Kenisha Arora.

Kenisha Arora is a Forbes-recognized young leader advancing education and health equity for children and youth worldwide at local, national, and global levels. She holds a Master’s in Global Health & Economics from Johns Hopkins University and is now pursuing her MD at Toronto Metropolitan University’s School of Medicine, bringing together expertise in global health, economics, and governance.

Globally, Kenisha was selected from more than 10,000 candidates to serve as the Representative of Youth on the UN High-Level Committee for Education, joining leaders including the President of Sierra Leone, the Prime Minister of France, the Director-General of UNESCO, the Executive Director of UNICEF, and the Managing Director of the World Bank. In this role she brought together the perspectives of 450,000 young people across 120 countries and led a UNESCO coalition of over 100 youth leaders to set priorities for transforming education. These efforts culminated in a Declaration on Transforming Education, which Kenisha launched alongside the United Nations Secretary-General at the UN General Assembly. Her advocacy secured the adoption of two new global SDG4 indicators, on digital literacy and on greening education, endorsed by UN Member States. She also championed the Transforming Education campaign, which reached nearly 77 million people worldwide. Kenisha’s leadership has brought youth priorities into the world’s most influential decision-making forums, including the United Nations General Assembly, the World Health Assembly, the World Bank, and the G20 meetings.

At the national level, Kenisha served as a Board of Governors at Western University, where she carried fiduciary responsibility for an operating budget of $896 million and helped shape strategic decisions on financial stewardship, academic policy, and institutional priorities for one of Canada’s largest research universities.

Locally, she was elected as a School Board Trustee representing 150,000 students. In this role she set district-wide policy, approved budgets, and passed a provision for free menstrual health products in school washrooms, embedding equity and wellbeing into education. She carried this conviction that health and education are intertwined into her work on the world stage. Invited to the World Health Organization Headquarters in Switzerland, she launched WHO’s first-ever Adolescent Health Framework with WHO Director-General Dr. Tedros Ghebreyesus.

Kenisha also co-founded The HopeSisters, a grassroots nonprofit that empowers students to become changemakers and ‘HopeSpreaders’ by leading local health and education initiatives. The organization has been recognized by the Gates Foundation, the Clinton Foundation, Chegg’s Global Student Prize (Top 10), and the United Nations Office for Project Services.

Serving on the Award Council for the Global Schools Prize is an opportunity to spotlight schools that dare to innovate and lead with courage. To me, schools are not only places where children learn, they are institutions that shape futures and transform societies. The schools we will celebrate through this Prize are pushing the bounds of what the future of learning looks like. They are challenging the very definition of what education can be, and in doing so they create blueprints for equity, creativity, and possibility that ripple far beyond their own walls.