BY grace akosua williams

My journey as a social entrepreneur began when I launched my first single-woman protest in a rubbish container in the parking lot of my school.

For the American readers, rubbish = garbage.

During my school lunch break, I noticed staff throwing books in a large rubbish container. I was incensed and thought, "How could this happen at school?" So I rolled up the sleeves of my woolen jumper and climbed into the rubbish container. Step by step, I removed every book earmarked for landfill and put it on the grass. Emptying out the rubbish container filled with books was exhausting, but it had to be done. I was halfway there when the school staff approached me and asked, "Grace, what are you doing?" My response was, "Isn't it obvious?"

Things started to get tense, but the staff knew the only way to stop me was to remove me from the rubbish container, and no one would take that risk. My friend walked by, noticing the commotion and all the scattered books. He saw what I was doing and joined me in the container.

My protest was for a simple cause: education is a human right, and children in African countries didn't have school books; we shouldn't be wasting books that other children could use.

Looking back on that moment, I realized I had received the equation for successful entrepreneurship: If you do something you truly believe in for long enough, eventually, people will come along and support you to transform the world.

BORN IN TASMANIA

I was born in Tasmania, an island off the mainland of Australia. Most people don't know where to find Tasmania. In my conversations with Americans, they often confuse Tasmania with Tanzania in Africa. Found off the coast of Australia, Tasmania is an island in the southernmost part of the world, home to about half a million people dispersed across regional and rural towns.

As a child, my instincts told me to stand up for my values. I believe this ultimately led me down a path toward social innovation and impact. In what can feel like an isolating experience, living in Tasmania, and a challenging place to innovate and lead change as a young black woman, I’m glad I learned the value of my voice early in life.

LEADING A PURPOSED LIFE

Since 2014, I've worked with refugee and migrant communities in Tasmania as a community organizer and advocate. This has allowed me to understand the depth of the challenges and barriers preventing people from marginalized communities from reaching their potential. In 2019, inspired by this work, I founded Citizen Tasmania. We are a cultural organization designed to build the leadership capacity of people from our communities to address human rights issues and shift from a state of survival to thriving.

I developed a new model for refugee and migrant resettlement that has received support from New York-based social innovation experts Echoing Green. My model prioritizes thriving communities with a holistic approach to successful refugee resettlement. Through an inclusive and culturally informed framework, Citizen Tasmania helps marginalized communities see their value and train them to use their collective power effectively through workshops focusing on advocacy skills, public speaking, and understanding of political systems.

Despite winning two human rights awards in Tasmania, I only realized the impact I was having once I was awarded an Echoing Green Global Fellowship in 2022. Since 1987, Echoing Green has worked with some of the world's best and brightest social innovators. As a fellow, I joined a community that included former U.S. First Lady Michelle Obama (1991), political commentator Van Jone (1994), and the organization's president, Cheryl L. Dorsey (1992). Connecting with a global community of transformational leaders through Echoing Green has helped me to understand the revolutionary nature of my work here in Tasmania.

GLOBAL CONNECTIONS

Being connected to a global community of BIPOC social entrepreneurs after working from a place of isolation has helped me to own my brilliance in ways that felt impossible until I began to see the work of other outstanding black social entrepreneurs. Feeling like the lone creative social entrepreneur in my community, I did the job of pioneering social innovation without the language to describe what I was doing or contextualize it within a global framework. Naturally, I felt isolated and incompetent and frequently felt like a failure when my approach was ignored and dismissed as naive.

Learning about the global challenges facing our communities and witnessing the selfless work of activists and entrepreneurs leading the way to create change fuels me with the passion for continuing my work with marginalized communities and refugees back home.