Aaron Redman ’01 – 2024 St. Francis Xavier Award for Ignatian Identity

Last year, speaking to an audience in Rome, Pope Francis called St. Francis Xavier “the greatest missionary of modern times” and spoke about his journeys to the frontiers of the known world, making it especially fitting that we have singled out Aaron Redman for this honor. For the past two decades, Aaron has crisscrossed the world, starting with his time in El Salvador as a member of the Peace Corps, to living and working in Mexico and Germany, and supporting projects around the globe; his mission — to help the world understand and combat climate change through cutting-edge sustainability education and practices while uplifting marginalized communities particularly vulnerable to the impacts of the changing climate.

Having been inspired to serve in the Peace Corps by several teachers at Brophy, Aaron has maintained a deep connection to the communities he worked with in the El Salvador countryside. He helped start women-led enterprises making reusable produce bags and organized a still ongoing collaboration with Arizona State University's (ASU) Education for Humanity initiative to provide free high-quality hybrid English classes to anyone in the community. Aaron also coordinates the fundraising for a scholarship program for local youths which he began as a volunteer. The program now includes over 20 first-generation graduates with 12 young people currently studying, thanks to the program’s support.

With an M.S. in Sustainability from ASU in hand, Aaron was called to the Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México, campus Leon, where he worked as a professor and to establish the university’s sustainability department. There he introduced sustainability to hundreds of students across several degree programs and carried out research on how to promote more sustainable waste behaviors locally. His next stop was at Leuphana University in Germany, where he embarked on his doctoral research as part of ASU's School of Sustainability for the “Educating Future Change Agents” project. Upon completing his degree he returned to teaching, this time as part of ASU's online sustainability degree program.

Since then he has worked continuously as a sustainability consultant, contracted by U.N. agencies, universities and private companies. Aaron is also a contributing author for the annual publication “10 New Insights in Climate Science,” a research associate overseeing the development of global indicators of climate communication and education for the MECCE Project based in Canada, and a contributing researcher on sustainability assessment to the GreenEdTech project in Denmark, in addition to short-term projects bolstering sustainability education for UNESCO.

In fall 2023, he was in Ukraine working as a consultant for Overseas Strategic Consulting when he shared this with Brophy News magazine, “My time at Brophy was critical to setting me on a sustainability career path. While there, I discovered through an immersion trip to Oaxaca, a huge need to improve so many aspects of society; at the same time, AP Environmental Science introduced me to the many environmental challenges we face.”

Aaron, thank you for heeding the call to go where you felt you were needed and where you could serve the world best. In the spirit of St. Francis Xavier, you are a 21st-century missionary working to sustain God’s creation for the good of all. Brophy College Preparatory is proud to present you with the 2024 St. Francis Xavier Award for Ignatian Identity.