ABOUT THE MILLENNIUM FELLOWSHIP - CLASS OF 2025
United Nations Academic Impact and MCN are proud to partner on the Millennium Fellowship. This year, 60,000+ young leaders applied to join the Class of 2025 on 7,000+ campuses across 170 nations. 290+ campuses worldwide (less than 5%) were selected to host the 4,500+ Millennium Fellows.
UNITED NATIONS ACADEMIC IMPACT AND MCN PROUDLY PRESENT LANDRY BERAT, A MILLENNIUM FELLOW FOR THE CLASS OF 2025.
New York University Shanghai | Shanghai, China | Advancing SDG 11, SDG 3 & UNAI 3
" During my Millennium Fellowship, I will begin to formulate the Global Compassion Principles, a set of ethical guidelines for individuals, companies, and governments in support of veganism. The impetus for this idea derives from the Sullivan Principles, created by the Reverend Leon Sullivan of the United States in 1977 for companies doing business in apartheid South Africa. Sullivan later expanded them into the Global Sullivan Principles which were guidelines for corporate behavior throughout the world. Similarly, I hope that the Global Compassion Principles will become known as a universal standard for all - individuals and institutions alike - who support veganism. "
Millennium Fellowship Project: Circle of Compassion
To promote veganism as a way to diminish animal suffering, improve human health, and save the earth, my eight sisters and I incorporated in the United States, the non-profit Circle of Compassion which, with support from the private and non-profit sectors, will launch this summer and fall, young people-targeted, educational media campaigns with the aim of publicizing the imperative for veganism. In the spring of 2026, we will sponsor a nationwide essay contest for elementary and high school students. Later, during the summer, we will initiate a world-wide Vegan Challenge – the name derives from the Ice Bucket Challenge used by ALS cure crusaders - to highlight the personal and planetary benefits of universal veganism. This challenge will involve more than just becoming vegan. It will have a lobbying/public awareness component via which young people can perform a number of tasks in order to meet the challenge. These might include writing to food companies and supermarket chains asking for more vegan selections or petitioning local school officials to provide vegan school lunches. Eventually, we will have an annual vegan challenge throughout the world. In this way, the contestants and all of us, including the fragile planet we share, will win.
About the Millennium Fellow
Landry Berat is a senior at New York University, Shanghai majoring in Advanced Global China Studies. A native New Yorker, she has learned Chinese from birth even though her family has no Chinese antecedents. Among her passions is promoting veganism as a universal practice. Raised in a vegan home, she realized early that veganism prevented animal suffering, improved human health, and, for our rapidly warming planet, offered a way to save its fragile ecosystem. To achieve this vegan tomorrow, she and her eight sisters founded the non-profit Circle of Compassion to engage the world's youth in effecting a vegan transformation.
