Faith Toran G’18

Your early career was environment-focused...

I worked for Unis-Cité, a French organization advancing national youth service, for a while, before finding a role geared towards environmental issues: working for the UN as a Communication for Development Specialist in Guinea, West Africa. It was the perfect job for my degree! The education I received at AUP was so valuable that the UN had open positions for people who’d studied exactly what I had. I worked for a few months on a multimillion-dollar climate adaptation and resilience project...

And then the pandemic hit...

The borders were closing. Everyone got sent home. It was 2020, and I hadn’t been back to the US properly since 2013. I spent time in quarantine thinking hard about what I wanted to do next. I decided to work on something with more immediate impact, given the Covid crisis, so I interviewed for a communications position with Doctors Without Borders (Médecins Sans Frontières, MSF). It was the middle of the pandemic, but I was still able to move to Haiti to conduct humanitarian work. I was glad to be responding directly to what was happening in the world.

What has your time with MSF taught you?

Initially, during the pandemic, I learned a lot about crisis communications. It was an interesting, if sometimes frightening, experience to confront violence in the five months I was in Haiti. My second mission was to Cameroon. As a neutral party, MSF workers are able to go into areas that others aren’t – but that also comes with risks. After nine months of frontline emergency response work, I took a job with MSF’s climate office.

So things have come full circle?

I’m back working on environmental issues, yeah. I’m the Communications and Fundraising Coordinator for MSF’s Climate-Smart project. It was set up to bear witness to the impacts that climate change is having on the health of our patients, but we soon realized there is also a need to reduce the organization’s own emissions. MSF has an estimated 65,000 people working for it in 72 countries. We have a principle of doing no harm when we respond to emergencies – that has to include not harming the planet too. I’m part of a team of people supporting the organization’s decarbonization work.

What does that work involve?

I am producing communications materials to support decarbonization efforts and also amplifying success stories where they already exist to connect people in different countries so they can share innovation. I spoke at Climate Week in New York City alongside Columbia Climate School, explaining how increased access to environmental data could improve humanitarian action. I’m also concerned with growing eco-anxiety among humanitarian workers; I worked on a podcast with MSF Canada that explored eco-grief in youth.