Image courtesy Do Something

CNN has called them the "Oscars of youth service awards." They honor 12 incredible, courageous and inspiring young people with as much pomp and circumstance as you'd find in any Tinseltown awards show. They are the BRICK Awards, and they prove that the youth of today are capable of accomplishing great things.

Presented each year since 1996 by Do Something, the BRICK Awards are about recognizing young people and the efforts they are making to revolutionize community involvement. But the BRICK Awards go beyond just handing out some money. They hope to give children across the nation real role models to emulate; innovative young people, like themselves, who have taken the next step and done something positive to change the world.

The BRICK Awards were televised for the first time on April 12, 2007 on the CW. It contained all the elements of an awards show: a celebrity host, popular musical acts, celebrity presenters, and glitz and glamour. But the BRICK Awards are very different from any other awards show; they demonstrate that people should be rewarded not for how beautiful they are or what they're wearing, but for what they've done, what they continue to do and how their work can inspire the next generation of do-ers. The goal is to create a new type of celebrity: the rock star of social change.

In this article, we'll take a look at how the BRICK Award Finalists and Winners were selected and what the award entails. We’ll also explore what it means to have the event televised for the first time, everything that went into creating the show, and what the future of the BRICK Awards looks like for 2008 and beyond.