At the centre of leadership

Andrew Mathieson
INSPIRATION for a Torquay 28-year-old to build a worldwide, life-changing organisation came in the form of a rehabilitating Bolivian capuchin monkey struggling to adapt to its environment.
The shy monkey had never lived or socialised with other groups of the endangered primates, instead finding comfort in the arms of humans.
Acting as a monkey psychologist to Nikita, a solemn Larissa Brown could relate.
Her solitude though, was the isolation of a dark bedroom where she was shut out from an outside world that had slowly become foreign.
She had earlier floated between five university degrees in which the aspiring environmentalist couldn’t find the answers to the world’s problems in the pages of a book or during a lecture.
“I felt so despondent because I couldn’t see a future,” Larissa recalls.
“I literally went to bed for three months and dropped out of university.
“My best friend had to sort of drag me out of bed, so I went backpacking around the world with him.
“It was then that I found out what an incredible planet it is and how much we have to lose.”
The irony was that the idea behind Larissa’s soon-to-be Centre for Sustainability Leadership was initially mapped out years earlier in the bedroom of her parents’ Torquay home.
But it wasn’t until the whirlwind trip that she felt empowered to crawl past her comfort zone on the first stop among America’s ski slopes.
The self-discovery eventually transformed to the point where Larissa was teaching beginners how to snowboard and tackling steep jumps she once feared.
“I thought that doing those big jumps was so far beyond what I could ever possibly do,” Larissa explains.
“One day I decided to have a go at it and I took off because when you do a big jump you have to commit.
“On the land around I thought ‘What else that I have set limits on that I wasn’t able to do’.”
Larissa was just 23 when she founded Centre for Sustainability Leadership, which offers lucky scholarship holders an opportunity to discover new ways to implement environmental change themselves.
She became obsessed with her natural surroundings while growing up on the cliffs of Jan Juc Beach but didn’t know the steps to making a difference.
Then Larissa struck up a friendship with a former Environment Victoria boss. She picked his brains with a long list of questions every couple of weeks.
“I was trying to a find a course about how you create change in the world and I couldn’t find anything, so I decided to start one myself,” she says.
The centre has since grown to also attract hundreds of passionate volunteers and guest speakers, from lawyers to artists and company executives to first-year university students.
Larissa’s words speak of a passion for the place, which government agencies, progressive businesses and philanthropists have showered with more than $1.5 million a year in financial support.
“There were so many young people who, like me, were passionate about a better world but were frustrated at not knowing how to do it,” she reflects.
“Knowing I wasn’t alone was very important for me.”
The centre, which has spread its leadership courses through Europe a partnership from the United Nations, will go online for “hundreds of thousands of young people across the globe”.
Larissa’s work earned Australia’s inaugural National Young Environmentalist of the Year award in 2008.
Still, she admits it was a struggle to get the courses off the ground, barely scratching up a decent pay check.
“The first two years, I slept on my friends’ couches,” she laughs.