Isaiah Wellington-Lynn
Belonging - Education - Creative Expression
Isaiah's Story
Award-winning polymath,
born and raised in pre-Olympics Stratford, East London,
educated at UCL, Harvard, and Oxford,
and on a mission to cultivate spaces and design experiences
where people feel they can truly belong and thrive.
Isaiah Wellington-Lynn is often described as polymathic. He has excelled across academia, sport, the arts, and his professional career. And in 2021, Colleen Amos OBE, the CEO of the Amos Bursary, and Baroness Valerie Amos LG CH PC, the first Black head of an Oxford University College, the 8th UN Undersecretary-General, and the first Black person to be appointed to the Order of the Garter, the most Senior Order of Knighthood in the British Honours System, presented Isaiah with the inaugural Amos Polymath award for his academic, athletic, creative, and entrepreneurial pursuits. Isaiah grew up in an ambitious and resourceful yet low-income household with his mother in one of London's most deprived areas, but he strived to ensure that his background did not limit his potential. As a neurodiverse person, this was even more difficult, but he persevered. His journey of overcoming has shaped his career pursuits and advocacy in belonging, education, and creative expression.
Belonging:
One of Isaiah's core cares is Belonging. As a neurodiverse person raised in a low-income family, Isaiah was heavily bullied at primary and secondary school by figures of authority. Isaiah has since had to work incredibly hard to carve out brave and safe(r) spaces in his life to both heal and thrive.
In 2017, Isaiah was determined to continue to shatter the negative projections he had absorbed from some of his formative environments, namely school. As a former elite international basketball athlete, Isaiah had spent considerable periods of time competing in highly-coveted invitational tournaments in North Carolina and New York, and therefore, elite US universities had been on his radar for a while. However, he was determined to convert aspiration to action and decided to apply to Harvard College to spend the third-year of his undergraduate degree abroad. As a low-income student, he had applied for and secured a full private scholarship, however this fell through a few days before he received his offer. With no alternative options, Isaiah reluctantly decided to launch a crowdfunding campaign to raise £64,000 in 4 weeks. He curated a small team and while his summer was filled with working intense hours as a summer analyst at J.P. Morgan, he and his team managed to raise the full amount from over 800 people.
His campaign, #StratfordToHarvard, then paved the way for Isaiah to attend Harvard, thrive academically and socially, and secure a fellowship at Airbnb in San Francisco. Alongside his Kleiner Perkins Design Fellowship at Airbnb, Isaiah also founded a non-profit called the Redefining Boundaries Fellowship and raised seed funding from several VCs and tech companies. Isaiah's fellowship aimed to help early-career Black technologists cultivate a sense of belonging in Silicon Valley.
It also helped that Airbnb's mission was to create a world where anyone could belong anywhere. Isaiah's journey to and experience at Harvard, plus founding a fellowship, and working at Airbnb planted the seeds for what would later become the core theme of Isaiah's PhD at Oxford: "The Art and Science of Belonging at Oxford". Isaiah's anthropology PhD project researches how undergraduate students from different demographics use ritual and narratives to cultivate belonging at Oxford.
Airbnb
Kleiner Perkins Design Fellow,
Anti-Discrimination Team
Redefining Boundaries
Founding Fellow, Class of 2018
Belonging Round Table
With HRH King Charles
Education:
Another one of Isaiah's core cares is Education. Mainstream, formal education as well as alternative, supplementary education have been key parts of his story. Isaiah is determined to ensure that people with unlimited potential but limited resources have the opportunity to gain a rich and robust education that equips them with the skills to pursue their passions.
Isaiah was educated at both state and independent schools in London and has studied or worked at a total of 9 universities: Syracuse University London, NYU, Columbia, UCL, LSE, Harvard, MIT, and Oxford. These experiences set him up well to join the founding team of the London Interdisciplinary School (LIS), a pioneering response to the British educational system of siloed knowledge. LIS is the first entirely interdisciplinary university in London. Isaiah initially served as a founding advisor for 1.5 years while he was still an undergraduate. Once he graduated, he joined as the youngest faculty member in 2020 and as of 2023, Isaiah is an Assistant Professor where he offers perspectives in anthropology, design thinking, and ethnographic research methods. From January 2024 to March 2024, Isaiah curated, designed, and led a 10-week innovative and oversubscribed undergraduate module for LIS's final year students titled 'Applied Ethnography, Practical Ethics' (ask him about it!). Isaiah is also the Lead of Integration Coaching, one of the three core pillars of LIS's curriculum. In this role, Isaiah designs the university's coaching framework and curriculum, and leads a team of approx. 24 cross-functional integration coaches who facilitate weekly coaching sessions for undergraduates and postgraduates.
Harvard
Visiting Undergraduate 2017 - 2018
UCL
BSc Anthropology 2015 - 2020
Oxford
PhD 2021 - Present
Creative Expression:
From a super young age, Isaiah has pursued his creativity in different ways. As Isaiah navigates the second half of his twenties, creativity takes several forms: modelling for brands in editorials, walking on the run way in fashion shows, writing poetry, writing short stories and reflection pieces, curating conferences, designing digital and social experiences, writing and editing chapters for a two-year book project, art direction, jewellery art and design, brand strategy consulting, chairing panels, delivering key note speeches, and facilitating workshops. And, Isaiah recently started learning how to DJ.
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Model
Fashion shows and Editorials
Creative Consultant
Writer, Curator, Artist, and Designer
Public Speaker
Keynotes, workshops, panels