Jacinda Ardern Urges Global Leaders to Embrace Greater Compassion

It’s easy to forget that Jacinda Ardern once served as New Zealand’s prime minister.

In a Cambridge, Massachusetts café line, dressed casually in a Juliette Hogan suit, sneakers, and gold earrings, Ardern offers a warm smile and invites others to call her simply “Jacinda.” As she orders a cappuccino, the barista wonders why she seems familiar — could she be someone from television? “Toni Collette?” they ask, mistaking her for the Australian actress.

Ardern, without any security detail, downplays the mistaken identity and chooses not to correct it.

The café is just a ten-minute walk from Harvard University, where Ardern, who resigned as prime minister in 2023, now holds three fellowships. After stepping down voluntarily, she married her longtime partner, Clarke Gayford, and temporarily moved her family to Massachusetts.

The day before the meeting, graduation celebrations had taken place on campus, leaving tents, stacks of folding chairs, and students gathered with cardboard boxes scattered around. The ceremony marked the end of a school year during which Harvard faced legal battles with the U.S. government over allegations of antisemitism, putting federal funding and international student visas at risk.

Against this tense backdrop, Ardern, often referred to during her tenure as the “anti-Trump,” has published her memoir, A Different Kind of Power. Released Tuesday, the book advocates for leadership grounded in empathy and kindness as a potential solution to global crises — a theme also explored in one of her fellowships at the Harvard Kennedy School. Whether this message will resonate amid such a delicate moment remains uncertain.

Ardern shared that she has been appreciating the relative anonymity of life in the United States, which has allowed her to spend more time with her six-year-old daughter, who is now “more aware” of her mother’s former role as prime minister but “doesn’t place too much importance on it.”