What’s a moment that really shaped how you see the world?

Sometimes a key moment can make a world of difference in our lives. Those moments are deeply underrepresented in our conversations relative to the importance they play in our lives. We hope to begin to remedy that below.

Sarah Segal

I was in my friend’s living room. I innocently said, ‘I love animals so much.’ A parent of one of my students said, ‘well if you love animals so much, then why do you eat them?’ That night I went home and started looking up all kinds of articles on animal cruelty. I vowed not to eat animals anymore. Read more>>

Brooke Butterworth

“I remember being in an acting class… So I was in an acting class, and I was a really sheltered kid. I really saw the world in black and white, and an acting teacher said, ‘You can’t play perfect characters. Read more>>

Gilly Kahn

I’ve had a few of these types of moments, but the memory I’ll call on right now is about when I was 19 and working at a school for autistic children over the summer. I’ve been thinking about those kids a lot lately, as I have been reading and listening to many books about autism. Read more>>

Winston Wilson

As a young boy who had moved to New York from Jamaica, I often felt like an outsider, a world away from the vibrant home I vaguely remembered. To cope, I found solace in the colorful pages of comic books and the endless possibilities of my own notebooks. In those pages, I could create worlds where I was the hero, where I always belonged. Read more>>

Caitlin Garcia Ahern

In middle school, my best friend was a Chilean, and had to move from Atlanta back to Chile because her family’s visa expired. After maintaining a friendship at an unbearable distance, I finally had the opportunity to go visit her a few years later. This was my first international trip and shaped me in many ways. Read more>>

ELENA SMITH

Oh my. This one is long. I remember being in elementary, possibly the 5th grade, playing for the school basketball team. This particular day we had a travel away tournament. This tournament was about 2.5 hours from Little Rock in Texarkana. I was enrolled in a private Christian school. Read more>>