Growing up, I was lucky enough to travel a lot. And travel does something to you – it makes inequality impossible to ignore. I noticed it early: the gap between the world I came from and what I saw elsewhere. A close friend's father was an ICRC delegate, and his stories stayed with me. After school, I volunteered with the Austrian Red Cross and spent time in Ecuador, working in a hospital. Those experiences compounded. At some point they stopped being experiences and became a direction. I knew I wanted to dedicate my work – and my life – to this.

What I do with CYH is not frontline humanitarian work – I want to be clear about that. We're building a community, a bridge between the sector and the next generation. The discipline I've had to cultivate is resilience in the face of resistance: being told it won't work, falling down, getting up, moving forward anyway. That refusal to stop when things get hard is probably the quality I've had to build most consciously.

The public often sees slowness as inefficiency. In reality, it is often responsibility. Organizations like the ICRC operate in extremely complex environments – every decision involves legal considerations, security risks, political sensitivities, and the safety of staff and affected populations. Acting too fast, without neutrality or trust, can close doors for years. Access is negotiated, not assumed. Trust is built over time. And once lost, it is almost impossible to regain. What looks slow from the outside is often what makes the work possible at all.

Largely, yes. And it's one of the most uncomfortable truths in this sector. Funding follows visibility. When a crisis drops from the front page (becomes a “forgotten crisis”), so does the funding. The Rohingya crisis is a clear example – Yasmin Ullah, one of our YHS panelists, has spent years trying to keep international attention on a situation the world decided was "over." It isn't. We just stopped looking. That says everything about how we value time, attention, and whose suffering we consider urgent.

Chapter One: Watching. Growing up adjacent to powerful institutions, understanding systems from the outside, learning how decisions are made without yet being in the room.

Chapter Two: Entry. Volunteering with the Red Cross, Ecuador, university, the ICRC traineeship. Learning that I had something to contribute – but also that the sector had walls. That young women were welcomed as volunteers, not as leaders.

Chapter Three: Building. Founding CYH. Understanding that if I wanted the room to exist, I would have to build it myself.

Chapter Four: Sustaining. This is where I am now. The harder work of holding something alive – financially, organizationally, personally – under real pressure, with real stakes.

The theme of our last summit was "The Future of Humanitarianism" – and that question is exactly where this tension lives. We're not trying to replace or disrupt existing systems. We're adding a layer. But we're also pushing on the definition itself: where does humanitarianism start? We believe it starts long before a crisis – in how you lead a team, how a company makes decisions, how a community treats its most vulnerable members.

At CYH, we call this Skill Activation. Every person already has skills, knowledge, and a sphere of influence. A journalist who refuses to dehumanize. A lawyer who brings humanitarian reasoning into corporate decisions. A teacher who models dignity in how she handles conflict. An engineer who asks who his work affects. These are all forms of humanitarian action – and none of them require becoming an aid worker. That's a different kind of urgency. Less loud, but potentially more lasting.

That going into the field is one of the hardest personal decisions a person can make. The sacrifice is real – distance from family, instability, the weight of what you witness. I have enormous respect for people who make that choice. I made a different one: to work from here, to build something that brings these values into peaceful places. That is its own form of commitment.

It creates a bias toward visible action. Programs that are easy to photograph, events that generate reports, outputs that look good in donor presentations. The invisible work – building trust, understanding root causes, maintaining neutrality under pressure – gets systematically underfunded because it doesn't make a good slide.

Short-term political thinking at the expense of long-term human consequences.

If humanitarian values were truly guiding decisions, governments would have to stop treating people as cases, flows, or risks, and start seeing them as human beings with dignity. That shift sounds simple, but it would fundamentally change priorities.

Sometimes it's overwhelming. But that feeling is also part of what drives me – it's a reminder of why this work matters, and why it's worth continuing. I've learned to act where I can, advocate for what I believe, and not confuse cynicism with realism. CYH itself is an answer to that tension – we can't fix the system, but we can change who gets to be part of it, and what values they carry into it. That feels like enough to keep going.

Climate adaptation. Mental health infrastructure in fragile states. Investment in local civil society long before crises hit. Early warning systems that actually trigger early action. And localization – genuinely shifting power and resources to local actors who understand their contexts, who are there before any international organization arrives, and long after they leave.

I believe, the erosion of the values that underpin our societies. Humanitarianism is not just a sector – it is a foundation. The principles that protect human dignity, that make international cooperation possible, that hold states accountable – these are being quietly hollowed out. Not with a single dramatic moment, but through accumulated indifference, political convenience, and the normalization of what would once have been unacceptable. That slow erosion is the most serious risk we are not taking seriously enough.

One book – three actually: Henry Dunant's A Memory of Solferino, the founding text of the humanitarian movement, a reminder that it all started with one person who refused to look away. And The Midnight Library by Matt Haig, because it asks the question every driven person eventually has to sit with: what does a life well-lived actually look like? Atomic Habits by James Clear, because it changed how I think about the relationship between small actions and lasting change.

One piece of music: "He Lives in You" from The Lion King. It carries something real about legacy – about what we inherit and what we pass forward. That feels very connected to why I do this work.

One artwork: Girl with Balloon by Banksy. Hope that is always slightly out of reach – but worth reaching for.

One technology: not sure.

Jay Shetty, for translating complex emotional and ethical questions into something accessible and actionable. Tom Fletcher, for his clarity on humanitarian action and what the future of this sector must look like. And Emma Watson – for showing what it means to use a platform with both intention and humility.

For me personally, it comes back to what CYH is built on: the belief that you don't have to wait for a crisis to act on humanitarian values. Every person already has a sphere of influence – in their work, their decisions, the way they treat others. Acting earlier means activating that sphere now, not when things fall apart.

At CYH, we talk about Skill Activation: the idea that a journalist, an engineer, a teacher, a manager – each of them can contribute to a more humane world from exactly where they already stand. We don't ask people to donate or protest or leave their careers. We ask them to look at what they already do, and find where humanitarian values can live inside it. That is acting earlier. Not waiting until the next disaster. Starting now, with what you have.