Greening Hollywood: Green Leadership, ATHGO International and the U.N.

ATHGO International recently gathered 100 students and young professionals together for a 4-day Forum held, this time, at UCLA (past ATHGO International Forums have been held at the U.N., the World Bank and in Geneva), which was sponsored by Boeing, Milbank, UCLA Sustainability and Green Conversion Systems.

ATHGO International is a nonprofit that cooperates with the U.N., using the U.N.'s Millennium Development Goals as guidelines. Its focus is on cultivating leaders within the youth demographic of 18-32 year olds. These youth are culled from an international pool of exceptional individuals.

The goal of the Forum is for students to come up with an actionable business venture that utilizes Clean Technology and drives environmental sustainability and economic development. The teams are evaluated on the final day by representatives from the professional community. As a result, participants this time developed eight innovative social venture designs.

Dr. Armen Orujyan, Founder and Chairman, ATHGO International Photo Courtesy Robert Kuzon

ATHGO's Founder and Chairman, Dr. Armen Orujyan, speaks of the "three i's of ATHGO: Innovation, Incubation and Implementation." He explains that step one is to nurture the students in their innovation in coming up with entrepreneurial business ideas. The next step is incubation of the most commercially viable of those business ideas and the final phase is implementation. For the past 6 years, ATHGO has primarily pursued phase one, innovation, and is now getting set to launch more fully into phases two and three. Coach Bill Walsh of the San Francisco 49ers put it, "More than creating, innovation involves anticipating. It is having a broad base of knowledge on your subject and an ability to see where the end game is headed."

The Keynote Address at the Forum was given by His Excellency Cheick Sidi Diarra, United Nations Under-Secretary-General, Special Adviser on Africa, and High Representative for the Least Developed Countries, Landlocked Developing Countries and Small Island Developing States. H.E. Diarra spoke with Paige Donner for a few minutes at the reception for him hosted by ATHGO and the City Attorney at L.A.'s Tom Bradley Hall.

Video courtesy Katharine Coles

Dr. Armen Orujyan, Founder and Chairman of ATHGO, has a doctorate in Political Science. His doctoral thesis is on U.S. Presidential campaign strategies. He shares here some of his thoughts about ATHGO International, the U.N. and the importance of cultivating youth leaders...

Our demographic is the 18-32 year olds. We have students and young professionals, social entrepreneurs. The average age is about 24, 25 years old. They come from all walks of life. We have students here from Canada, from Europe, from Africa from Latin America - so although we're here at UCLA, we only have one student from UCLA here.

There's a common saying that youth is wasted on young people. I'm not a major believer of that. There's a great energy in young people. There's a great ambition in young people. They're very open to change and they're more conforming and they're more interested in coming together with people from different backgrounds. They're not stuck in a dogma of any nature.

So what we attempt to do here is bring this energy together and give them the skill set on entrepreneurship, with the addition of a social component to it. We have them organize into teams and together come up with great social venture designs for them to launch profitable businesses that would have several impacts. The impacts will be social impact, environmental impact and economic impact.

We saw over the years that if you give them an opportunity, a platform for them to thrive, they will. What's missing is platforms of this nature. You don't find them around. We send them to traditional university systems, they excel, they get to the climax, the peak of it, and then there's a huge drop when it comes to getting into the professional field. So if they reach the maximum in academia, it is definitely not at a maximum on the practical setting. We try to bridge that gap for them to have the business skills along with the educational skills.

We have five current programs. We have programs here at UCLA, we have larger programs that are at the U.N .Headquarters in N.Y., and at the World Bank Headquarters in Washington D.C. We have repeat attendees because our programs are never the same. The thematic area is always different. The umbrella, for example, would still be Climate Change or Information Communication Technologies, but what we're attempting to do with the larger picture is different with every forum.

The U.N.'s interest in ATHGO is that we're not an advocacy group. The only advocacy ATHGO engages in is giving opportunities to young folks for them to thrive in life. But ATHGO itself is not an advocacy group. We focus on skill set development, and skill set development that will affect economic development positively in working with the U.N. on their Millennium Development Goals.

The U.N. is a major supporter of ATHGO because we are working with a particular segment of the population that is not easy to reach. And once you reach them, it is very difficult to know what will get them engaged and really stay with you continuously. Since we exclusively work with the 18-32 year olds, and we work exclusively with them to develop skill sets that will help their overall economic development, it's very interesting for the United Nations.

The fact that we're not an advocacy group helps the other nation-states within the U.N. as well as the World Bank, to embrace our methodology, for them to try to even model some of the things that we're doing within a larger context with their own work. So they've opened the doors to us for the last five or six years and we've been thriving in our relationships. As you saw, we have the Under Secretary of the U.N. here visiting us for the same purpose, the very nature of how we approach these issues with our methodology.

Navneet Singh Narula, of the Points of Light Institute with the U.N.'s H.E. Cheick Sidi Diarra at the ATHGO Forum, Photo Courtesy Robert Kuzon

Other speakers at this Forum included Mr. Tod Arbogast, Director, Sustainable Business at Dell; Mr. Rich Lechner, Vice President, Energy and Environment, IBM; Mr. Navneet Singh Narula, National Director, Points of Light Institute; Dr. Woodrow Clark, Nobel Peace Prize Laureate; and Mr. John Shegerian, President, Electronic Recyclers International, to name only a few.

Dr. Woodrow W. Clark, II, MA3, Ph.D. and Paige Donner, CEO of Greening Hollywood spoke on the Role of Media Panel at ATHGO Forum held at UCLA (Ms. Alegre Ramos not pictured)

The Global Environmental Youth Conference

ATHGO is working with Cynthia Ruiz, the President of the Los Angeles City Public Works, on its Global Environmental Youth Conference. Last year, the city brought 5,000 young people, ages 12-21, together to learn about things they can do to lessen their impact on the environment.

ATHGO Participant, Brad King and others in background, Photo Courtesy Robert Kuzon

ATHGO has been invited by Cynthia Ruiz to lead the initiative globally. What they'll do this year is bring together a large group of young people in five to ten cities worldwide simultaneously to get some knowledge, get some skill sets to come up with some incredible results in their own respective cities. The mission is to come up with a plan that will be actionable on that day. "When you bring in a couple of hundred people, or a couple of thousand people, that energy transforms into some kind of a result. That's what we're planning to do. So it's going to be fun," says Dr. Orujyan.

Comments

[dtengen]

Thank you Paige Donner! As a member of Athgo's board of directors, I was pleased to see Ms. Donner at our LA Forum on environmental sustainability and am now delighted to read her Greening Hollywood column. We've been abusing our environment for too long, and we can no longer delay our efforts to heal the harm we've done. Yet public policy makers and private sector businesses have been slow to act, paralyzed by the ignorant belief that a zero-sum game exists between economic prosperity and environmental sustainability. As government, business, and academic experts clearly showed with real-world examples at the Athgo Forum, however, transitioning to a green economy creates a wealth of opportunities for new businesses and new jobs. Thus, we need more individuals to initiate green enterprises, and we need the public to demand that business and government leaders implement policies to facilitate rather than hinder such ventures. As Athgo's Forum panel on the media (in which Ms. Donner participated) made clear, the media has a crucial role to play in fulfilling these needs. Rather than ignore the issue or perpetuate the false dichotomy of "environment vs. economy" (which still happens far too often), the media can raise awareness and enlighten, inspiring the public to undertake the political and entrepreneurial action that we need. Praise be to Paige Donner, Greening Hollywood, and the Huffington Post for doing the latter by shining the media spotlight on Athgo's efforts to move us toward environmental sustainability.
Sincerely,
Darel Engen.

[EKStickland]

Wow, ATHGO seems like a great idea- I wish I could have been involved in something like this when I was still in school! It's exciting that students have an opportunity to interact with U.N. diplomats in this way. With any luck schools will start promoting this program more and we can see more participants- it seems a shame that only one student from UCLA was there!

[Shekarchian]

Greening Hollywood.­...indeed. Paige Donner serves not only as an inspiration to her colleagues in the entertainment industry, but also as a role model for future generations. What an important organization. It's things like this that give me hope.

[utilityman]

This was a fantastic conference and I am very pleased that I was able to participate. It was also such a pleasure to meet paige Donner. Keep up the great work Paige!

[white068]

Greening Hollywood: Green Leadership, ATHGO International, and the U.N.: I am happy as a student with aspirations to take my education to the Ph.D. level that an organization is finally willing to help students make the most out of their education. Students usually flounder through their academic careers with no real world experience to help them get and keep jobs. This organization has a solution that is both workable, as they have already witnessed, and attainable. The thought of an organization that is willing to not only help the environment but also integrate education and real world experience is wonderful. It will not only promote leadership within the communities that the students come from but will also help to cultivate world leaders. Organizations like this need to be watched with a hopeful eye. United Nations involvement can only help to cultivate these young leaders to be all that they can be. I can only hope that more organizations will be as student and leadership centered as this one.

[GradStudent83]

First, I would like to thank Paige Donner for focusing on such a tremendous organization. This was my first time learning about ATHGO and their dedication to not only enhancing the environment but also enhancing the lives of students. I find their methods for reaching out to 18-32 year old students to be an exceptional way of changing the society in which we live. ATHGO seems dedicated to providing students with marketable skills that will be useful as they go out into the job force. As I have already seen myself, students getting their BA, MA or even PhD do not necessarily have the skills that will make their careers or transition into the job market successful. However, ATHGO is attempting, as Dr. Armen Orujyan pointed out, to bridge the gap between graduate school and the job market by nurturing these students and providing them with useful business and economic skills that are a must in the job force. Additionally, ATHGO is training students for careers in industries (like environmental sustainability) that will be needed to change and prolong the society in which we live. I am very happy that this article was published so that more light can be shed on the advancements ATHGO is making for communities everywhere. I look forward to hearing more about ATHGO's achievements in the future!