Whitman alum Simren Rai ’21, an award-winning environmental justice activist, artist, and the founder/executive director of Revolutionary Grains, will speak on the power of cultivating a boundless imagination. Her talk draws from her own experiences starting Revolutionary Grains: a food justice NGO, with the mission of challenging the industrial grain complex and weaving a community-centered, ancestrally-rooted grain supply chain.

At a liberal arts college like Whitman, we become adept at identifying, writing about, and researching environmental and social injustice. How do we transform this academic proficiency into real world change? What tools can we access when we are called to grow leadership from budding passion? How do we act on our creative intuition when the world around us can feel so structured? Through the combined praxes of Neuroscience, Anthropology, Environmental Studies, Art, and Solidarity Economics, Simren will dare you to re-imagine your path to be a change-maker the world so deeply needs. While she unpacks the confluence of her own identities, heritage, time at Whitman, and post-graduate journey, her path is not a prescription. Resilience roots from diversity, and therefore each in the audience must imagine how their own story can be a tool for change. We will strategize together how to dream in this way, and then find the courage to act upon those dreams.

Sponsored by the George Castile Fellowship and the Anthropology Department