ROBERT AXELROD

ROBERT AXELROD

/

Former Consultant for the UN, World Bank & US Department of Defense
Professor Emeritus of Political Science & Public Policy at University of Michigan
National Medal of Science Award-Winner

I think the most critical thing is education for critical thinking. The ability to listen to a political argument or an argument of any sort, on COVID, for example, or climate change, and not necessarily understand the science behind that, but to understand how to evaluate the credibility of the speaker, how to evaluate the logic of the arguments and to see whether a conspiracy theory is behind this that has no grounding… And so I think what’s especially important in would be an educational in critical thinking.

BENH ZEITLIN

BENH ZEITLIN

/

Writer, Director & Composer

I think it goes to this feeling of freedom, looking how freedom changes as you grow, being a very particular type of freedom that children have just by the nature of not having learned what the rules are. As we grow, we start to limit what we believe is possible. When you’re a kid, there isn’t a delineation between this is real, and this is my imagination. It’s all real. That’s your life experience.

JACQUES VILLEGLÉ

JACQUES VILLEGLÉ

/

Artist & Grandfather of French Street Art

There was the war from ‘40 to ‘45 under the Fascists, so I didn’t have art training at that time. The painter Picasso, we knew the name, the artist who painted an eye in the place of a navel, that’s all I knew at the age of seventeen. I found a book published in 1926, the year of my birth, speaking of the painters Braque, Picasso and Miró. And then all the figurative painters at that time, Van Dongen…so it was a new style that I encountered there.

MARCIA SCHEINER

MARCIA SCHEINER

/

President & Founder of Integrate Autism Employment Advisors

For autistic individuals, there’s really sort of two paths. There are those today, about 35% percent of 18 year olds with an autism diagnosis who do go on to college or some form of post-secondary education, and then those who don’t. Of those who don’t and want to work, there’s about a 55% unemployment rate. And those who go to college and then look for employment afterwards, there’s about a 75 to 85% underemployment rate. So you can see the unemployment rates whether you go to college or not are astronomical, but they’re even higher if you go to college, which is sort of counterintuitive.

TIES VAN DER HOEVEN

TIES VAN DER HOEVEN

/

Creative Director & Co-founder of The Weather Makers holistic engineering company

The story behind The Weather Makers and the whole intention is that five years by accident, I was working in a dredging company and one of the commercial people from Egypt approached me on a question about a lagoon where the fish were disappearing. So we started with this very small thing and set up a whole flow modelling approach, so really from the hydraulics, we could determine what would happen with the fish. And that really was the regretting the Sinai could have a very big impact on the world.

ROBERT J. LANG

ROBERT J. LANG

/

Master Origamist, Physicist & Author

In origami design, historically people have always used their intuition. They probably started by folding traditional shapes or folding designs by others, developed an intuitive understanding of how the paper behaves and then from there they can explore that intuition to create new shapes. That was the way design worked for years and years, that was the way it worked for me, but I eventually hit a limit to what I could do with my intuition and so part of my motivation for exploring mathematical methods was to externalise some of the design process. If I could get some of the design process on paper in a meaningful way, then I could handle more complicated goals than I could just fit in my brain.

PETER SINGER & ANANTHA DURAIAPPAH

PETER SINGER & ANANTHA DURAIAPPAH

/

Human & Animal Rights Activists

“74 billion animals, according to the United National Food & Agriculture Organization, that we raise and kill each year on this planet. If we can’t make inroads into that and change attitudes to that, then I still have fears for where we are going.” – Peter Singer

DAVID TOMAS MARTINEZ

DAVID TOMAS MARTINEZ

/

Pushcart Award-Winning Poet

When I was younger, I never really thought of living past twenty-five…I felt like I was in a movie. I thought that I was living this movie idea of things and there’d be gunshots around you. You hear it hitting the concrete, and you’re like ‘Oh, shit’. Seriously, I didn’t think of it as real life. When you’re young, the idea that I’d known people that were killed early, you go to prison. These just felt like matter of fact. They seemed to be this part of life and you just accepted them.

DIANA CHAPLIN

DIANA CHAPLIN

/

Canopy Director of One Tree Planted

“We planted over 10 million trees in 2020 alone. And it’s one tree planted for every dollar donated, so we make it as simple as possible, but when you add it all up together the impact is just tremendous and growing every day.”


GAVIN JAMES CREEL

GAVIN JAMES CREEL

/

Tony & Olivier Award-Winning Actor, Singer & Songwriter

To not honor that we are all creative, beautiful, interesting deep, rich individuals. We’re not zeros and ones on a spreadsheet. We’re not scientifically explained. We are not mathematically judged. We are imperfect blobs of emotion and bone and spirit and life and when we come together there is nothing greater than the chemistry and the alchemy of musical theater… There’s a joy, there’s a bounce, there’s an effervescence that’s part of that music. I had a great teacher in college, the head of our program Brent Wagner said, 'With lyrics, I can tell you to open the door, but with music I can tell you how.’ Lyrics are information and music is emotion.

DR. FRANÇOIS CLEMMONS

DR. FRANÇOIS CLEMMONS

/

Singer · Author
1st African American Actor on Children’s TV · Officer Clemmons on Mister Rogers’ Neighborhood

I always find it an ironic thing to think about the fact that Fred Rogers was colour-blind. He could barely tell a blue from a grey. I was young and to him I was a child and I certainly played the role of a child and he played the role of parent… He was profoundly patient.

AVI LOEB

AVI LOEB

/

Harvard Astronomer · Theoretical Physicist
NY Times Bestselling Author of Extraterrestrial, The First Sign of Intelligent Life Beyond Earth

If we are not open to discover wonderful things, we will never discover them. It very much depends on us allowing ourselves to explore and find new things. My mother used to tell me when I was a kid that when I was born as an infant I was very different from the other babies in the room. I was looking around with open eyes, and I should say that’s where it all started. Once I got out of the womb of my mother and I started looking around, I was very curious. The great privilege of being a scientist is that you don’t need to give up on that curiosity. You can maintain your childhood curiosity.

PINA GERVASSI

PINA GERVASSI

/

Pina Gervassi is the Climate Director of the Forest Stewardship Council

Since I was a child, most of my family were dedicated to nature, fishing and agricultural engineers, so I started to love nature since I was very little, and then when I realised how important the Amazon is for the world and that I was living in a country [Peru] that’s really important, not only because of forests but also for biodiversity, indigenous people…I decided that I wanted to do that and I knew that was the place I wanted to be.

JULIAN FLEISHER

JULIAN FLEISHER

/

Jazz Singer, Writer, Radio Host & Producer

Over the years I’ve had a career as an actor, as a writer. I wrote books for many years. I’ve been singer, singer, songwriter, radio host… When I look at the whole drawing on the napkin, and I tried to ask myself–What unifies all of these things? And it came down to songs. Songs really are at the heart of all of these pursuits. Something about songs really matters to me. In the same people believe in Jesus Christ, and they can’t really get through the day without connecting with that figure. That’s how I am about songs. They are the fuel for me.

TAL HEVER-CHYBOWSKI

TAL HEVER-CHYBOWSKI

/

Director of the Paris Yiddish Center (Maison de la Culture Yiddish) & Medem Library

A lot of people in my family and among my friends when they heard that I study Yiddish and that later made it my livelihood, they are very surprised. Yiddish? How come Yiddish? Why Yiddish? They even laugh sometimes, they are very surprised. And what I answer to them is that there is nothing surprising about the fact that I study or speak Yiddish. The real surprise, the real question that has to be asked is how come my parents, this last generation, didn’t speak Yiddish? Because, if you consider my family, for hundreds of years on all sides they spoke Yiddish.

JENNIFER MORGAN

JENNIFER MORGAN

/

Fmr. Executive Director of Greenpeace International
Special Envoy for International Climate Action · German Foreign Ministry

I have always hoped and dreamt to work with young people because I’ve always felt that it is their future. It’s so inspiring to be working with young people all around the world. I feel that we are in the midst of transformational change and that working together around these key moments where you can see those shifts happening – unimaginable things that you never thought were going to happen can happen. That would be my other advice to young activists that just when you aren’t expecting it, something will happen and you’ll be like, “I can’t believe they just decided that! Holy cow!” And then you’ve got to celebrate.

PATON MILLER

PATON MILLER

/

Artist & World Traveler

When we moved back to Hawaii and lived on Molokai. I was teaching at the Kalaupapa Leprosy Colony, we had no money. And I was spearfishing, not for sport, but to get food for my family. And it was a beautiful time of our lives. We were so poor, but we were not poor. Poor is a state of mind. We were without money, but we were having so much fun.

SHIMON SCHWARZCHILD

SHIMON SCHWARZCHILD

/

Environmental Activist
Founder Assisi Bird Campaign & Action for Nature

I witnessed being totally rejected and not only witnessed, I remembered as a ten-year old all the children would go to a class in eugenics that I was not allowed to go to. I remember the insults that children learned against Jews while I was still in Germany. And I’m one of the lucky Jews who managed to leave.”

EDMAR CASTANEDA

EDMAR CASTANEDA

/

Jazz Harpist

The harp or the instrument that I play is a traditional instrument from Colombia (I’m from Bogota, Colombia). We have traditional music there called Janetta music. It’s the music from the plains of Colombia and Venezuala. It’s like the cowboy music… I met the harp when I was seven years old. That’s the first time I saw this instrument. I was like–Wow! I knew I was born to play the harp that day!

PETER SINGER

PETER SINGER

/

Most Influential Living Philosopher
Author · Founder of The Life You Can Save

I would like young people to recognise that they are part of a long tradition that has been trying to the make the world a better place. A tradition that goes back as far as we have recorded history, that there are people who tried to–like Socrates, but also like Buddha and many other figures in different cultures–think more about how we ought to live and tried to live in accordance with their thinking. Tried to do good in the world and that’s a traditional they can be part of. This generation really does hold the future of the planet in its hands.