One Young World Ambassadors are leading projects in every country of the world, creating substantial social impact across all 17 Sustainable Development Goals. Every month our Coordinating Ambassadors select someone from their region who has created significant social impact locally, regionally or even worldwide. We are delighted to feature a selection of these exceptional young leaders below. If you would like to be considered, please reach out directly to your Coordinating Ambassador. Unsure who is your Coordinating Ambassador? See the breakdown of countries here
Elissa Glorie, The Netherlands - Moja
Elissa founded Moja in 2019. It is an underwear company that aims to use business as a force for social good. Moja creates underwear for men and women and uses part of the margin to reduce health inequalities in developing regions. People with a distance to the labour force produce underwear and reusable sanitary pads which are distributed to students alongside hygiene and menstrual health education. Lack of access to hygiene products increases vulnerability to infection, and especially for girls, can cause truancy from schools, impeding their essential education at that age.
Moja strives for transparency and sustainability in its underwear production. The underwear sold on its webshop is produced ethically in Portugal, with an OEKOTex Standard100 Certification. The Moja team has established a local team in Tanzania, running entrepreneurship programs in two sewing locations and built a framework for education workshops. So far, 2,000 pairs of underwear have been made and distributed in Tanzania and the first 100 reusable sanitary pads are being tested.
Olubunmi Odekunle, Nigeria - LendKash Limited
Olubunmi founded LendKash Limited, a web platform that provides financial stability and financial robustness to underserved individuals. These beneficiaries have little or no access to investment opportunities nor bank loans, due to unaffordable, high-interest rates and excessive collaterals.
LendKash helps individuals and micro-businesses to get a loan for either personal or business use at ease. Olubunmi developed a digital lending marketplace and investment platform that helps individuals invest and lend to other individuals with the assurance of repayment and good returns. More so, individuals can get a microloan at a reduced rate with no collateral. This gives individuals’ opportunities to boost their income, and have a residual income when they lend to borrowers on the platform. Currently, the platform has more than 600 active users. It has disbursed loans up to $2000, and 11 people have been able to expand their micro-businesses.
Andrés David Beltrán, Colombia - Fundación United Way Colombia
Andrés is a Cooperation Specialist at Fundación United Way Colombia, promoting educational innovation to tackle pressing issues in the education system and reduce school dropout rates in Colombia. The organisation does so through teacher professional development programmes, focusing on the development of “XXI Century Skills”.
In 2020 alone, Fundación United Way Colombia has impacted the lives of 66,000 students and 2,800 educators. Thanks to its projects and programmes, students have access to better quality education and tech devices to further their studies. Also, both teachers and students have benefited from socio-emotional skills development, support provided to help them to face Covid-19 lockdown-related challenges.
Margaret Osolo Odhiambo, Kenya - Streetwise Transformers
Margaret is the Health Lead at Streetwise Transformers, a humanitarian community-based organisation that is committed to restoring human dignity for marginalised and vulnerable populations of homeless children, young adults, and families. The target demographics primarily live and work on the streets and street-connected environments in Nairobi. The organisation has a keen focus on improving their health, well-being and living standards- working in Health programming; Education and Skills development; Alternative economic livelihoods; promotion of Sport and Talent; Outreaches- Reintegration, Rescue, Tracing and Rehabilitation; and Advocacies and lobbying for the rights and well-being of the street-living communities.
The organisation provides access to basic necessities, facilitates access to friendly health services as well alternative economic livelihoods for the community. It has managed to reach over 2700 children, young adults, women and people living with disabilities, with support programmes for Menstrual, Sexual and Reproductive Health; Mental health, health literacy for disease prevention, Water, hygiene and sanitation, Drug & Substance abuse and NCDs management, amongst others. Streetwise Transformers has also facilitated the tracing, rescue, rehabilitation and reintegration of over 500 children and youth out of the streets.
Reimar Weissbach, USA & Germany - German American Conference; Die Liga e.V.
Reimar Weissbach, USA & Germany - German American Conference; Die Liga e.V. Inspired by the OYW 2019 London Summit, Reimar has set about addressing the “big challenges” by facilitating a collective effort of young leaders globally via the German American Conference (GAC) and Die Liga.
At GAC, Reimar is part of a team of students organising events aiming to foster transatlantic dialogue and connection between decision-makers and next-generation leaders. Those include multiple events around his passion for shaping the ‘future of work’ and additionally he is carrying more overarching marketing and promotional responsibilities. Through these actions, Reimar helps to organise over 10 distinct events featuring over 40 high profile speakers, often in the form of educational workshops and panel discussions. These events have reached more than 1000 participants from all over the world over the course of 2 months. At Die Liga, among other activities, Reimar has recently co-authored a discussion paper and policy brief on the impact of climate change on planetary security.
Ivona Kostyna, Ukraine - Veteran Hub
Since 2014 the conflict in Eastern Ukraine caused extensive damage, displacement, and death among the population. Veteran Hub, for which Ivona is Head of the Board, is an innovative non-profit that provides holistic support to veterans of this war and their families. It has opened community centres in Kyiv and Vinnytsia, where many veterans reside and is opening a third in Dnipro in early November. These centres provide legal, social, psychological, and employment support to veterans, and offer fellow civil organizations free office space, facilities, and networking opportunities.
The organization’s mobile office project will help reach out to veterans with reduced mobility. It will help them develop a journey map to satisfy their service requirements, and also grant the feeling of care and appreciation from the community. So far 2,462 people have received legal support, 1,638 received employment support, and 2,286 psychological support. Overall, 6,300 services have been provided to veterans, the military, and their family members since November 2018.
Francisco Rojo, Spain - Voluntechies
Francisco is the founder of Voluntechies, a non-profit organisation that uses the latest technology available in the market, particularly in the sector of virtual reality and robotics, to create social good. From storytellers and content creators to teachers and doctors, VR is impacting every part of society and sparking imagination like never before.
Voluntechies runs a variety of activities. For example, it offers experiences for vulnerable people such as hospitalised children, people with disabilities, or the elderly to get "outside" of their reality with the help of VR glasses. The organisation has helped over 5,000 people through such initiatives in the last 5 years, and its goal is to reach 1,000,000 people by 2030.
Emilio Rodriguez, Canada – ParlAmericas
Attending One Young World 2019 London Summit developed Emilio’s interest in youth mainstreaming, inspired by other young people leading the change in every corner of the world. In September 2019, he joined ParlAmericas, an inter-parliamentary institution composed of national legislatures of 35 countries from North, Central, and South America, and the Caribbean, which promotes parliamentary diplomacy in the Inter-American System with a focus on three priority programmatic pillars: gender equality, open parliament, and climate change.
As Program Officer for Gender Equality and Youth, Emilio’s role is to support the planning and implementation of ParlAmericas’ projects under the Gender Equality pillar, which includes regional meetings of parliamentarians around key gender equality issues and initiatives led by partner civil society organizations, as well as the production of knowledge resources. With these initiatives that promote and advance good legislative practices that can be adopted by members in their own parliaments, Emilio has made a significant impact.
Luca Schmadalla, Germany - BP Personal Carbon Offsetting
BP launched Personal Carbon Offsetting after the OYW Summit in The Hague, in 2018, with Luca as Project Co-Lead. This initiative created a platform for BP employees to offset their personal carbon emissions through the existing payroll infrastructure. Employees can choose to fund high-quality carbon offsetting projects, whereby the monthly cost is deducted from their existing payslip. This initiative allows them to take responsibility for the impact of their carbon emissions. BP as a company then pays 50% of the cost for all employees signed-up to the project.
More than 50,000 tCO2e offsets are already being purchased by BP employees annually. This is supporting a variety of impactful projects, such as the BIRU project in Indonesia that enables households to produce their own low cost, low carbon energy from animal dung by using biogas digesters. This fund initiative has benefited 100,000 people across ten rural provinces who are cooking, heating and generating light using the low carbon biogas. Approximately 20,000 tonnes of carbon are cut each year by this project alone.
Interested in learning more about Ambassador projects around the world? Check out our Impact page to learn about how young leaders in the One Young World Community are leading the charge towards the UN's Sustainable Development Goals.