From Frankston to Mali

Elise Klein

None of 1997’s year nine teachers at Frankston High could be blamed for failing to identify troublesome 15-year-old Elise Klein as a future finalist in Young Australian of the Year or as a future Australian youth representative to the United Nations General Assembly.

At the time Klein believed in social justice and protecting endangered species, but had no idea how to translate her beliefs into constructive action.

“My first ‘activist’ step was becoming a vegetarian when
I was 12,” she recalls. “I wanted to become an environmentalist but didn't really know what that meant.”

Now 30, Klein is completing a PhD in International Development at Oxford University. She is also the founder and volunteer CEO of the Mali Initiative, a not-for profit organisation which builds schools and funds community projects in the landlocked West African nation of Mali, the fourth poorest country in the world.

Her brilliant future began in 1997 when the late Jim Stynes, AFL star, Brownlow medallist and co-founder of Reach, a not-for-profit youth organisation, came to her school to run a workshop. Reach program facilitators identify the underlying reasons behind the behaviour of disengaged young people and help them redirect their energy in positive directions.

Stynes saw 15-year-old Klein’s promise, training her to be a Reach facilitator.

“Jim helped me change from someone who was interested in doing something in the world to someone who was actually doing something in the world,” recalls Klein, who would spend the next 10 years running Reach workshops across Australia.

In the meantime, she had decided to enrol in a Monash University Environmental Science honours degree.

”I was interested in trying to figure out the human behaviour behind environmental destruction and this sounded, loosely, like the right idea.”

Her final year honours project in human geography and indigenous land rights was the high point of Klein’s undergraduate years.

“I started to get a proper education about indigenous history,” she says. Her research in this year also set her on a new path into the social sciences, inspiring her to enrol in a Monash Masters degree in International Development and Environmental Analysis and then to do her PhD at Oxford.

Reach led to the Mali initiative. While making a documentary in Mali about how the chocolate industry exploits young Malians, Reach co-founder Paul Currie met some local people who were running a tiny school in a run-down building for underprivileged children. In 2004 Klein also made contact with these Malians wanting to make a difference. It was a life-changing experience. She began leading fund-raising initiatives for primary and then secondary school buildings in Mali. For her, the logical next step was a broader program which could support the visionary projects of the Malian people.

Klein acknowledges the importance of her environmental science studies, which gave her the analytical skills she would draw on over her next decade as a postgraduate student, as an activist and as a social entrepreneur.

“I really needed to learn the critical tools that would help me try and understand the world around me,” she says. “Whilst these skills can expose some very ugly parts of the human condition, given the huge challenges we face as a global community, these critical skills are key.“