The Catalyst Conference

Each project features a “beautiful question” that invites participants to consider the student’s inquiry focus and to learn how the student researched and responded to that question, a process aimed at generating new ideas for responding locally to real world challenges.

In 2021, 550 students from 96 GOA schools will present their projects. Meet our 2020 student award winners.

LaTricea Adams is the Founder CEO & President of Black Millennials 4 Flint, the first and only environmental justice and civil rights organizations founded by Black and Latinx Millennials with a focus on the eradication of lead throughout the nation. Earlier this month, LaTricea was appointed to the White House Environmental Justice Advisory Council. In addition to LaTricea’s work in the environmental justice space, she serves as a lifelong educator with teaching and executive leadership experience in large, urban districts such as Nashville, Memphis, and Washington, DC. LaTricea’s life motto is to be “supreme in service to all mankind."

This year, GOA will feature a former West Point Grey Academy (Vancouver, BC, Canada) student Tess Blake, who took a GOA Gender Studies course and participated in the 2018 Catalyst Conference. Her project focused on the experiences that women and non-binary individuals had with safety and the public transportation system in Vancouver, BC. In the time since her Catalyst project concluded, she has extended her efforts in an ongoing public campaign called Moving Forward to raise awareness and work with public transit officials to create a safer transit experience for everyone.

We're also thrilled to welcome Laila Ibrahim and Amy Monroy, students at the Metropolitan Regional Career and Technical Center (Providence, RI, USA), who engaged in a year-long action research project in partnership with KnowledgeWorks where they pursued the research questions, “How do the racial and ethic background of students and teacher affect student-teacher relationships within the classroom?”

All keynotes will be featured on the conference website April 22-26, 2021. The Catalyst Conference is free and open to the public.