Ep. 19 - Your dreams are valid

06/15/23 • 39 min

1 Listener

Mary Izobo, the guest of Episode 19 of the podcast The Road Less Traveled, wears many hats. She is an international human rights lawyer, governance specialist, and is currently studying for her PhD in International Law and Governance at the University of Pretoria.
In this episode, we ask her more about her gender advocate hat as the Founder and Executive Director of The Amazon Leadership Initiative (TheALI). It is a non-profit organization that empowers women and girls, fosters inclusivity in leadership roles, and provides mentorship, education, and capacity development to alleviate gender inequality.
She had not realised before the master that the work she was doing was human rights. Since she graduated, her understanding of human rights became clearer, more lucid and applying the knowledge to the practice. She insists as well that: “You don't need a human rights degree to stand against injustice. I believe that injustice transcends the career interests. There are so many individuals who did not have a human rights degree and are renowned activists.”
Mary has 3 pieces of advice for anybody who wants to start their own initiative:

Passion: your passion will take you anywhere you want to go.
Determination: be hard-working and not give up.
Commitment: you should always remember your why: why you started with the organization in the first place.

She also mentioned that what makes her go through bad days is the fact that she created a tribe for herself (family, friends and supportive people).
There is one song that stood out for her when she is having a bad day: Marvick City, God will work it out.

Passion: your passion will take you anywhere you want to go.
Determination: be hard-working and not give up.
Commitment: you should always remember your why: why you started with the organization in the first place.

Previous Episode

Ep. 18 - Housing is a human right!

The guest of Episode 18 of the podcast The Road Less Traveled is a perfect example of the beauty and depth of non-linear paths. She worked as a civil servant, for the United Nations and as a freelancer. She finds her joy when taking the hat of an activist: Maite Arrondo is an expert on the right to adequate housing and has been working for the past 8 years as a consultant on innovation in housing policies.
When she had to choose her theme for her master thesis, Maite noticed by reading the newspaper that housing was an emerging issue and decided to focus on it. Since then, her passion for the issues of housing and homelessness has never diminished; she continues to work on the connection between the international human rights based approach towards the right to adequate housing and its realisation at the local level.
Her passion for innovations in housing is obvious when she recalls the moment six or seven years ago when she learned for the first time about the model of Community Land Trust (a model of affordable housing and community development) in Puerto Rico, in Caño Martín Peña. She works for the Barcelona municipality, which is like a policy laboratory with their focus on housing and their creation of networks. One of the things I like best about my work is that I am always feeding my curiosity with peer learning exchanges. I get a chance to learn about other contexts, solutions and innovations.

Next Episode

Ep. 20 - Be bold!

The guest of this episode, Federico Batista Poitier, studied first forensic anthropology and then human rights. After graduating from the European Master in Human Rights and Democratisation, he specialised in issues related to accessibility and the implementation of the UN Convention of the Rights of Persons with Disabilities. Federico started working on issues related to disability when he was an English teacher in South Korea and worked in an inclusive school.
He currently works as accessibility policy officer for United Cities and Local Governments (UCLG), that he describes as a kind of UN of local and regional governments. 65 % of the Sustainable Development Goals need implementation at the local level to be realised by 2030. He particularly focuses on accessibility as mandated through the international human rights framework of the Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disability and its article 9, a lot of the competency to implement this article being with local governments. This implementation is sometimes made difficult with coordination and centralisation.