Empowering and Engaging Young People to Change the World

Jyothi Laxmi Ramakrishnan: Empowering and Engaging Young People to Change the World

by Richard-Michael Manuel, UT-Arlington
Outstanding Student Leaders Digest (published by AIDemocracy.org)
January 29, 2006

People who fall through the cracks often get ignored, but Jyothi Laxmi Ramakrishnan won't turn a blind eye—no matter where they live.

She sees a world where those in need get the help they deserve. That’s the same spirit behind eight charitable goals that 191 countries have set for 2015, called the Millennium Development Goals.

When she saw a way to keep member nations on task, she led the way to make it happen.

It was during a student activism conference that she and other AID members forged the idea of the Sept. 2005 Youth Global Leaders Summit. She became director.

“I wanted to empower and energize a group of young people, so that they felt like they had the power to change their world,” Ramakrishnan said.

She worked on many aspects of the summit, coordinating student workers, helping with recruitment, advertising and logistics, designing the Web site, as well as working on the conference themes.

Ramakrishnan said that approximately 600 people came together for the event.

“I hope participants left empowered by the knowledge that they are part of a larger community of activists working against world poverty and disease,” she said. “And I hope they left knowing that they had the power to change the world.” She credits AID staff for being "incredible" partners in organizing the summit, but this Harvard psychology senior is no stranger to large-scale collaborative projects.

She organized a school-wide fund raiser to help Mozambique’s 2000 flood victims, put together a panel discussion after hate crimes occurred in the shadow of the September 11 terrorist attacks, and participated in culturally-inclusive leadership and artistic roles, while a student at Algonquin Regional High School—not far from her birthplace in Worchester, Mass.

At Harvard, she has continued to take on student-leadership roles, serving as founder and president of the Harvard International Development Organization, which aids charities abroad, organizes events on global poverty awareness, and raises money for international Non-Governmental Organizations.

She has also “served as a volunteer teacher and psychological researcher in Ecuador, Poland and Belgium,” which has put her face-to-face with those in need, including a group of “abandoned” children in Poland.

After graduation she hopes to make a career of helping those in need.

“I would like to combine my interests in psychology and economics to work for the economic empowerment and psychological rehabilitation of marginalized populations,” she said. “It would be interesting to combine research with public policy work.”

Ramakrishnan encourages people to merge their passions with their careers.

“There's a lot of pressure out there, especially for college seniors like me, to define who they are where they're going,” she said. “But I think it's a bit scarier and a lot more fun to ignore all of that, to just cling tightly to and follow my own interests, and to see where it takes me.”