STEPPING UP

Taos Wynn 06Ox 09C is a provocateur.

His goal: to incite love, hope, and action.

The youngest of two sons from a military family, Wynn watched his parents—Raymond, a US Army veteran, and Elaine, an educator—open their home to endless streams of kids and neighbors, always willing to help in any way they could.

It came naturally to Wynn to do the same, but it was a trip to Haiti to assist after Hurricane Sandy that propelled him to do more than just acknowledge the greater problems he saw both in developing countries and on the streets of Atlanta.

Beginning with a small contingent of friends who joined him to bring sandwiches to homeless people around Atlanta, Wynn grew that small outreach into the Perfect Love Foundation, the manifestation of his desire to harness the collective power of love to address society’s problems.

“I hold true to the belief that all human progress requires collective action and cannot be limited to one ethnic group, race, or gender,” Wynn says. “It requires activities that foster healthy relationships and an understanding of other people’s cultures and perspectives, so we can better relate to each other and have meaningful conversations that lead to change.”

Three fundamental beliefs underpin all of Wynn’s advocacy efforts—“everyone matters, everyone deserves respect, and everyone has the ability to make a difference”—and his foundation is built on the philosophy that all of these can be accomplished through the fundamental understanding that we are all more alike than we are different.

Since late 2013, the foundation has grown to champion causes including empowering students and citizens as change leaders, promoting unity and understanding among all people, meeting the needs of at-risk groups, and providing relief for communities impacted by disaster. Wynn was named a 2017 Millennial of the Year and received the Georgia Outstanding Citizen Award, one of the state’s highest civilian honors.

“It is our responsibility to instill and share a greater sense of valuing all people,” Wynn says. “For a lot of the challenging or complex issues of the world, we are going to need as much help as we can get. We do not want to dismiss or devalue anyone because everyone has the ability to make a difference and ultimately further social progress.”

Many of the foundation’s volunteers are millennials, and several of their programs focus on preparing children and teenagers to be change leaders for the future. Wynn says teaching respect, understanding, and love for others are concepts he grew up with and Emory reinforced.

“When there is something going on in society at large that we do not agree with, we must accept accountability for those things,” he says. “This isn’t always easy, but it is up to all of us to accept the responsibility of seeing changes through.”

In a way, Hassanatu Blake 05MPH was born for service.

A native of Limbe, Cameroon, she was born to a Cameroonian mother and an American father who was serving in the country as an economist with the Peace Corps. The couple had three of their five children in Cameroon before moving to Baltimore, Maryland, with their young family.

“My father and mother were keen on making sure we knew not only what went on in the United States, but around the world, particularly back home in Cameroon,” Blake says.

Throughout their education, Blake and her twin sister, Hussainatu, were active in volunteer activities and afterward pursued professions that addressed critical issues including access to education, HIV/AIDS prevention, and aiding victims of human tracking. Through these experiences, one common question emerged: “How do we get youth to tackle issues in their own communities?”

The Blakes established Focal Point Global, a nonprofit “focused on connecting youths to have discussions about global issues, then linking them to local organizations to complete projects to address those issues.”

Focal Point Global works to facilitate global connections through technology—including modern social media tools—to link young people with experts and peers around the world who are addressing the issues they face without leaving their city, state, or country.

Since 2010, Focal Point Global has gone on to address high HIV rates in developing countries and a resurgence of HIV incidence in the US. It also has expanded to tackle issues including child trafficking and youth employment and entrepreneurship in disadvantaged areas.

Gulshan Harjee 82M 85MR knows what it is like to have to flee your home for a foreign country, hoping to find stability there.

Three times she had to leave a country where she lived when war or unrest threatened her safety. First her native Tanzania, then Pakistan, then Iran where she attended university.

When the US issued sanctions against the country after the American embassy was seized in 1979, Harjee came to Atlanta where her fiancé was studying law.

“After coming to the United States, I was able to interview at Morehouse, but it was only a two-year medical school and I had to transfer to another medical school to graduate,” Harjee says, adding that her acceptance was facilitated by Louis Sullivan, founding dean and first president of the Morehouse School of Medicine. “He listened to my story and, by giving me that thirty minutes of his busy day, he totally changed my life.”

After finishing the program at Morehouse, and with a recommendation from Sullivan, she was accepted to Emory School of Medicine.

After completing her training, she remained in Decatur, practicing internal medicine and doing community work. In 2015, her years of community involvement led her to help found the Clarkston Community Health Center—a comprehensive, free clinic that provides medical, dental, and mental health care to indigent, uninsured, and underinsured patients—with her colleagues, Atlanta pharmacist and Emory parent Saeed Raees and Emory cardiologist Arshed Quyyumi, a professor of medicine and director of Emory’s Clinical Cardiovascular Research Institute.

The center serves impoverished patients without health insurance, about 80 percent of them refugees and immigrants.

“If you sat down and talked to the families of patients who come to the Clarkston Community Health Center, you would wonder how these people make it, how do they pay bills and buy food?” says Harjee.

Care is provided by physicians and other medical practitioners from Atlanta and the surrounding areas who donate their time and services to the clinic. Through the years, Harjee’s life has been marred by tragedy and challenges, but her dedication to her community has never wavered.

“I came here with nothing, and when I think about where I grew up and what I went through compared to what I am able to do today, I feel I need to give back,” she says.

For a while, as a student at Harvard Law School, James O’Neal 77Ox 79C felt adrift, disconnected from the rudder he had felt steering him all of his life.

“Growing up in the sixties and seventies, I saw the law as a tool of change and I wanted to pursue a career where I would be informing, helping, and advocating for people,” he says.

But when he saw his classmates taking high-paying private-sector jobs, he began to question his focus.

The moment of decision came during his third year of law school, when he applied for and was awarded the Public Interest Law Fellowship, funded by members of the class of 1982 to support one classmate to do something new and different in the field of public interest law.

O’Neal partnered with a youth guidance center in Harlem to experiment with his idea of combining law and education to affect the career aspirations of urban youth positively.

During the year, he taught elementary and high school students, as well as those in a program for first-time offenders. In each setting, he had experiences that showed he could make a difference.

“They equated the legal system with an oppressive system based on the encounters they’d had with police,” he says. O’Neal fashioned his classroom into a courtroom, allowing students to serve as lawyers and judges. It led to a slow change in their perceptions.

Realizing he was exactly where he needed to be, O’Neal incorporated Legal Outreach as an educational nonprofit that celebrated its thirty-fifth anniversary this year. Its partners include seven law schools, forty law firms, judges, and more than two hundred attorneys.

As of 2018, 731 students have completed College Bound, the organization’s comprehensive, four-year program designed to equip students from underserved communities with the academic tools they need to succeed. Of those, 99.3 percent have attended college and more than 75 percent of graduates have matriculated to top-ranked colleges and universities including Harvard, Yale, Columbia, Swarthmore, Cornell, NYU, Williams, Wesleyan, and more.

“We seek to provide kids with hope, first and foremost,” O’Neal says. “We want to provide them with a clear vision of what they can achieve.”

“Knowledge is everywhere right now,” says Munir Meghjani 08Ox 10C. “The internet revolutionized that. Google put it all right at your fingertips.”

However, the test for present and future generations is not simply acquiring knowledge, but developing the ability to deploy research, discoveries, works, and breakthroughs in the service of what is good—to enrich, change, and save lives.

This is what drives Meghjani, a commercial and investment real estate broker and entrepreneur in Atlanta who believes his Emory education allowed—perhaps even required—him to pursue his calling for philanthropy, volunteerism, and altruism.

Meghjani is cofounder and executive director of H.O.P.E. (Helping Organizations & People Everywhere), an Atlanta-based nonprofit that connects organizations and charities worldwide with young adults who have the skills and desire to create sustainable solutions to fundamental societal problems. The issues range from global poverty to rights and empowerment for women and girls in developing countries.

He also played a critical role in the start of Activist Recruiting Organizing & Mentoring in Atlanta—a group created as a “gateway” for mobilizing interested citizens on social justice initiatives through networking, training, and mentorship with social justice groups around Atlanta.

“What we need to understand is that, as a world, there is only a limit to how high any of us can go when others are still down,” Meghjani says.

When people lack access to knowledge, they lack access to power and those with knowledge must share it.

“It’s only when you accept the fact that you’re a global citizen, that you realize your actions have a butterfly effect no matter where you are,” he says. “You may not see it today, but you’ll feel the impact tomorrow.”

Gabriel Wardell contributed to this story.