SEIZING THE CHANCE FOR CHANGE Award-winning author Lydia Millet ’86, and JA Worldwide President and CEO Asheesh Advani ’90

Photo credit: Lydia Millet '86

THE ENTREPRENEUR AND THE ENVIRONMENTALIST - Cover story of Spring 2021 The Root, UTS alumni magazine

By Kimberley Fehr

The pandemic simultaneously divides and unites our world, leaving no one untouched. But this disruption from life as we know it presents a chance for change, or even an unprecedented opportunity to reinvent our world. Two visionary UTS alumni, environmentalist and award-winning author Lydia Millet ’86, and JA Worldwide President and CEO Asheesh Advani ’90 discuss how we can seize this chance for change, taking the best of what we are learning from the COVID-19 pandemic and carrying it forward into the future. It begins with empathy.

From her window amid the saguaros of the Sonoran Desert outside Tucson, Arizona, Pulitzer Prize nominee Lydia Millet watches the daily spectacle of life on earth unfold before her – the prickly pear cactus blooming and the darting flight of the Anna’s hummingbird – sharing an empathy with nature she says many people have now just discovered because of the pandemic.

During the pandemic, Lydia Millet ’86 signs her book, A Children’s Bible, on the front porch of the home she shares with her children and boyfriend.

Photo credit: Aaron Young

The life of the desert unfolds outside Lydia Millet’s window, an inspiration for her environmental writing.

Lockdowns and social distancing rules led to a major resurgence in outdoor activities. Nature reclaimed the deserted streets of cities as cougars roamed the streets of Santiago, Chile for the first time, and dolphins swam further up the Bosphorus than ever before. The gates closed and wildlife made remarkable gains in renowned national parks like Yosemite.

“It wasn’t just a matter of wildlife emerging more, but also of people noticing it and wanting to observe it,” she says. “The pandemic brought a lot of people oddly closer to the other life that exists in our streets and our gardens. There’s an access to nature and wild places; to landscape and the sublime that we haven’t had for a long time.”

THE WILL TO KNOW EACH OTHER AND OUR WORLD BETTER

The closer we can get to things, the better we know them, and the more we can love them, she says, joking that doesn’t mean we still can’t get really irritated by family members during the pandemic. “But in general, we love what we know, and we can’t love what we don’t see.”

Like the red-tailed hawk circling above, she sees the big picture, and can’t look away. An author of more than a dozen novels and short story collections, she also works as the chief editor at the Center for Biological Diversity, an organization with the all-encompassing mission of “saving life on earth,” and her work there pervades her environmental fiction.

If her revered dystopian climate change novel, A Children’s Bible, named one of the New York Times Top 10 books of 2020 and a National Book Awards Finalist for Fiction, advocates for anything, she says it is empathy: the will to know the world better, to know each other better, and empathize with each other. With a plot impelled by “a righteous anger at the moral failings of the older generations,” the story begins with a group of families vacationing together in a country home, the children a tribe unto themselves, so contemptuous of their parents they won’t even admit to each other who their parents are. The earth is dying and in the words of teen protagonist, Evie: “We knew who was responsible, of course: it had been a done deal before we were born.”

The cover of Lydia Millet's book A Children's Bible

As the world beyond descends into climate change chaos, the parents drink and the children become the competent ones in the novel, leaving for a safer home, only to return in an ultimate show of empathy to care for their parents and give them blood, nothing less than the gift of life itself.

ENTREPRENEURIALISM FOR EVERYDAY PEOPLE

Asheeh Advani ’90 with Canadian students at a JA Worldwide Global Youth Forum.

JA Worldwide

On the other side of the country, Asheesh Advani’s work as the president and CEO of JA Worldwide extends from his pandemic-era office in the Boston-area home he shares with his wife and children, to the far reaches of the globe, touching the lives of 12 million students each year. The organization is transformed from the Junior Achievement of Asheesh’s youth, where the teen entrepreneur served on the management team of a student T-shirt business, never suspecting that one day he’d become the leader of the global nongovernmental organization, and yet here he is.

Today JA Worldwide operates in over 115 countries and takes a broad definition of entrepreneurship beyond the stereotypical tech whizzes to encompass financial literacy and work readiness, rooted in the idea of mindset and resilience – the critical skills needed to prepare youth for the future of work.

World Economic Forum Asheesh Advani ’90 speaks at the World Economic Forum in Davos.

Photo credit: JA Worldwide

The pandemic has made us more global and more local at the same time, says Asheesh, showing us the tremendous interconnectivity between what happens in one part of the world and the impact in another. At the same time, policy-making and natural tribalism are pulling us in the direction of not trusting other tribes and communities.

While the pandemic inspires many acts of altruism and requires extraordinary heroism of medical professionals, Lydia says there also is an opportunity to examine how social behaviour turned away from the collective and common good, citing the “radical disinterest we saw in the States in helping each other through these basic measures like wearing masks and social distancing. I’m hopeful that the shock of that will make us rethink our relationship to community in a way that may help also with the climate crisis.”

EMPATHY NEEDS TO GO GLOBAL

JA Worldwide is uniquely positioned to make a difference on this front, with the ability to reach some of the most optimistic future leaders of the world at a time when they’re building what Asheesh calls their “empathy muscles.” This weighs on his mind because he feels JA Worldwide is obligated to forge these global connections through the learning experiences they deliver in schools.

Lydia Millet pictured with her brother Josh Millet ’89 in New York during the nineties.

Sarah Edwards Schmidt

“One of the most critical problems in the world is the need for young people to have a global mindset and empathy for other people’s issues and problems and pains,” says Asheesh.

UTS has always been ahead of the curve in understanding that, he says, reaching future leaders and giving them the global well-rounded education they need to make a difference. “I’m forever grateful to UTS for instilling both empathy and confidence in me,” he says. “Being at UTS allowed me to build some incredible friendships and fostered a love of learning and curiosity about the world.”

At UTS, Asheesh took part in Model United Nations, never imagining that one day he would grow up to address the United Nations, as he did at the United Nations Economic and Social Council in May 2017. He is also actively involved with the World Economic Forum as a member of the Global Agenda Council for the Future of Education, Gender, and Work. When Lydia attended UTS, she was neither an aspiring environmentalist nor a writer. “I did a lot of writing which was probably very bad but my teachers were kind – they were so interested in it, which made them able to see something there.” She’s now working on a memoir called We Loved It All, about extinction, religion, and people’s views of the natural world, which will also discuss how the engagement with ideas and critical rigour at UTS helped forge her path.

A ROLE MODEL OF RESILIENCE

Resilience is not something that people learn from a book but it can be taught, says Asheesh, noting that youth disillusionment is now one of the top 10 global risks, according to the World Economic Forum’s Global Risks Report 2021. Disillusionment in the young is a harbinger of many social problems that can eventually manifest in radical ways, even as terrorism. “Youth are facing the challenge of not learning as effectively as they used to be able to do in person, and the inequities are exacerbated when some kids have great broadband and computer access and parents who can provide support, and others do not.”

Add this to a job market that was already changing before COVID-19 gutted entire sectors, and there are fewer jobs, especially for the young, he says. A “powerful data point” is that the average young person is going to have at least seven careers and 20 jobs, according to the World Economic Forum’s Future of Jobs report. Some of these job shifts will be involuntary, which means an essential life skill is the ability for youth to think of themselves as people who are resilient and can pick themselves up, dust themselves off, and start something new.

Resilience builds from learning how to transform negative thoughts into positive ones, and learning from the experiences of role models. “Picture a 12-year-old girl in India whose dad is a rickshaw driver and mom works at home,” he says. “Her scope of what she thinks is possible is influenced by the people her parents spend time with and the people she meets.”

THE BAROMETER OF HOPE

In India, Asheesh’s organization took young girls on a tour of GE Healthcare and introduced them to a female nutritionist in her late twenties. She told them how she used to be just like them when she was young, how her interest in science blossomed and led her to this career where she helps people who are ill in Mumbai hospitals access meals at scale. “I looked at the eyes of the girls, and you could see every one of them wanted to be her. At the end of the day, we asked what they want to study and almost every hand went up for chemistry and STEM. You could see their entire lives changing in that moment.”

Moments like these are “incredibly empowering” he says, and give him so much hope for the future. Another barometer of hope comes from the young people taking part in student entrepreneurial competitions hosted by JA around the world.

“You get a really good sense of where the world is headed based on the entrepreneurial ideas of young people,” says Asheesh. “The smartest, most ambitious young people no longer want to be investment bankers or lawyers – they want to be social entrepreneurs. They want to bring technology together with biology to create new businesses. They’re interested in brain-computer interaction, and artificial intelligence. That’s where the energy is.”

Asheesh Advani sits in on a JA India class with students.

Photo credit: JA India

The interest in sustainability – ensuring business is a force for good and addresses climate change – is across the board. “Every idea that students have is looked at through that filter and I estimate more than 70 percent of new student businesses have some sustainability component to them. It’s truly remarkable and gives you so much hope for the future.”

THE POSSIBILITY OF AN EXTRAORDINARY REDEMPTION

Lydia wrote of the “possibility of an extraordinary redemption” in her New York Times article on November 25, 2020, that called on President Joe Biden to “rise up and save us” as part of her climate change work at the Center for Biological Diversity.

Indeed, it seems possible, looking back to the day the Center’s legal wrangling and ‘Noah’s Ark’ strategies first gave polar bears protection under the U.S. Endangered Species Act, and now how the Center’s work has garnered federal protection for about 732 species and half a billion acres of habitat. But increasingly, protecting species has become synonymous with protecting the planet itself, an even more daunting challenge.

“This is the moment for heroic measures right now,” Lydia says, with just a 10-year window to tremendously reduce our emissions to have any hope of staying under 1.5 degrees Celsius of global warming that could prevent the worst kind of cataclysm. “The best thing we can do as individuals is put pressure on governments and elected representatives to be forced by the will of the people to make these swift, legislative changes that are required. That simply is the most important thing. Anything we can do as individual people is dwarfed by that.”

As for Asheesh, he’s leveraging the scale of JA Worldwide to mobilize a global movement of youth empowerment. Under his leadership, JA Worldwide has become one of the top NGOs in the world, named by NGO Advisor as the seventh most impactful in 2021, a ranking the organization has held for three consecutive years. JA Worldwide operates as a branded network of teams, like Richard Branson’s Virgin Group, where Asheesh previously worked after the company he founded, Circle Lending, was acquired and renamed Virgin Money.

Asheesh’s vision for the future is simple but powerful, one where every young person who participates in JA is empowered to think of themselves as somebody who can create at least five jobs: a job for themselves and four others. “Most young people are seeking meaning and a way to be productive members of society,” says Asheesh. “You don’t have to be a technology entrepreneur to be a job creator. You can do it in any setting, whether you work for a company, non-profit, university, or in a small business or social enterprise. If you think of yourself as someone who can secure a budget to hire people and deliver a product or service that others value, you can create economic stability for yourself, and for others.” With over 120 million JA alumni, his dream of JA providing meaningful livelihoods and hope for both rich and poor communities is touching more lives all over the world.

Lydia envisions that our in-person encounters with actual people will acquire a “new kind of exuberance” after the pandemic made us so hyperdependent on screens. “I think we will learn to find greater joy in those kinds of moments.”

And as we face a climate change crisis in the midst of a pandemic, she says, hope is the only way forward. “That hope has to be immediately backed up by action. We can’t despair. We shouldn’t despair; it gives us nothing. Hope is really the only way, but through hope to action.” ■

Photos from Asheesh Advani's address to the United Nations Economic and Social Council in May 2017, as posted by his spouse Helen Rosenfeld on Facebook.