In 2022, Aysha Emmerson '18 was mid-way through her undergraduate thesis as a student at Harvard University and spending her summer back at St. Michaels University School working as a houseparent. We referenced her then return as “working her way back home”.
Since then, Aysha’s journey has taken her to Capitol Hill, Oxford University, local MP Elizabeth May's constituency office and, most recently, to the floor of the United Nations Environment Assembly in Nairobi. Through all of it, a single word has remained her compass: resilience.
It is not a word she arrived at lightly. Aysha designed her own undergraduate degree at Harvard — one of only a handful of students to do so each year — centred on resilience studies. Asking the question: How can individuals, communities and ecosystems better respond to crisis and change? She took courses across more than ten departments and followed the questions wherever they led.
They led, eventually, to the rainforest.
The Thesis
At roughly 250 pages, Aysha's Harvard thesis was what she describes as the most meaningful work she has ever done: the first academic study of the Fairy Creek blockade, one of the largest acts of civil disobedience in Canadian history, which saw more than 1,100 arrests as protesters fought to protect old-growth forests from logging on Pacheedaht traditional territory on Vancouver Island.
The thesis went on to win Harvard's Hoopes Prize for outstanding undergraduate research.
She had conducted her research on the ground at Fairy Creek in 2022, gathering interviews, surveys and ethnographic fieldwork as the blockade wound down. She examined what drove people to act, what allyship on Indigenous land actually meant in practice, and what the protest revealed about something much broader.
"I think it can be understood as a response not just to old-growth forest logging, but to social ills more broadly," she said. "An expression of our larger desire and need for social connection and for a feeling that our actions actually matter."
Wider Worlds
After Harvard, Aysha spent three months interning on Capitol Hill, helping introduce the first US legislation aimed at creating a national strategy for social connection. From Washington she returned briefly to Victoria before heading to Oxford for a Master's in environmental governance, partnering with the City of Calgary to analyse the inclusivity of the City’s resilience strategy — a deliberate shift from the grassroots urgency of Fairy Creek to the slower machinery of institutional policy.
Both, she found, were necessary. Neither was sufficient alone.
Back in Victoria since early 2025, she works as constituency coordinator for Green Party leader and Saanich-Gulf Islands MP, Elizabeth May, fielding concerns, building relationships, fostering civic engagement and connecting people to the processes that affect their lives. She also served as Elizabeth’s primary aide on her local re-election campaign and national leader’s tour—travelling the country to connect with voters at a critical juncture in Canada’s political future.
"I view my role as a funnel between people who have a problem and want to share it, and their member of parliament," she said. "You couldn't find a more responsive and invested member of parliament than Elizabeth."
Seeing a gap and stepping into it is a characteristic move for Aysha. Those who knew her at SMUS would recognise the instinct. As head prefect she helped build community across the school. Earlier still, she founded Self.I.E. (Self Inspiration and Empowerment) Camps, pairing high school mentors with younger girls entering middle school, because she understood what that kind of support could mean.
"I didn't want any other girl to feel the kind of insecurity, loneliness, or lack of confidence that I did at that age," she said.
Nairobi
That instinct to show up carried her to Nairobi earlier this year, where Aysha served as a youth delegate to the United Nations Environment Assembly, representing the Children and Youth Major Group to the UN Environment Programme, a body open to anyone under 35 with an interest in global environmental policy.
Aysha and her fellow delegates advocated for ambitious resolutions on everything from global wildfire management to the environmental impacts of artificial intelligence, meeting directly with member state delegations and intervening in negotiations. Youth, Aysha said, were noticed in every room they entered.
"I went in thoroughly disillusioned with multilateralism, as I think many of us rightly should be," she said. "But to actually feel, as a young person, like what we were doing mattered . . . I was slightly shocked, elated and inspired."
For SMUS students interested in climate, she is emphatic: this is not out of reach. Anyone under 35 can join the major group and have a direct voice in global environmental policy.
Just Getting Started
Aysha isn't sure exactly what comes after, but the next step has just come into focus. True to her compass, she recently learned she will be heading to Tanzania as part of the Aga Khan Foundation of Canada's International Youth Fellowship — a nine-month climate resilience placement that will take her work into one of the world's most vulnerable regions.
She suspects there will be more school after that, and more questions beyond that. What she is sure of is that there will always be more to do.
"I am simultaneously always finding joy and satisfaction in life, particularly because of the incredible people I get to meet and learn from every day," she said. "But I am also always unsatisfied, because there is always so much change that you can make and so much wrong in the world. And we all need to be fixing it all the time."
