After completing her Youth 4 African Wildlife Internship in 2014, Lianna Nixon returned back to Boulder, Colorado to continue her studies at University of Colorado’s Classics department. Since then, Lianna has been greatly involved with educating her community on wildlife issues that vary on an international scale. She organized the Global March For Elephants And Rhinos in Boulder on October 4th 2014. She has also lectured in multiple university classes on her experiences from the Y4AW internship. Most recently, Lianna has been to Antarctica, and teamed up with the Young Explorers program onboard Abercrombie and Kent’s cruise, Le Boreal. There, she gave a lecture on African wildlife crime, worked with the kids onboard the cruise, and created a short film “Antarctica, In The Eyes Of A Child,” on Antarctic conservation through a child’s perspective.
As a side project aside from her studies she is in the process of publishing a children’s book about a rhino’s journey for a missing horn. She is also writing a thesis on Wildlife Conservation throughout Classical Antiquity. She plans to analyze the Ancients’ view on their role in the ecosystem, and how their environmental actions impacted their society and our lives today. Lianna hopes that in writing this thesis, she will be able demonstrate that humans have always impacted the environment whether for bad or good. Y4AW has forever changed her life; she left South Africa confident and covetous to make a change. This internship made her realize that the greatest impact she could make was to follow her passions and share them with others. Lianna hopes to pursue education after completing her Master’s degree, and inspire the minds of our earth’s future caretakers. After all, we all possess passion to change the world.
“Never believe that a few caring people can’t change the world. For, indeed, that’s all who ever have.”
–Margaret Mead.
Through Lianna and other Y4AW interns our vision of creating lifelong conservation ambassadors and proponents of change is being realised.
Watch this space for more updates on our former interns.