Millennium Fellowships skill leaders to make social impact

On Thursday 23 June, the 776 Foundation announced its inaugural set of awards of US$100,000 two-year fellowships. Among the 20 winners is Kami Krista. The 23-year-old Harvard sophomore won for his start-up climate tech company Elio that will help companies to develop and evaluate decarbonisation strategies based on state-of-the-art science.

Krista’s is the most recent large grant secured by a Millennium Fellow alumnus since the programme’s inception in 2007.

Previous alumni of the Millennium Fellowship (MF) programme include Jeremiah Thoronka, a Sierra Leonean, who last year won the Chegg.org Global Student Prize (US$100,000) for inventing a device that generates electricity by capturing the kinetic energy from traffic and pedestrians. The device powers 150 households comprising 1,500 people and 15 schools attended by 9,000 students.

Established by Alexis Ohanian, co-founder of Reddit.com, the 776 Foundation funds 18- to 23-year-olds to develop innovative projects designed to combat climate change.

“The 776 Foundation is equipping some of the most driven future leaders with the capital and support needed to fully immerse themselves in what could be the next world-saving idea,” said Lissie Garvin, director of the 776 Foundation and Fellowship Programme.

“What Kami and Elio are building will strengthen the fight against climate change by bringing the best data and research to decision-makers and close critical data gaps to align R&D efforts. This will enable global companies with climate goals to build, execute and evaluate actionable and effective climate plans.”

Elio, which grew out of work Krista did while a Millennium Fellow, “will enable the critical coordination between climate R&D and the companies that are heavily dependent on technology to reduce their emissions by as much as 50%”, says Krista.

“It provides a platform for companies operating in a sector where it is hard to reduce emissions with a digitised, evidence-based decarbonisation strategy.”

The Millennium Campus Network

The Millennium Fellowships were created by the Millennium Campus Network (MCN), founded 15 years ago. The network grew out of two books that Sam Vaghar, then a student, read early in his university career at Brandeis University in Boston. The first was Tracy Kidder’s (2004) Mountains Beyond Mountains, a biography of the late Dr Paul Farmer, the co-founder of Partners in Health.

Since 1987, this non-profit organisation has provided direct health care in such countries as Haiti, Peru, Mexico, Lesotho, Malawi and, in 1998, in conjunction with the Russian Ministry of Health, in Tomsk Oblast in South Central Siberia (Russia).

The second book was The End of Poverty (2005) written by the award-winning Columbia University economist Jeffrey Sachs, which drew attention to the fact that almost a billion and a half people were living in extreme poverty, defined then as US$1.90 per day (or US$2.29 in 2021).

Two days after a cold call to Sachs and a five-hour drive down Interstate 95, Vaghar found himself sitting in the office of the famed economist who regularly advised government leaders and was in 2005 director of the United Nations Millennium Project, which developed the eight Millennium Development Goals that formed the basis for the 17 Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) adopted by the United Nations in 2015 (and which are central to the work of MCN).

Remembering that first meeting, Vaghar says: “I am only 19. I’m a university sophomore [second year]. I don’t have any answers. But I know my generation can do more to tackle extreme poverty.” With Sachs’ encouragement, Vaghar and his classmates organised a series of public health seminars in Boston. Six months later, MCN held its first summit at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.

“We had hoped for a few hundred students. We were shocked that a thousand showed up to hear speakers including Sachs and the Grammy Award-winning singer John Legend.”

The fellowship is launched

But, although MCN hosted global summits annually, Vaghar found that the energy dissipated after the event. “We addressed this,” he says, “by launching a semester-long civic leadership programme: the Millennium Fellowship.” The programme is presented by MCN and the United Nations Academic Impact or UNAI.

The MF grew quickly: from 11 Millennium Fellows the first year (2013) to over 2,000 at 136 campuses in 30 countries today. For the Class of 2021, Vaghar and his small staff of four (along with over 100 alumni) sifted through more than 25,000 applications and more than 31,000 from 140 countries for this year’s class.

Almost all applicants learn about the MF either through word of mouth or on the net. “Our advertising budget totals about US$900 a year,” says Vaghar.

Though MCN is based in Boston, the bulk of the MF’s groups are in the developing world. For example, there are Millennium Fellows at two universities in Canada and 26 universities in the United States, but also at more than 50 in Africa. MFs are active in four European countries. India alone counts 33.

The vast majority of the 2,018 fellows are people of colour. Members of the Class of 2021 logged 247,763 hours working on 1,083 projects that positively impacted the lives of more than 1.6 million people. Almost 100% of fellows graduated from university and 87% are currently employed in careers that contribute to social impact.

With the exception of the Millennium Oceans Prize to catalyse student activism for the oceans, MCN does not fund projects. Instead, it provides intensive training (networking) and credentialing that allow participants to access additional support. In addition to leading at least eight members of their group (per campus), fellows are responsible for reaching out to other organisations for support (when needed). (You can see a YouTube video about its work here.)

According to Vaghar, Millennium Fellows “meet on their respective campuses over six sessions between August and November to hone hard and soft skills and reflect on core values integral to advancing the SDGs: empathy, humility and inclusion”.

Additionally, they take part in a webinar series with social impact leaders – from the United Nations, Gates Foundation and organisations such as Last Mile Health – showcasing the myriad pathways to a social impact career.

Through their projects, Vaghar told University World News, Millennium Fellows apply what they learn to grassroots initiatives advancing one or more of the SDGs – from creating a community farm or tackling food insecurity to leveraging solar power to provide electricity locally.

After a virtual global graduation in November that convenes the entire class, fellows earn a certificate of recognition from UNAI and MCN.

An ‘interesting leadership opportunity’

Among this year’s Millennium Fellows is Vladyslava Vertogradska, who was a campus director for MF at LCC International University (LCCIU), Lithuania.

In 2014, when she was 13, she and her mother fled to the city of Ivano-Frankivsk in Western Ukraine after Russian-backed paramilitary forces seized effective control of the city of Donetsk in Eastern Ukraine at the same time Russia seized Crimea.

In 2018, she moved to Klaipeda on Lithuania’s southeast coast to attend LCCIU, the only North American-style university in Europe, where she has just completed a bachelor of arts in contemporary communications.

“After everything I had gone through, Lithuania seemed like paradise,” she wrote on her website.

Like most of the Millennium Fellows I interviewed, Vertogradska found out about the fellowships online. She was surprised when she found out that instead of the fellowship being for an individual and his or her efforts, the MF was a group project that she could lead.

Soon she realised, however, that “this was an interesting leadership opportunity, so started writing on the university Facebook group and sending out emails”, she told University World News. “All kinds of people applied to work on the project with me.”

Over the course of the past 10 months, Vertogradska has produced 45 episodes of a podcast entitled “Vlada’s Talk Show” in which she interviewed young people in Lithuania and around the world, professors and sector experts.

Vertogradska has created inspiring and educational content around topics ranging from climate change to citizenship, exchange programmes, the war in Ukraine and disinformation in the media, says Vaghar. Her YouTube videos, for instance, can be viewed here.

Demystifying cancer

Sara El Koussa, who lives in the city of her birth, Beirut, used her Millennium Fellowship to develop a series of webinars devoted to demystifying cancer in a society where it continues to be stigmatised.

“People don’t even like to talk about it,” the 23-year-old who lost her own mother to cancer a few years ago, told me. “People are very superstitious about it in Lebanon.”

She said a study showed that women in the Middle East “don’t share their diagnosis because they don’t want people to think that their daughters have inherited bad genes – which could affect their marriage eligibility”.

As was the case for many of the Millennium Fellows, her original plans – in-person symposia – were upended by the COVID pandemic.

With the help of the MF team led by Vaghar, El Koussa led her own team of 16 volunteers in producing a webinar series designed to break through the conception that a cancer diagnosis is equated with death by giving survivors a platform on which they can tell their stories.

She knew that people were sceptical about how many people would sign on to watch webinars on cancer, the first being delivered by an oncologist who explained different cancers and symptoms. She too was shocked that 275 people signed on to the session.

Almost 64% of the Millennium Fellows are women, which speaks to the MF’s commitment to SDG 5: Gender Equality. El Koussa credits her family, education, and training the MF gave her with being able to deal with male chauvinist attitudes from a friend who appeared to be expressing concern for her.

“I have a good friend who was sceptical about the project. He said, ‘Just keep it something you’re actually enjoying yourself doing. Don’t screw up. And don’t make it more complicated because you don’t have to handle all the hassles’,” she says.

After a moment’s thought, she continues: “I felt that the discussion was not on the idea itself. I felt the discussion was on how qualified I was as a woman to be undertaking this project.” Her voice showed her steel when she told me she dismissed his question: ‘How much can you do and how much of your time do you want to put into this and not somewhere else?’

Prachi Lalwani, whose family moved from India to Venezuela before she was born, is studying international relations at Florida International University (FIU, Clearwater). Her project also focuses on SDG 5 as well as SDG 10 (Reduced Inequalities).

COVID also forced her team to move from in-person events to the development of a series of podcasts and online materials designed to educate women about career opportunities open to them.

In addition to being a Millennium Fellow, Lalwani has been a delegate at the Model United Nations team at FIU and is a Hamilton Scholar; through this fellowship, she worked at the Washington DC-based Heritage Foundation, developing a policy proposal for the ASHARay of Hope programme that focuses on addressing domestic violence against women of South Asian heritage in New York State.

Dealing with imposter syndrome

It was all the more surprising, therefore, that towards the end of her response about how the MF’s mentoring programme was key to her success, she brought up the fact that she experiences “imposter syndrome”.

Social psychologists define this syndrome as the feeling that you don’t belong, that you are a fraud because your abilities (as a woman, a person of colour or other socially targeted group) cannot measure up to the supposed norm, usually imagined as a white male.

“I feel like whatever I’m doing is not enough. I feel like you start putting yourself down. And, in my case, as an international student I feel like I have the imposter syndrome because I have fewer opportunities and I should be doing more. So, I put myself down.”

She credits the support she received from MF for coping with these feelings.

Okechukwu Uche, who hails from Lagos, Nigeria, is a Mastercard Foundation Scholar studying business management at the African Leadership University on the island nation of Mauritius.

His MF project, I-Succeed Network, flows from his experience in high school where he developed a student company, SYTEC Enterprise, with the help of the Junior Achievement Nigeria programme. The company produced a rechargeable battery-powered inverter and flashlights that were needed by his school and neighbouring communities because of frequent power outages.

Through the I-Succeed Network, Uche is working to create a digital education platform for teenagers and young adults in his community to access content relating to leadership development, entrepreneurship, digital and financial literacy. The goal is for the platform to help young people develop skill sets and competencies to excel in competitive work environments.

Concerns about racism

What struck me most about my discussion with Uche was his worries about whether or not he would experience racism in Mauritius. Though Mauritius no longer asks its citizens about their ethnicity, on its census, in 1972 – the last census that did – 65.8% identified themselves as being of Indian origin, more than double the proportion of those who identified as being of African origin.

Accordingly, Uche was concerned that he would not know the social cues. This led him to be very cautious when meeting people (whom, it turns out, he found to be very warm and welcoming) and careful about where he went.

Since he came from a city and country in which almost the entire population of 214 million are African, I asked him about his perceptions of racism. His answer did not so much surprise as sadden me and indicated the limits of even MF’s robust mentoring and support programmes.

Uche said he was concerned about encountering racism in another African country because he has seen the way black people are treated in the United States. Following the Black Lives Matter movement and the backlash against it on the news, and watching American films made him feel as though, outside of Nigeria, he would be seen as inferior.

“You are made to feel like you don’t belong on our territory,” he said, summing up the xenophobia he picked up from American media.

“There are systemic biases and discrimination that have persisted for centuries. It will take a multiplicity of individual and institutional efforts for these to be dismantled,” says Vaghar.

“What we can do is help young leaders build bridges across identities and borders. Millennium Fellows connect and collaborate around shared passions for a more just world and learn from each other's lived experiences in the process.”

Women’s health and well-being

On the evening of 24 February 2019, “Period. End of Sentence” won the Academy Award for Best Short Documentary.

Only Rayka Zehtabchi, the film’s director, was supposed to be on stage to collect the golden statuette. But five young women broke the rules and rushed up on stage to be with her after hearing that their 25-minute film that tells the story of a group of women in Hapur, a city in Uttar Pradesh, India, who learned to operate a machine that makes low-cost sanitary napkins, had won the Oscar.

One was Claire Taback Sliney, who had conceived of the project of sending the machine to India when she was in high school, and had spent her Millennium Fellowship working on what became the film.

“Before working on this project, I didn’t realise that some people around the world could not access hygienic period products because I was fortunate enough to have the level of access that I needed my whole life,” says Sliney, who then adds: “Why these issues aren’t even relevant [in the news] really speaks to a lot of these larger systemic issues that one might not even realise and have a relationship to periods: things like global poverty, things like access to education, things like female empowerment, access to jobs for women globally.

“If women are impeded by their periods because they don’t have access to period products that they need in order to leave the house and stay out of the house [for education or work] to prevent them from bleeding and soiling their clothing, it makes it difficult, if not impossible, to go about one’s daily life and go to school or hold a job,” says Sliney, who graduated from the University of Pennsylvania in 2021 with a joint degree in philosophy, politics and economics (PPE) and gender studies.

“Claire’s Millennium Fellowship project – ‘The Pad Project’ – spotlights the linkages between menstrual equity, access to education and employment. Her approach – combining grassroots impact with storytelling – helps the public understand how sexism permeates so many aspects of health and well-being,” says Vaghar.

“If you’re using toilet paper or a dirty rag or other unhygienic material that people around the world use to clean up their periods, you are at a higher risk of infection. And that can lead to a whole slew of further health issues,” Sliney told University World News.

Striving for impact

Sliney’s involvement with this issue dates back to her high school years in Los Angeles, California. After learning about the ‘concept of period poverty’ at the United Nations Commission on the Status of Women, she formed a club with some other students under the guidance of her English teacher Melissa Barton.

The club raised money to purchase the sanitary pad-making machine to send to India. Barton is now the executive director of the Pad Project, the NGO that grew out of the club founded in the Oakwood School.

As important as sending one machine to India was, Sliney says, they soon realised that the purchase of one machine was not enough. “We realised that we could make a stronger impact, reach more people and shine a light on both the concept of period poverty and get people to talk more about periods if we made a film.”

“Claire started her activism in high school. In her case, the MF provided a bridge between her early activism, peers on her campus and at universities across the globe. Through the fellowship, she found advisors, mentors and networks.

“Shortly after completing the programme, she was invited to speak on a panel at the United Nations, building further support for her documentary and engaging with experts at UN Women,” says Vaghar.

For her part, Sliney, who holds a one-year Fulbright Fellowship that has allowed her to work in Paris on a documentary about female Ukrainian refugees in France, told me that her experience as a Millennium Fellow was invaluable.

In words that echoed those used by other fellows I interviewed, Sliney closed our interview by saying, “I’m really thankful for the programme. I stay in touch with Sam [Vaghar], who remains a great advisor for me.”