A few years ago, Yael Stone was widely known for starring in Netflix’s smash hit show Orange is the New Black. Since then, she’s turned her attention to local social entrepreneurship. In 2023, she founded Hi Neighbour, an organisation that distributes scholarships to locals seeking to up-skill for jobs in renewables and helping local businesses to install solar.
This week, she appeared at the Forbes Women’s Summit to talk about her journey from the small screen to climate activism. Women’s Agenda was there to hear her words of wisdom and her experiences.
Orange is the New Black
When Stone appeared in Season 1 of the popular Netflix show in 2013, she was 28-years old, and had just moved to New York City. The experience, she told audiences, was “amazing” and “life changing”, despite the red carpet events which she described as “confronting.”
The Sydney native had always worked in the arts (she graduated from Newtown Performing Arts High School) and found the creative process of being part of a television show familiar and comforting.
The big change she experienced starring on Orange was the exposure and near-universal fandom it garnered.
“The show was wholly embraced by literally everyone who took the train with me,” she said. “That was a big change. I’ve done a lot of theatre in my time and you connect with audiences members, and it’s powerful and beautiful. What happened with Orange is you can literally fly anywhere in the world and people wanted to relate to me, not as an actor, but as Lorna.”
“That was a big, a big leap. Having a big voice was huge and different. And thinking about how to use that voice was huge.”
Side hustle leads to social activism through yoga
During the first two seasons of Orange, Stone continued to work as a waiter and yoga teacher in New York City. Through her role in the show, she learned about the US prison system, and realised she had a responsibility to share what she was learning.
Stone wanted to combine her interests and discovered the Liberation Prison Yoga — a group that teaches trauma conscious yoga to incarcerated people in the US. Stone began volunteering to teach female prisoners, delivering classes based on loving interactions and a belief that students could be healed.
“I loved the work, it was intense,” she explained. “Sometimes it was very challenging, especially when some guards are trying to tell you what prisoners had done, so that you would freak out and to judge them. It was lots of moments of growth and change and confrontation.”
The experience gave Stone a taste for activism and social entrepreneurship. “I realised I could do stuff in a world…try and make it better and to have a vision and to work with it,” she continued. “I joined the board of Liberation Prison Yoga, and we did a lot of great stuff we set out to do.”
Using your platform for good
Once Stone gained hundreds of thousands of followers on Instagram, she felt a strong sense of responsibility to advocate for the things that mattered to her. She was perpetually asking herself the same questions: “Who do I bring along with me? How can I use my platform not just to serve me or my own career or my own ambitions for the future of my career? How do I bring other people on this incredibly privileged journey?”
Stone believed that she needed to bring the widest spectrum of people to build bridges and find solutions for a safer future.
“We’re living in this super polarised world,” she said. “How do we build bridges between people who are really different from us? People who’ve had very different experiences to me? I’m finding those commonalities — weaving them in with shared visions and shared beliefs.”
She also notes the power of speaking up for other women — “I’ve had moments where it was necessary for me to speak in certain movements to support other women when I felt they’ve been a solo voice and they needed somebody else with them.”
“But check in with yourself. Am I going to be safe if I do this? Is my family going to be safe? Am I in physical danger? Am I in legal danger? Good to do a bit of research first.”
Stone returned to Australia in 2019, around the time of the Black Summer Fires — which occurred near her residency in the south coast of NSW. Stone was acting in a play at the Sydney Theatre Company when the first fires began. She was excited to be acting again, after giving birth to her first child, two years prior. But the fires were causing her distress.
“I would leave [work] every day and I couldn’t breathe,” she recalled. “And I’d be on the stage, worried about my daughter at home. This fear started to grow. I would have these long, dark nights where I’d be wrestling with like… what am I going to do? How do I show up to this responsibility?”
Stone, now 39 and a mother of two, said her experiences in NYC interacting with passionate change makers, planted the seed for her ideas for starting Hi Neighbour.
On the verge of returning to the US, she and her partner decided to stay in NSW.
“I just felt like we are on the frontline of climate change with Australia experiencing some of the most intense impacts before our very eyes. [We thought] let’s do this. Let’s, let’s make a difference here. In the places where we were born, where our children were born. Let’s see what we can do on home soil.”
Advice for aspiring change agents
Stone’s journey from Hollywood to social activism wasn’t easy, but she’s made it work through an unwavering determination to stick to her values. The transition, she said, was the most satisfying decision she’d ever made.
“I no longer have to wrestle with that secret grief or anxiety that had my head to toe covered in eczema,” she explained. “Because I know now I’m doing the most that I can to create the future that I believe in.”
She encouraged audiences to resist the cynical messages circulating around social movements, often spread through misinformation and disinformation in the climate movement.
Trawling through a local renewable conversation online recently, Stone found fake local community movements disseminating disinformation.
“All their messaging seems to come back to this idea that there is no hope. That’s what they would have you believe. To be afraid of change, afraid of dreaming.” Stone believes that messaging is dangerous and only benefits the status quo.
“Our planetary future is still very much up for grabs. So ask yourself — what are your hands reaching for?”