstrate active commitment to volunteerism, experience in local government, student government, or workplace leadership, volunteer leadership achievements, knowledge of Zonta International and its program and support in Zonta International’s mission of building a better world for women and girls.
Lingner won the Zonta Memorial Scholarship, aimed at female students on a non-traditional educational path, returning to college after five-plus years away from school.
Here’s a little more about the winners:
Annabelle Cattabriga is from Dunbarton and is a graduating senior at Bow High School, where she is the president of the Student Senate, an executive board member of the National Honor Society, a delegate for Harvard Model United Nations, and a member of the theater department. Cattabriga plans to study political science on a pre-law track. She wants to represent victims of all forms of crime, particularly children who are victims of abuse. She currently volunteers at the local Child Advocacy Center.
For her senior project, Cattabriga collaborated with the Granite State Children’s Alliance to research child abuse. She volunteered at law enforcement, counseling, and community-based agencies which protect against child abuse/serve victims. She presented her findings in front of the entire SAU faculty and staff on their first day of school, which served as a major part of the faculty’s mandatory training requirement.
In addition to winning a local Zonta scholarship, Cattabriga earned a Zonta International Young Woman in Leadership Award, becoming one of 37 women from 25 countries to achieve this recognition this year.
“We are so optimistic that our next generation will be even stronger because these young ladies are being recognized for strong leadership skills,” said Concord Zonta member Shelly Hoik. “We expect them to carry the torch to lead others to advance the status of women.”
Preesha Chatterjee, who lives in Bow and is about to graduate from Bow High School, also earned a local Zonta scholarship. Chatterjee is captain of her school’s math team and the wind section leader for the concert band. She represented Armenia as a freshman in the Harvard Model United Nations conference and then led as delegate for Burkina Faso at a special summit on climate change. She served on 350 New Hampshire, a climate justice organization, as the media lead and facilitation lead.
Chatterjee drafted House Resolution 30, advocating for robust climate education in schools, including localized case studies and social and economic impacts of climate crisis. She testified before the House Education Committee, collaborated with different legislators and conducted interviews with NHPR and the national magazine Non-Profit Quarterly. Though the bill was tabled, her work still mobilized youth. She has also talked to school boards across the state about the lack of climate education access in high schools. She helped peers write testimony and practice speaking.
In the future, she hopes to address climate change through the lens of economics and quantitatively analyzing the effectiveness of policies.
Valerie Lingner, who won the Memorial Club Scholarship, attended Hopkinton High School and graduated in 2002. She currently lives in Loudon and has worked as an LNA for 12 years, including in a nursing home specializing in helping patients with Alzheimer’s and dementia, as well as on the surgical in-patient floor at a hospital and outpatient with cardiology patients. For her last six years at work, she has been focused on electrophysiology, which has become her passion. After 20 years away from college, she is returning to school with the Nursing Program at NHTI to pursue her dream of becoming a device nurse. She will start the program this fall. Although she is working full-time this summer to pay for the equipment she will need, this scholarship will supplement her income to help cover the tuition costs of the nursing program.
Author: The Concord Insider

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