Three alumni helping people feel and do better
Buckeyes do good all around the world, and Keshawn Harper, Ally Pesta and Rick Milenthal focus on kids, body image and anti-suicide efforts.
Keshawn Harper ’14, ’20 MSW
After Harper graduated from Ohio State with a bachelor’s degree worth of training in criminal justice, security and intelligence, he served as a police officer in Atlanta. He saw it as a steppingstone to the FBI or Drug Enforcement Administration. Then he started talking.
Harper talked with people he arrested, often teens, about their “home life and kind of what led to the stuff going on.” He started thinking, if those conversations had happened earlier, maybe those young people wouldn’t be in their current situation. Over time, walking the beat didn’t feel as good a fit as he had envisioned.
Now, with a master’s degree in social work, talking is one of Harper’s primary tools. At KIPP Columbus schools since 2020, he leads groups and works one-on-one with students just coming into their own. He covers depression, anxiety, “figuring out who you are, what you’re looking forward to, what you want,” he says.
He takes pride in seeing students who had been ready to walk away instead graduate and move forward.
Ally Pesta ’18
Pesta wants everyone to know: A person is much more than their body. “Your personality, your laughter, your light, your energy — everything you give — has nothing to do with your shape or size,” she says.
To spread that encouragement, she shares her story of recovering from an eating disorder and works, in addition to her full-time job at Zillow, as a recovery coach, running coach, yoga teacher and proponent of joyful movement. She speaks to groups, including several last fall on the Columbus campus, about how people can embrace their power and purpose, without using food and exercise as a form of control. She also writes a blog for Project HEAL and published a memoir.
While the stereotype of people with eating disorders is “small, thin, white women,” Pesta says, “we need to also understand that this impacts everybody — male, female, nonbinary, any race — and broaden the way we think about creating treatment for anyone.”
Pesta is determined to do her part.
Rick Milenthal ’82
As chairman and CEO of The Shipyard marketing agency, Milenthal has the skill set to turn ideas into movements. That’s what he started several years ago, when — after the suicide of a friend’s son — he decided to help people with mental illness. “Now we’re deeply involved in what I think is going to be transformational.”
First came a 24-episode, pandemic-era podcast, an effort with his wife, Karen, timed to help when people felt isolated. Next was a partnership with Wexner Medical Center to draw attention to mental health at a 2021 football game. Milenthal and Shipyard then joined forces with the WonderBus music festival to raise awareness and proceeds for mental health programs, including Ohio State’s Department of Psychiatry.
Now, Milenthal is collaborating with Ohio State to share with community leaders and the public the important work of the SOAR Study. The State of Ohio Adversity and Resilience Study will be a long-term look into the root causes of mental illness. Earlier this year, the state provided $20 million in seed money for the effort. Learn more about the study on this webpage.
“We will be the driving force on the communication side, to bring this to the world,” he says. “In Ohio, now with institutional support, we can turn the tide for the world.”
