“When I think back to when I was a teenager I ws someone who cared alot. Talked big talk, but really didn’t follow through. It was all talk and no action. I knew that I cared vaguely about the world but hadn’t really crystalised that into a set of clear, strong principles that I knew that I could use to guide my decision making. But thank god I found OzGREEN!

Over the course of an incredibly transformative workshop and weekend, I not only clarified my values and decided what I really wanted to stand for as a human, but also, really committed myself, not just to the talk, but to the action. 

And it’s been a wild ride since then! 

The immediate aftermath of that workshop, the thing that was concerning me most was apathy. Civic engagement. It really concerned me how few young people were getting involved in making the world a better place. 

So I organised a forum with a friend which brought together 100 young people in my local area. We tried to equip them with skills, resources, connect them to local organisations, and that was the start in many ways of my activism, organising and civic leadership journey. 

Over the following years I started working for an incredible youth movement organisation called Oaktree, running campaigns to fight extreme poverty. I helped to found the Austraian Youth Climate Coalition, helped to found a campaign called “Live Below the Line '' that encouraged people to live under the extreme poverty line for a few days to understand and challenge themselves and raise awareness. That campaign has gone on to raise more than $20 million dollars over the following ten years. 

All through that time, I kept grappling with this question of how do we unlock the creativity, the leadership, the passion, of people to make their communities better? And how do we do that at scale? How do we do that in a way that meets the moment of the challenges the world is facing? 

That led me in 2011, to join this very small technology start-up called change.org. It had a mission of empowering people to create the change they want to see, and over the following decade, I have helped grow change.org into more than a dozen countries - opened up our offices across Asia, Latin America, Europe. Helped try and reinvent a business model that would allow us to take social impact technology to scale. Grew the platform to have more than 400 million registered users. More than 70 million people use the site every month now. And a few years ago, I took over as CEO. 

Right now, I’m focused on how we can use the incredible resources, technology, and the reach of the change.org platform to really empower a new generation of civic and movement leaders with the money they need, with the resources and support they need, to not just make big impact, but to do that sustainably. To do that in a way which really allows for the type of durable, long-term powerful innovative change making that we need to address the challenges that the world is facing today. 

I started out this journey in a rural part of Australia. And now I live in New York and have been here for eight years and am regularly able to spend time with some of the most incredible change makers and play some small role in helping accelerate their work. 
And all of it started with that very simple weekend away that helped transform this very general interest - general passion - into something that was so much clearer.

So much more meangingful.

And that I had so much more commitment to. 

It’s still what guides me today.”