{"id":4339,"date":"2019-05-30T12:26:17","date_gmt":"2019-05-30T16:26:17","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/emu.edu\/now\/crossroads\/?p=4339"},"modified":"2019-12-18T13:18:06","modified_gmt":"2019-12-18T18:18:06","slug":"young-alum-of-the-year-liza-heavener","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/emu.edu\/now\/crossroads\/2019\/05\/30\/young-alum-of-the-year-liza-heavener\/","title":{"rendered":"Young Alum of the Year: Liza Heavener"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"\"Eastern Mennonite University\u2019s 2019 Young Alum of the Year Liza Heavener ’07<\/strong> says she is \u201cnot afraid to jump into unchartered territory.\u201d<\/p>\n

Her passion for changemaking has taken her from Souderton, Pennsylvania, to EMU to Capitol Hill to remote Borneo to her current position as the chief operating officer for the New York City-based community of next-gen philanthropists, impact investors and social entrepreneurs: NEXUS Global.<\/p>\n

Its 5,000-plus members, which include young people from over 70 countries and from some of the world\u2019s most influential and wealthy families, have \u201ca proven track record of knowing how to move the needle on the most pressing issues of our generation such as climate change, human trafficking, animal welfare and refugees and countless other topics,\u201d Heavener said.<\/p>\n

\u201cI don\u2019t believe that all the money in the world can change the world, and I don\u2019t always believe the best ideas are enough to change the world,\u201d she said. \u201cBut if you bring those two things together with the right passions, synergies and collaboration, then we\u2019re able to accelerate solutions that are going to help the planet and hurry history in the right direction.\u201d<\/p>\n

EMU was \u201ca safe space\u201d for Heavener, with professors and staff willing to be her sounding boards as she earned a liberal arts degree with courses in pre-law, music, global studies, political science and business. She played field hockey, went on a Middle East cross-cultural, and spent two terms at the Washington Community Scholars\u2019 Center, where one of her two internships was in the Senate Majority Leader\u2019s office and the other later employed her.<\/p>\n

Those real-life experiences expanded her identity as a \u201ccitizen of the world\u201d who is geared for creating \u201clasting change and impact,\u201d she said, and she has since worked to build common ground in Congress, managed a campaign that \u201cfailed spectacularly,\u201d worked for an international consulting firm \u2013 and, on a whim, applied (and was chosen) to star in a documentary and television series about fighting illegal deforestation and releasing endangered orangutans in Borneo.<\/p>\n

At her first NEXUS Global Summit at the United Nations in 2012, though, Heavener thought, \u201cI\u2019m home. These are my people.\u201d<\/p>\n

Now married for five years to a man she first met in a crowded Metro station and the mother of a toddler, Heavener said that following her intuition has rarely led her astray.<\/p>\n

\u201cEveryone has their own passion, and their definition of impact will be different,\u201d she said \u2013 \u201cbut strive to do whatever you can to make the world a little bit better than it was yesterday.\u201d<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Eastern Mennonite University\u2019s 2019 Young Alum of the Year Liza Heavener ’07 says she is \u201cnot afraid to jump into unchartered territory.\u201d Her passion for changemaking has taken her from Souderton, Pennsylvania, to EMU to Capitol Hill to remote Borneo to her current position as the chief operating officer for the New York City-based community […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":242,"featured_media":4342,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[6,947],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-4339","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-magazine","category-springsummer-2019","issues-current-issue","issues-spring-summer-2019"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/emu.edu\/now\/crossroads\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4339","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/emu.edu\/now\/crossroads\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/emu.edu\/now\/crossroads\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/emu.edu\/now\/crossroads\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/242"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/emu.edu\/now\/crossroads\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=4339"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/emu.edu\/now\/crossroads\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4339\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":4346,"href":"https:\/\/emu.edu\/now\/crossroads\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4339\/revisions\/4346"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/emu.edu\/now\/crossroads\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/4342"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/emu.edu\/now\/crossroads\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=4339"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/emu.edu\/now\/crossroads\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=4339"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/emu.edu\/now\/crossroads\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=4339"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}