Olya Milenkaya was the leader of the High Schools Group during the 1999–2000 school year, her senior year at Los Altos High School.

Olya grew up in Siberia for her first seven years, until her family immigrated to California. While in high school, she attended the Deep Green Global Training in 1998, which led her to the Schools Group. A charismatic and buoyant personality, she quickly became the group’s leader and enlisted many others to the group through regular outreach to other area schools and environmental clubs. Olya led a core group of concerned students each Wednesday night learning about activism, organizing, and myriad environmental and social issues, and she was the driving force behind the highly successful Gap campaign.

Post-BAA

She went to Warren Wilson College in North Carolina where she participated in or led many environmental activities including the construction of the campuses’s first ecodorm. She returned to BAA for a summer as the paid Schools Group Coordinator. She graduated from WWC in 2003 with a B.A. in Environmental Studies and received her Ph.D. in Biological Sciences from Virginia Tech in 2013.

In 2019 Olya returned to her alma mater Warren Wilson to teach conservation biology. “I believe in the intrinsic value of biodiversity, and I enjoy the logic of science,” she wrote. “Conservation biology is a science applied to an ethic, and is both theoretical and practical, analytical and emotional. It is steeped in values, urgency, uncertainty, and controversy. In teaching conservation biology at Warren Wilson College, I aim to empower students to develop their own ethic about biodiversity, and to do science that does good in the world.”

She is married to herpetologist Lindley McKay, and they spend nearly all their off-time traveling the world in search of birds, herps, and wonderful experiences.