by Giulliana Micheletto
At only 24 years old, environmentalist Divya Dey has made some significant impacts and is driven by a deep personal connection.
Her passion for all environmental things began when she was just a child. Coming from a Bangladeshi background and raised in Canada, she was moved by stories of South Asia’s environmental, financial, and developmental issues, which fuelled her commitment to finding solutions and creating better communities.
Through her involvement in these activities, Dey found the Free the Children organization, an experience she describes as life changing.
“It really teaches you on how to engage with other people and on how to talk to other people (…) I saw my own identity playing a role in the kind of work they did.”
Dey was the recipient of the Future Aces scholarship in 2018, and in that same year she decided to dive deeper into the “environmental issues” pool. She started her journey at the University of Toronto Scarborough pursuing a degree in Environmental Science, minoring in French and specializing in International Development Studies. And although a significant part of her university experience was online, due to the COVID pandemic, she didn’t let that faze her.
In fact, she saw it as an opportunity to do more. During that time, Dey participated in more than 40 clubs including the Indian Students Association and the Global Development Studies, represented and advocated for her department’s needs during the pandemic to the Students Union, ran for student council and got involved with athletics, which led her to lead weekly online community events to foster community and help students deal with loneliness.
One of those events was focused on women empowerment and staying active at home, an experience that served as a driver to her involvement in leading her athletics’ outdoor recreation group, once the COVID restrictions were lifted.
“ …It’s staying physically active in the outdoors and using that as a way to stay motivated and engage with the climate.” Because of her involvement with the community, Dey won the University of Toronto Leadership Award.
After graduating, Dey got involved with several youth groups, one of those being Starfish Canada where she was one of the 75 environmentalists chosen to be part of a leadership summit across Canada. That experience and her love for outdoor recreation, inspired her to bring BIWOC (Black, Indigenous and Women of Colour) and the youth together to learn and engage in the environment.
After winning ten thousand dollars in funding, she took that project off of the paper and launched her own excursion focused on bringing those groups into nature.
When asked about her future plans, Dey mentioned the knowledge she has gathered from having worked in more than 30 different spaces, all of which she describes as looking at the world’s current problems from “different lenses.” All those experiences make her even more hungry for change.
“I’m taking everything that I have learnt about community and sustainability and development and bringing it into decision-making (…) It’s time that we collaborative understand the different lenses, bring them together and understand how we can change the systems that we have.”
Divya Dey is currently working on getting her masters in Sustainability Management from the University of Toronto as she simultaneously plans on launching her second excursion.
Looking back to her grade twelve self, all she wishes is that she could tell that little girl to be more confident.
“I would tell myself to be confident to shine in places you feel discomfort, because that’s where you will learn the most.”