Abby Falik, Social Entrepreneur

Your New Life Blend

Who are my teachers when they're not assigned to me? What is the curriculum I choose to follow when it's not in the book? These were the questions that Abby Falik challenged high school graduates to answer when she founded Global Citizen Year, a non-profit that supported students in taking a "gap year" after high school. Abby was a decade into Global Citizen Year when the pandemic ground everything to a halt. Abby realized that this had never happened before, this collective, shared pause in life as we knew it. She made a conscious effort to find the power in that pause. In 2022 she joined the Emerson Collective as an Entrepreneur in Residence to incubate new models to transform how young people learn, launch and lead. Part of that mandate meant examining the default, assumed pathways not just for students, but for us all - and, Abby realized, for her. She and her husband had always dreamed of traveling the world with their children, so they packed up and took off for their own pause, and a return to her own fundamental questions about how we choose to learn, and live. In this episode of “Your New Life Blend,” Abby dials in from Nepal to talk to host Shoshanna Hecht about tuning out “the noise of everybody else's expectations" and finding your own path, because if the road is comfortable, you're on somebody else's road.