Why I Do What I Do: Exposure Matters.

One day, while visiting my 10 year-old nephew, I asked him, “what do you want to be when you grow up?” I was assuming he would say he wanted to be a dope designer like his presumed favorite uncle —me. To my surprise, his two choices were to be either a rapper or a basketball player. Both answers gave me great pause.

If that's truly what he wanted to be I, of course, would be fully supportive, but it made me wonder if his two choices were dictated by popular media portrayals of people who look like him, which are unfortunately, most often of rappers or ball players.

It also made me wonder how many other kids, black or otherwise, were dreaming dreams about who they could be without knowing all the options they truly have to choose from. I realized that I needed to do more to show him all the amazing industries and fields of study I’ve been exposed to and provide him with more alternatives for his future.

More About Billy...

Billy Almon is a leading voice in how to use nature and creativity to explore changing the world. Over the last 10 years Billy has been traveling around the world exploring how biological strategies are being used to inspire solutions to human challenges through the process called Biomimicry. Billy is also the co-host of Little Giants, a tv series on Animal Planet that features some of his explorations. For more than a decade Billy worked as an Imagineer for the Walt Disney Company, where he honed his talents as a storyteller, inventor, futurist, and world-builder while working on award-winning projects. He has a Bachelor of Architecture degree from Howard University and a Master of Science in Biomimicry from Arizona State University with a professional certification in Biomimicry. In addition to his child and young adult oriented storytelling efforts, Billy also uses insights about biology to identify and highlight emerging areas of opportunities for creating restorative futures, in space and on earth, that are built on new understandings of historical and socioeconomic challenges.

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