I knew ChangeNow 2025 would hit hard again. Last year’s experience totally overwhelmed me - the people, the stories, the urgency. This time, I came prepared. I gave myself breathing room, space between sessions, and most importantly, zero pressure to “maximize” the event.

And still, it got to me.

Just in a different way. I want to share some of the moments and talks that really stayed with me. Not just because they were “impressive” - but because they unsettled something and helped me see the world, or myself, a bit differently. Again.

Make Science Great Again

I didn’t catch Ingmar Rentzhog’s talk live but I made sure to watch it later. I’d followed his initiative We Don’t Have Time before, especially the push to get people to move their money away from banks funding fossil fuel industries. I sure did, myself. Switched to a green bank. Even their logo is green.

This year, though, Ingmar sounded a louder alarm. A new initiative: Make Science Great Again.

He’s seeing and showing that science is being actively discredited around the world. Climate scientists silenced. Research labs at risk of being shut down. A CO₂ monitoring observatory defunded. This is happening.

Ingmar’s way of presenting is strong, data-driven, sharp, and with a twist of great marketing ideas. The red hats saying Make Science Great Again are a brilliant inversion of the Trump-era rhetoric. It’s cheeky, but also deadly serious. We need to protect science or we’re screwed.

Whose Knowledge Trains AI?

There was a block of sessions on AI that caught me off guard in a good way. One talk pointed out that today’s AI is trained on data from dominant cultures: mostly Western, mostly white, mostly male.

It doesn’t include indigenous knowledge, ancestral wisdom, feminist thought, or perspectives that are historically left out of the “official record.”

That thought stuck.

What would an AI trained on radically different inputs even look like? What could we learn? What blind spots could it help correct?

There was also a session on AI and fake news: especially how powerful these tools are becoming at generating disinformation. It made me pause. In a world where the outputs of AI feel so real, how will we know what to trust? What does “truth” even mean when language (and images, audio, video…) can be infinitely synthesized?

“They Fight and They Win”: Activism and Raw Emotion

One panel was called They Fight and They Win, and it was filled with stories of resistance. Two that really stayed with me:

• Imane Khelif, Olympic boxing champion, often questioned for being “too strong to be female.” She spoke in Arabic, with an interpreter. Her decision to speak in her native language was a statement in itself = a refusal to be misunderstood and misinterpreted (which is often very intentional). What stood out was the energy, and the presence. And a very fine outfit as well!
• Then, b-girl Talash, a young Afghan breakdancer, disqualified from the Paris Olympics for wearing a cry for help for afghan women, deemed “too political.” She was out of breath, emotional, struggling to speak… but it hit. Hard. The injustice of being silenced. The everyday battle women face in simply being allowed to move, to express, to be seen.

Don’t Fix the System. Redesign It.

On the final day, I randomly walked into a session of pledges by young activists. One sentence cut through everything:

“This system rewards polluters, rewards discrimination, rewards those who play dirty. We don’t need to fix it. We need to redesign it.”

This talk from Fadhel Kaboub didn’t feel like that traditional, finely polished speech. Just raw, furious honesty. And I couldn’t stop thinking about it.

The Personal Part: What ChangeNow Did to Me

Here’s the other half of the story.

One week before ChangeNow, I exited a startup I cofounded.

That completely messed with my plan. I had a clear agenda going in: talks to see, people to meet, ideas to pitch. Suddenly, I was walking into this massive event… jobless. And very much in transition.

So yeah, I walked in with two agendas. One planned, one unplanned. And naturally ended up following neither.

But something beautiful happened anyway. I met people, not “opportunities,” not “connections”. People who gave me hope. People who reminded me that my skills can matter, and they can matter for the right things.

For the first time in a long while, I allowed myself to zoom out. To ask: What do I actually want to do? Not just what I’m good at. Not just what pays.

What matters.

And that question became a compass.

It’s a month later.

As I write this, I’m about to join a company working in digital well-being, helping people develop emotionally, intellectually, and ethically in an overloaded digital world. It’s not climate change. But it’s aligned with SDGs, with human flourishing, with purpose.

ChangeNow didn’t hand me a job. But it gave me a deeper gift: clarity.

It made me realize I’m done with drifting between “good enough” opportunities. Done with jobs that were the convenient “next thing.”

I want to work where impact meets integrity.

And that shift started on the floor of a massive, slightly chaotic, always emotional sustainability conference in Paris.