September 08, 2011 at 08:23am
Last Year’s Winners
Last year Carielle Doe from New York and Michael Teoh from Penang became the first winners of Your Big Year. They have so far travelled to Europe, Asia, Australasia, North and South America and are currently in Africa. They have worked on volunteer projects and attended major events. They have spoken to children and families in diverse communities and also to large audiences filled with VIP's.
They have been incredible inaugural ambassadors of Your Big Year and we are truly proud of how they have handled themselves and created positive impact on every step of their journey.
Carielle
I am a freelance Producer who lives in New York City. I was born in the city and lived right outside Manhattan in Bronxville. Then we moved to my parents’ home country Liberia when I was 7. I went to an international school and met children from places I hadn’t even heard of, and that was when I began thinking about different cultures. At the same time, we saw how local people who were less fortunate lived (and poor in Africa is worlds apart from poor in America), so it made me start to worry about the disparity between the haves and the
have-nots.
There was a civil war in Liberia, so we moved again when I was 9, this time to Reston, Virginia. Friends and family who had escaped the conflict regularly told my family of atrocities they had seen and experienced, but the people around me didn't even know where Liberia was, let alone how the civilians there suffered. This was when I first had my desire to spread knowledge and open minds.
I always wanted to take a year to travel, but given my interests, I thought it seemed frivolous. I was an all-American sprinter at South Lakes High School in Reston Virginia then went to the University of Virginia where I continued my career as a runner. I was nationally ranked and Atlantic Coast Conference champion in the 400-meter dash. I still had a lot of improving to do and wanted to put all my efforts into being a better runner, so there was very little time to take a year off for travel.
I trained with my college coach for 2 years after graduation to focus all my efforts on running. After 11 years of running, 2004 was the year I decided to move on.
Liberia had just gotten out of the most recent (and bloody) of battles in the civil war that had begun in 1990 and I wanted to be part of the rebuilding efforts, so in 2004 I worked with the United Nations in Monrovia. I enjoyed my job, but my passion was still storytelling, so in 2005 I finally returned to New York University for a master’s degree in broadcast journalism.
I graduated from New York University with an MA in broadcast journalism and worked at a network for 3 years. I had been very frustrated about the lack of field producing experience I was getting, and one night when I was no longer at the company I saw an ad that talked about Your Big Year. It was perfect timing for me!
Michael
Michael Teoh is a Youth Advocate in Malaysia, consulting government agencies, companies and NGOs on engaging and developing the youth segment. He served as the Head for Outreach Programmes at myHarapan, a youth foundation established to support, facilitate and grow youths and their initiatives to create positive impact to the community.
He was the Co-Founder of Youth Entrepreneurs Malaysia (YEM), a social start-up enterprise involved in the business of building communities and becoming a Youth-centric media platform for entrepreneurship. To date, he has connected with more than 10,000 youths across 100 community and entrepreneurship projects in universities and colleges, since last year while pursuing YEM. He was also awarded the Global Entrepreneurship Week (GEW) – Most Enterprising Youth of the Year Award in 2010.
For his age, he is already a renowned speaker, speaking at major global conferences on the subject of Youth Development both locally and internationally. Michael was the keynote speaker on Youths Changing the World with Technology at the One Young World Global Summit in which he addressed 1,000 young leaders from 192 countries earlier this year, a speech which earned him interviews with CNN, BBC World News and Reuters. During this same year, he was invited to share his thoughts with students at both Oxford and Stanford Universities.
During his own university days, Michael pursued his studies in New Zealand. He was a multiple business competition champion, an achievement in which he takes great pride and was given opportunities to represent New Zealand at many large business conferences, sharing strategies and ideas with business luminaries throughout the world.
Michael was also an active youth leader, taking up influential roles in global youth organizations. His achievements include consulting for financial giant Citigroup in Hong Kong for one of his competitions and winning the spot for the Top 10 Global Best Social Enterprise Business Project in New York for the Students In Free Enterprise (SIFE) World Cup. He was also the only student from New Zealand to be invited to the Harvard Business Conference.
All in all, Michael accounts his many successes as paving the way for him to do greater things for his country and the world. He regularly speaks about youth empowerment, social enterprises and strategies about shifting the mindsets of grassroots movements to affect change for society.
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