Angelique Wan
Bachelor of Accounting, 2018
Young Alumni Award
Angelique Wan is an inspirational young leader driving social change through consent education. Through her work, she gives young people the tools to navigate consent in their sexual experiences through engaging, evidence-based, inclusive workshops and lectures.
After graduating high school, Angelique realised how ill-equipped many young people are to navigate consent, boundary setting and sexual harassment and assault. So, while Angelique was a student at UTS, she and her friend Joyce Yu founded Consent Labs.
Consent Labs is a not for profit organisation driven by young people. It strives to spark vital conversation around consent, not just for students, but also for the people around them – such as teachers, parents and educators.
While at UTS, Angelique also gained key experience in the classroom and through internships. And the practical nature of her degree equipped her with the industry skills and confidence to tackle big-picture problems.
Upon finishing her degree, Angelique immersed herself in her career, working at Macquarie Group as a financial analyst. But after four years she stepped away to follow her passion and become the full-time CEO of Consent Labs.
In this role, Angelique works with her team to further develop their workshops and teach valuable lessons around consent to young people. And today, Consent Lab has worked with over 22,000 students. Angelique and her team are working to extend their reach to regional schools to provide access to this vital information to more people. The team hopes to launch this program in term one of the 2023 school year.
In the future, Angelique hopes Australia’s consent education will be more accessible and inclusive of all cultures and expressions of gender and sexuality. She believes this is an important step towards lowering Australia’s sexual assault rates – especially for minority groups whose presence is so pronounced in these numbers.
It feels really special to be able to be honoured at UTS with this award and to celebrate the achievements and the success of consent Labs which feel like UTS has been pretty integral to the journey of consent labs in its entirety you know we first started having conversations about Consent Labs while I was living on campus here and I feel like I took a lot away from my degree while studying at UTS.
There was a lot of really practical support a lot of personal professional development that I received during my degree and I've been a part of UTS Startups since the inception of consent Labs which has been a massive support throughout the whole journey.
So changes that we've seen in terms of consent education the laws around affirmative consent have happened because of young people the most rewarding thing is seeing how passionate and vocal they are about receiving this education for the very first time because it's been something that they've been calling for for years or for decades and they haven't been heard up until now so I think the passion of young people is really behind us.
I think the recipe for my success or the success of Consent Labs has been finding a good team so making sure that you surround yourself with a team that also believes in the mission or the vision of what you're working towards and that really empowers and uplifts you.
You have no idea what the future will hold but as long as you believe in yourself and believe in the power of your voice particularly in the power of your voice as a young person then you will achieve success.
It takes commitment and education of all stakeholders in a young person's life to really push for this systemic social change – to make sure we’re giving our young people the correct knowledge to protect themselves and respect others.
