November 2020: Ambassadors of the Month

Alena co-founded NEXT, an initiative in Zurich Insurance that advocates for the younger generation to have a voice in key business decisions. It also empowers young leaders in the organisation to make an impact directly. The strategy includes three elements: Voice, Connection, and Social Innovation. The Voice strand includes advocacy for NextGen to have a voice in key Zurich business decisions which will shape the company’s future. Connection is about linking NextGen communities inside and outside of Zurich Insurance to create dialogue, share best practices, and bring insight and inspiration to the company. Social Innovation is about investing in the next generation of socially-responsible leaders within the company.

The NEXT Virtual Summit 2020, inspired by One Young World, brought colleagues, changemakers and entrepreneurs together to share insights and inspiration around the role generations can play in solving the major challenges of our time, including internal and external speakers.

In 2014, Asiya founded Conflict Women ​to financially empower rape and domestic violence survivors. What began with teaching survivors to make jewellery and retailing their handcrafted products has now evolved into virtual business training workshops, providing access to capital for their small businesses, mentors, and most recently our Survivor Pitch Competition, enabling survivors to pitch their idea to a panel of judges. Through entrepreneurship, we hope to eliminate gender-based violence.

Since its creation, Conflict Women has trained over 120 women and ​provided services to survivors in Trinidad and Tobago, Jamaica and Barbados. For her exceptional impact, Asiya received the 100th Commonwealth Point of Light Award from ​Her Majesty Queen Elizabeth II ​and the National Medal for the Development of Women (Gold) from the President of Trinidad & Tobago.

In November 2020, Khurelbaatar set up the OYWMongolia social media pages (IG, Facebook) to spread the One Young World message to young people in his country. Collaborating with two other Ambassadors, he set up the pages to communicate the work of One Young World, fellow One Young World Ambassadors, and the importance of the Sustainable Development Goals to young people in his country.

Khurelbaatar has the drive to educate, and in his day-to-day job at Oyu Tolgoi, Khurelbaatar runs event-based programmes connecting young engineers with more experienced professionals to share their experience and learnings about the industry.

Dannie is the Chief Business Officer of Vertoro, a Dutch startup working in the bio-based economy. Vertoro aims at accelerating the green revolution and revolutionise the oil industry. It produces a 100% natural alternative to crude oil called crude lignin oil (CLO).

This CLO is prepared from the biopolymer lignin. Lignin is the ideal starting material for this process since currently 98% of the lignin is burned for its calorific value. Vertoro has set themselves the goal to use exclusively waste material to ensure a circular economy converting waste into the feedstock of the future. For example, lignin is available in coffee grind which is a huge “offset market”.

German launched the Fotolampara initiative, which aims to give light to every home which lacks access. For this purpose, the project has designed technologies that use photosynthetic activity and other vital processes in plants in order to obtain clean, sustainable, and sufficient power that generates light.

Fotolampara has launched a project to bring light to 37 vulnerable homes with an energy deficit, saving the households approximately $30 monthly, as they will stop using expensive, traditional, and often dangerous sources of electricity. The objective is to reach vulnerable communities in areas such as Socorro and Guapuscal Bajo (Nariño, Colombia). This has significant personal and environmental benefits resulting from the reduced CO2 emissions in the atmosphere, reduced by an approximate total of 394.3kg annually.