In 1971, more than a decade before Theo was born, Richard Nixon declared the “War on Drugs.”

If that “war,” or any of the other anti-drug platforms that the United States—and to an extent, Theo’s home country of Canada—had been even mildly successful, Theo and his friends would probably be doing something very different with their lives right now.

Actually, a lot of people—particularly those from historically marginalized groups in the U.S. and communities directly affected by the drug trade in the Americas—would probably be doing something very different with their lives right now.

Theo is a 2019 GATHER Fellow and co-founder of Catalyst, a cross-border education initiative that he said was born out of “a group of friends thinking about the drug education we had received, and how inadequate it was to help us make sense of the things we were seeing around us.”

Growing up in rural Canada, what little drug education Theo received as a child came mostly through the Drug Abuse and Resistance Education (DARE) program. In that program (which has since been declared a failure) a uniformed police officer would come into classrooms and teach 11- and 12-year-olds to “just say no” to drugs. Little, if any, attention was paid to the bigger picture, and even less space was given to kids to process what they might actually be facing in their own homes or communities.

It wasn’t until he attended college in New York City that Theo got a chance to see the rest of the picture: While volunteering at a community garden in Harlem, he began to hear first-hand accounts of the effects of the crack epidemic in the 1980s, police brutality, and young boys being sent to jail for minimal possession. His roommate at the time, Benji, a co-founder of Catalyst, also told him about the drastic spike in violence and militarization that he saw while growing up in Guatemala as a result of the drug war.

“That planted the seed of thinking that there is something here that I need to better understand,” Theo said earlier this month from Mexico City, where he now lives. After undergrad, he went on to pursue a Masters degree at Cambridge University in England, where he dedicated his thesis to the war on drugs.

“The more I started to learn about the history, the more I was really shocked and appalled that it had taken me until my Masters degree to come into contact with this body of knowledge, and I wondered why it had not been made available earlier,” Theo said.

He started thinking about his own drug education, how addiction runs in his father’s family, and, at least in the case of several of his uncles, substance abuse had always been explained to Theo as a personal moral failure of the user rather than a biological or systematic one.

“Around that time, it also came to light that one of my cousins was pretty heavily embedded in the drug trade, and I started thinking a lot about how those experiences weren’t necessarily disconnected from Benji’s experiences in Guatemala. Those drugs come from somewhere, and they follow routes that cross borders, and tie together different countries within the continent,” Theo said. “The more I thought about it, the more it seemed urgent to create a space to think through the full complexity of drugs and drug policy, specifically in the Americas.”

Along with Benji, as well as friends from Philadelphia and Mexico, Theo launched Catalyst in 2017 with the goal of creating opportunities for cross-border dialogue among youth and educators from communities directly affected by the problem. (The problem so far has been the drug war, but there are plans to add a new program around land defense in the Amazon River basin, as well.)

The program is a year-long fellowship for educators and students ages 15 to 18 from North, Central, and South America. Whereas statistics show that this age group is among those most deeply affected by the drug trade, Theo said there is often very little room for their voices in policy debates around the issues. Catalyst seeks to give them that space through their fellowship, which includes a three-week intensive incubator where participants study the problem from a transnational perspective, share personal stories of how the drug war affects them at home, and receive tools and skills to launch projects of their own back in their communities.

Not only are they able to explore the past, present, and future of drug policy debates, but they’re able to learn first hand how interconnected their lives are, despite the borders that might lie between them.

“I think that there’s a lot of power in having students live together and learn together from the different communities,” Theo said. “It is one thing to read about something in an article in the U.S., but when your friend who you have just made over the past few weeks is telling you about how these policies played out for them and their family in their village in Mexico or Colombia — it makes it personal and urgent in ways that reading something in an article or a textbook might not otherwise.”

If there are elements of the program that are starting to ring bells, it’s more than a coincidence. Theo applied for the GATHER Fellowship in part to find community support as Catalyst grows, but as he learned more about Seeds of Peace, he also began to see a kindred spirit in bringing together youth to share their experiences and empowering them to make change.

Some of the challenges Catalyst faces are also similar to those that Seeds of Peace has faced through the years, like convincing parents from places where camps aren’t common that the program was not some sort of scam; obtaining visas for the students to cross borders; raising funding; and, of course, safety for program participants once they return home.

Yet despite those challenges, like many of those with Seeds of Peace who work in areas of conflict, he feels a need to keep pushing, to keep working.

“It feels very urgent—living in Mexico and seeing the suffering that policies in other countries cause here. The levels of violence that this country is experiencing never cease to shock and terrify me,” Theo said. “And knowing that the roots of that violence extend far beyond Mexico, I can only think about this problem as everyone’s responsibility.”

This series highlights our 2019 GATHER Fellows. To learn more about the inspiring social change that Theo and our other Fellows are working towards, check out #FollowtheFellows on Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram.

In every force of nature—a thunderstorm, a blizzard, a wildfire, a tornado—there exists the possibility of destruction, as well as the opportunity for change.

So when an abundance of childhood energy earns you the nickname “The Hurricane,” you can try to suppress that force, or you can channel it for good.

“Maybe I had more energy than people around me knew how to hold. I often felt like my energy was used as a weapon against me, like, ‘hey, calm down, sit down,’ but I don’t see it as a negative thing anymore,” Monica, a 2019 GATHER Fellow, said. “It was just a lack of creativity on other people’s part.”

There is no shortage of creativity in the ways that Monica is using her energy to make change today. As a founder of the nonprofit group Activate Labs, she is essentially using every tool she knows to shift power.

Whereas much of the work done around humanitarian aid or international development focuses on things like food, clothing, jobs, and shelter, Monica’s interests lie in addressing the needs that can’t be seen or touched.

What that looks like in person can vary, but it typically means showing up—always by invitation of local people or organizations—to the frontline of a community impacted by violence, trauma, or conflict. There, the process is guided by design thinking to develop a peacebuilding process that puts the people who would be benefiting from a program or service at the heart of creating and implementing the solution. In short, they’re focused on helping communities take back power over their shared futures.

“Having agency is just as important as giving them technical skills like building capacity. All of that is fine, but the confidence of knowing that you have the power to solve your own problems—to have that control of your world, that vision of your own future—not a lot of people have that, especially people who have experienced violence or oppression,” she said.

“The key to our process is that we consider non-tangible human needs, like belonging or community, nurturing relationships, transcendence, freedom and power in your own world. We believe that when these things are met, then you can actually work in the community to find jobs.”

In some places, this may be in the form of workshops and trainings. Such projects have included transformative leadership training sessions for over a thousand women in Mexico, as well as working with Get Up and Go Colombia—a group that promotes tourism in parts of Colombia that were affected by armed conflict.

For the latter, Activate Labs was contacted to co-design a peace process for a group whose expertise wasn’t in peacebuilding, but that wanted to take a human-first approach to addressing unemployment, a problem that is shared by all those impacted by the country’s civil war. The workshop began by bringing together 45 ex-combatants, as well as those who had trouble finding work because they had been displaced, injured, or in some way affected by violence, and worked toward giving participants the ability to name the problems in their community, and decide what peace tourism and working together could look like.

“There are a lot of solutions to unemployment, but this is a chance to create something together from the beginning—to seek buy in early on and build community,” she said. “People are able to define their own problems and lead their own change, and for peace that makes the most difference because it’s all about shifting power.”

SPACE FOR PEACE

Before peace design takes place, it’s often preceded by another of Activate Lab’s specialities: a peace activation, a peacebuilding response to crisis, violent conflict, or social disruption where the focus is placed on the needs that can’t be seen or touched.

In the past year Activate has led over 20 such peace activations, where they literally take up public, politicized space—such as public plaza in Mexico City, or near one of the largest and most infamous migrant detention centers in Texas—and infuse it with a festival-like atmosphere complete with activities such as karaoke, dancing, face painting, and communal art projects. Some of these locations are places where even the most basic human needs are rarely met, much less the intangible ones.

“In the same way that violence and policies that cause pain aren’t accidents—they’re engineered—we can design peace and bring what’s valuable and important into a public space through a creative and arts-based message,” she said.

She spoke of an event a few months ago, just around the time when the world was learning of the deplorable conditions in the U.S.’s migrant detention centers, when Activate Labs organized a peace activation outside one such detention center in McAllen, Texas. A young boy, maybe 5 or 6 years old, whom she said was among the children who had been separated from their families at the border, stood in line to get pizza at peace activation.

“So the kid finally got his pizza, I’m standing by the banner we brought for an art project, and he literally looks up at it and says ‘whoa.’ He hands me the pizza and just starts coloring,” Monica recalled. “The idea that self expression is not a powerful human need is just foolishness. Creative expression and the chance to see our problems from a different place—that’s something we need, and when we don’t have it, it’s more precious than food.”

AN EARLY CALL TO ACTION

Whereas many of Monica’s friends growing up decorated their walls with pictures of teen dreamboats ripped from the pages of TigerBeat magazine, Monica’s were adorned with pictures of orphans and starving children from the pages of National Geographic.

“I have always known my calling, even when I was 12 years old,” she said. “I didn’t have all the tools for understanding, but I wanted a place for these kids and I wanted to think about them.”

The youngest of 11 children, her family emigrated to Southern California when she was 5, having left their home in Communist Romania where they faced religious persecution. Growing up, she said her father modeled what it meant to live an empathetic life—she vividly remembers one occasion of him serving a fancy meal to roofers who were working on their house—and she said short-term service trips with her church gave her the chance to gain a sort of perspective that many 12-year-olds don’t have the opportunity to experience.

Today, Monica is trying to make the work she does a normative experience for her own two children; she said that her daughter, who is 9, has come to border towns to visit refugees with her many times in her short life.

“She’s been a part of people’s healing because she’s a cute girl and she’s funny, but she ‘gets the memo’ that these are humans,” Monica said. “It’s creating a culture of treating people differently, and it’s very intentional.”

Her work frequently keeps her on the go. She gave this interview during a break at a conference in Cancun, Mexico, and a few days later would be leaving for another in Kenya. She currently has projects running in Central and South America, and over the summer, Monica, her kids and her husband—whom she credits with making possible the global nature of her work—recently left Southern California for Washington, D.C. to be closer to a greater concentration of peacebuilding organizations.

She believes Activate Labs is at a critical juncture—its services are in demand and people are eager to join in on its efforts—but as with many grassroots organizations, how to take the group to the next level isn’t so clear. This is a large part of what brought her to GATHER.

“You can feel it—we need to grow because this kind of empathy and centering around people who are impacted is needed in the world. I know more people want to be a part of it and I need to figure out a way to grow for that reason,” she said. “What GATHER gave me is the inertia to think bigger.”

Among her big concerns is keeping in line with their values as they grow. She spoke of a recent incident where she was contracted to do consulting for a government peacebuilding organization, but the arrangement fell through because of their work with migrant caravans and fears that she might be too liberal of a partner while the Trump administration is in the White House.

And while she pondered whether she should erase all of her social media and references to ending the separation of migrant families, she received wise counsel from a friend:

“He said, ‘You probably won’t get business relationships you want because of who you are, but you’ll get the relationships and opportunities that you need because of who you are,’” she recalled. “That gave me solace.”

Perception is at the heart of so much of the work Monica does, and core to that is taking what could be seen as a hindrance—whether it’s pain of the past, anxiety, or being a hurricane of energy—and channeling it toward the good. When asked what keeps her up at night, she pushed back against the idea that such a level of anxiety was normal or okay, and shifted it to what she saw as a more valid question.

“The real question is what keeps me going, and I’m passionate about shifting power and getting to a place where we can see each other, and how we work in this world is kind and compassionate, and giving and open,” she said. “Anxiety is useless toward the good; it takes on a velocity-filled form and becomes a force of nature. My passion for peace is a force of nature that someone will have to deal with.”

This series highlights our 2019 GATHER Fellows. To learn more about the inspiring social change that Monica and our other Fellows are working towards, check out #FollowtheFellows on Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram.

As a very small child, no older than 6, Divya says she remembered seeing children begging in the street while visiting family in India. Having only lived in a Midwestern U.S. suburb at the time, her young mind couldn’t make sense of it: “Why are the children so dirty? Where are their parents? Why are they not in school? Why isn’t everyone freaking out?”

“I was told to stay away from them,” she recalled during a phone call from her current home in Baltimore last month. “But I was like, why is it OK that I have what I have, and they have nothing? And why is no one bothered by it?”

From an early age, Divya, a 2019 GATHER Fellow, has been drawn to the people, places, and systems that are, by and large, often overlooked, and she’s long had a knack for seeing when things didn’t quite add up.

She’s so good at unearthing logical flaws, in fact, that among her 2019 GATHER cohort her name became synonymous with searching for the truth. (For example, when the group visited Swedish parliament, she “Divya’d” several policymakers into reluctantly admitting that Sweden sells weapons to Saudi Arabia.)

“Yeah, I guess I ask a lot of questions when things don’t seem to make sense,” she said with a laugh. “When I feel like there are gaps in what people are saying or there seems to be a logical break, I want to know where that’s coming from. I like to fill in that gap.”

Today she’s channeling her inquisitiveness—and her compassion—toward helping some of the most vulnerable populations in countries around the world.

In the midst of pursuing a MD/PhD at John Hopkins School of Public Health and Dartmouth’s Geisel School of Medicine, she’s working as a GATHER Fellow to change the narrative around the practitioners and recipients of humanitarian aid—particularly in regards to male unaccompanied refugee minors.

She’s had an opportunity to see firsthand the struggles this group faces, beginning in the summer of 2016 when she volunteered as a translator with an organization aiding refugees in Greece. In multiple visits over the last three years, she’s noticed a level of friction between refugee youths and NGOs that has led to a system of fragmented services. The conflicts over how to help minors has left them with few skills to become independent adults, and even less hope.

“There’s a pretty big disconnect between what an organization is willing to give and thinks is a priority, versus what these young boys actually need and want for a healthy development,” she said. “And if we’re not solving it, they’re going to do it in their own way, which may actually be damaging.”

CAUGHT IN LIMBO

Boys account for over 90 percent of unaccompanied refugee minors, Divya said, many of whom left home before they had the chance to learn skills that would help them flourish at home or in their host countries. Humanitarian aid is often quick to respond to the needs of women and children, but as these unaccompanied boys begin to transition to adulthood, they go from being considered part of the most vulnerable groups (children), to the least vulnerable (single young men). They fall into a sort of limbo, where they may look like young men, but their internal development more closely resembles that of young boys.

In 2016 Divya was one of the first interpreters allowed to enter the minor section of the refugee camp, and because there were so few interpreters who spoke Urdu, she left her phone number with a few of the boys to be a resource.

“Some of the boys, when they lost their accommodations or turned 18 and aged out of receiving services, ended up in very exploitative circumstances, like working labor on a farm where they weren’t allowed to go to the doctor if they got hurt,” she said.

One of those boys did get hurt, and remembering that Divya had some medical training, he called her for advice.

“I was kind of shocked,” she recalled. “The rhetoric around child protection is to protect and take care of these kids who would otherwise be hurt or maybe exploited, and you’re not accomplishing that goal if you’re just letting them out to be exploited the second they turn 18. It was an issue that no one was really addressing at that time, so I decided to do my PhD on it.”

Divya has since returned to the region multiple times for volunteer and thesis-related fieldwork, and what she’s found, as she reported for the Hopkins Bloomberg Public Health Magazine, was that the current systems leave youth ill equipped to deal with the emotional and psychological trauma associated with leaving home and surviving in a new country. Further, they do little to give them the tools, guidance, and support to help them imagine and find ways they might participate in mainstream economies.

She recalled one Afghan minor, for example, who told her that he watches the Greek kids go to school and play football, while he sits in the refugee camp just eating his three meals, day after day, with nothing more to do, nothing to work towards.

“Without parents and teachers and other supportive adults, they often miss out on the ability to build skills that they would need to be independent adults,” Divya said. “As a result, they have no direction, no scaffolding to hold onto as they enter adulthood.”

The solution, she said, wouldn’t involve anything groundbreaking, but it would require NGOs and social service organizations to see and understand unaccompanied minors holistically—the way we understand adolescents in our own communities—rather than through the lens of international treaties and policies.

“They are adolescents, and we know how to raise adolescents,” she said. “But instead, there is a subconscious ‘othering’ of migrants, and we try to create a completely separate model of what we need to do for them. In trying to reinvent this wheel, we miss some critical pieces.”

BREAKING THE SILOS

This fall, Divya will resume medical school (in her program, a doctoral degree is usually obtained between the pre-clinical and clinical years of medical school) in the relatively rural state of New Hampshire. In much of her work, she said she feels as though she is working in silos. Being a part of GATHER, however, has given her the opportunity to “connect with an incredible group of people that sort of helped me think about how I could pull all of the pieces together.”

And she believes it’s through coming together, treating others as we would members of our own family, that refugee youth can have a better chance to thrive, to become contributing members of whatever society eventually becomes their home.

Of all of the things Divya’s done in her brief 28 years, it’s the changing of minds that makes her most proud. She’s seen the way Islamaphobic relatives, acquaintances, and colleagues have changed their thinking towards Muslims after seeing her work in Muslim communities, as well as the way people in conservative communities where she works have changed their opinions toward women.

“When you undo the prejudice, that to me is a huge victory,” she said. “The truth is, every person in the world is more like you than not like you.”

This series highlights our 2019 GATHER Fellows. To learn more about the inspiring social change that Divya and our other Fellows are working towards, check out #FollowtheFellows on Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram.