Google her “Power of One” TED Talk and you’ll see Saanya's sense of “rise and stride” right away. Donning an ocean blue t-shirt, she brings to surface her message of #stopsucking – a passionate call for saving mother earth by simply refusing a plastic straw. Inspired by Dani Washington, the first African American woman of color to host an American Science show, Saanya navigates her activism through collaboration with several foundations, including the Lonely Whale Foundation and the Plastic Pollution Coalition. A rising freshman at Rice University in the fall, Saanya looks forward to expanding the scope of impact.gravitas to a national (and ultimately international) level. Read on to learn more about ZPotential’s first feature & creative cosmos champion.
Impact.gravitas – how did the name come about? Is there a story behind it, perhaps?
When creating impact.gravitas, I wanted the name of the organization to be something catchy, unique, and something that people would remember. The biggest reason why I founded impact.gravitas was because I wanted to make an impact in the realm of plastic pollution - hence the word “impact” right in the beginning. However, I wanted the impact to be meaningful and for the right reasons. “Gravitas”- meaning dignity, seriousness, or solemnity of manner - is the ethos of the organization. Plastic pollution is a serious global issue and the way in which we approach it is deeply with a strength in character.
The punctuation in between the two words “impact” and “gravitas” symbolizes the urgency of the growing issue. Plastic pollution needs to be stopped. Period.
How has your geographic journey (Singapore, China, USA) uniquely carved your perception on single-use plastics?
As an expat kid, I feel extremely fortunate to have grown up traveling the world at a very young age. My parents took us everywhere, and while I got to get a unique perspective of global culture and heritage, I also got to see people deal with pressing issues first hand. We traveled to many developing countries - India, Cambodia, and Thailand to name a few - where there was not a proper waste management infrastructure and people were living in a cities accumulated with trash, most of which were single-use plastics.
Even living in Singapore, one of the most prosperous countries in the world, opened my eyes to the problem. As a kid, I thought that Singapore’s beaches were obviously swimmable. Wrong. People would tell me that if you swim in the water for too long, your skin would turn purple with all the oil in the water from the cargo ships.
As I grew up, these experiences made me question: shouldn’t it be a human right to live in a clean environment, drink clean water, and breathe clean air? My childhood was a defining factor of my passion for environmental issues.
Impact.gravitas just participated in Plastic free month for July. Is there anything from this
experience that surprised you? Biggest takeaway?
The Impact.Gravitas Plastic Free July challenge was something that I thought of to get youth like myself to get involved in individual action to reduce single-use plastic pollution. To see this challenge start with something that I did individually, and then grow to something that 31 different individuals did from around the globe was mind blowing to me. I never thought that so many people would take on the challenge and post on their Instagram stories everyday to show what they were doing to refuse single-use plastic.
The whole goal for this challenge was to start getting people, especially young people like ourselves, to understand that they can take individual action to turn the tide of plastic pollution. With 340 Instagram stories posted throughout the month of July, I’m sure that we inspired a whole lot of youth!
Greatest challenge in your journey as a plastic-free activist – how do you tackle it?
Throughout this journey, it has been so humbling to see so many people vibe with the work that I am doing and want to, in turn, do their part to help. However, there have been plenty of people, both my age and older, who think that ocean plastic pollution is a joke - something that doesn’t even matter in the grand scheme of things. I have seen my peers demonstrate microaggression towards me and the organization: using plastic straws, water bottles, and bags on purpose to “spite” me, or adults telling me that single-use plastics are such a small part of pollution and that I should be focusing on something more important. These things really took a toll on me, especially in the beginning of my activist journey - it
made me question whether the work I was so passionate about was even meaningful.
I do believe that much of this microaggression spurs from the political climate in this country (like come on, we have a president that doesn’t even believe in climate change), and this is a struggle that me and my friends who are environmental activists share.
However, after some time of being in this environmental realm, talking to mentors, scientists, and youth who resonated so much with my work, I now realize that I am doing the right thing and nobody can tell me otherwise. When you are so public about a cause, people are always going to have something to say. To the people who make fun of my work or tell me it isn’t important, I question them. Tell me the facts, from reliable sources, that say this issue isn’t important? Did you know that you eat microplastic everyday? Do you and your future children want to live past 2050? Yeah, I thought so.
Favorite project you’ve undertaken in the vein of impact.gravitas so far? Why?
It was my junior year in high school. In our school cafeteria, we had trash, recycling, and compost bins, but we noticed that people didn’t really know what to put where. We knew this needed to change we so we painted the trash cans their respective colors and put posters on them to signify what pieces of trash goes in what bin. But there’s a catch.
I was taking AP Statistics at the time and wanted to see whether this can painting and poster thing would really make a difference. So, we decided to do a statistical study that measured the amount of trash that was misput in each bin. What did this mean we had to do? Oh yes, we got down and dirty and sorted through the trash, recycling, and compost bins in our school cafeteria … all in the name of science! And to make it even better, we had to take a before and after measurement, so we did this TWICE! Don’t worry, we had gloves.
Although this wasn’t the most pleasant experience, I was pretty amazed by the response that I got from people in impact.gravitas at the time. Never before have I seen a group of people having so much fun sorting trash! Not only was it the hands on experience that made this my favorite project, but we also saw a significant improvement in disposal behavior!
Overarching goal post-college for impact.gravitas; how do you plan to expand the scope of this organization?
Ever since I got the ball rolling for impact.gravitas in high school, I knew that I wanted to bring it with me to college. In the last couple of months, I brought a fellow Coke Scholar, Emily Javedan, onto the impact.gravitas team as Vice President to help me scale the organization. We are thinking of doing a chapter model with impact.gravitas, starting with one at Rice University and one Johns Hopkins University and then scaling up from there. I think that youth like myself are such a vital part of this cause because we are the future. Getting more high school and college students involved is essential to our
mission.
During college, I want to utilize the resources as much as I can on a university campus to help expand the impact of impact.gravitas. In terms of post-college plans for impact.gravitas, I hope that the organization is still present at the universities that they were started at.
“Movie moment” in your environmental activist experience – can you describe one hallmark
scenario that makes you wake up and go at this mission every day?
I was fifteen years old. In March of 2017, I was asked to speak on a Changemakers panel at SXSW about my work at Dell Technologies and my experience as a young environmental activist. I had never spoken about my environmental work so publicly and to such a large audience before. I was also planning to launch impact.gravitas on that stage, and tell the world what I was tangibly going to do about plastic pollution. It was really exciting for me, but I also had no idea how people were going to react. Like were they going to thing that this fifteen year old was crazy?
At the panel, I talked about my work as a young activist and launched impact.gravitas as planned. It was seeing the audience and the panelists react to what I was saying, for the first time publicly, resonating so much with me and the issue that I was trying to tackle changed me. People believed in me. People believed in my work. After I walked off that stage, I had complete strangers, adults double my age, tell me that I was going to do great things and that I should keep going.
It’s the adults like them, the teens who swipe up on my Instagram stories telling me that I’m the reason they bought a metal straw, and the kids who tell me they want to grow up to be just like me that keep me going. Our earth is in great danger, and it takes all of us to ensure that she doesn’t die.
To learn more, visit: https://www.impactgravitas.org/
Story by Sibani Ram
Comments