$ 1 : 16
For every $1 of value invested, One Young World Ambassadors deliver $16 of social value, based on a Social Return on Investment analysis of 45 Ambassador-led initiatives addressing the 17 Sustainable Development Goals in 2023
SDG Impact Tracker
Interested in supporting impactful initiatives led by young leaders? Search this database of over 430 projects from the One Young World Community to find out more.
Climatenza
Akshay Makar founded Climatenza, a solar thermal company working in India and Chile that develops and applies concentrated solar power technology to generate clean and high-value energy for industrial applications. Akshay’s clean energy solution can replace carbon-intensive fossil-fuel technology used in industry and manufacturing. Climatenza aims to complete projects by 2025 which will achieve a target reduction of 746,861 CO2 emissions over the 25 year lifetime of the solar fields.
bp’s support for Climatenza is coordinated by One Young World Ambassador, Ross McRobert, and is operated with an ‘open door policy’. This support provides Akshay with access to experts who are at the forefront of bp’s net-zero ambition. Since winning the Lead2030 challenge for clean and affordable energy, Climatenza has progressed to pilot stages with strategic customers in order to provide them with the confidence to make long-term investments. Climatenza also innovated to remove front-ended capital-intensive outlays, which can often be barriers to companies making a shift to clean energy.
With the support of bp mentors experienced in clean energy ventures, Climatenza is preparing to launch a fundraising round in 2021 or seek a partner through which to scale their operations. Within the next five years, Climatenza aims to build and operate solar thermal projects with a combined scale of 55.5 MW.
CAYSTI
CAYSTI's mission is to develop and promote innovative tech tools to leverage egalitarian access to quality education in Science, Technology, Engineering, Art and Mathematics. The organisation’s training centre in Cameroon is dedicated to low-income students and refugees from neighbouring countries and has trained over 6,500 young people by using ground-breaking learning tools.
CAYSTI has weekly meetings with Deloitte Cameroon, helping support the strategy development of two main initiatives. The first is the $1 Scholar Programme, an inclusive programme that aims to give equal access to coding and soft skills classes to youth in Francophone Africa. The second is the publication of an educational comic book and aligned workshops, helping youth better understand the concept of entrepreneurship.
The $1 Scholar Programme aims to impact 30,000 individuals in the first phase and 300,000 individuals in the second in targeted states of Cameroon, Gabon, Tunisia, Ivory Coast, Senegal, DRC, Togo, and Benin. Further plans for collaboration include CAYSTI opening its platform to content aligned with Deloitte’s WorldClass ambition to support 50 million people by 2030 with job skills, educational outcomes, and access to opportunities.
BIVE
BIVE facilitates access to timely, high quality and affordable private healthcare services for 19,000+ Colombian people. Its BR13 project provides leadership tools and technical knowledge on non-communicable diseases, mental, sexual and reproductive health for rural youth, with the purpose of reducing avoidable mortality and morbidity in rural Colombia.
The partnership with AstraZeneca is helping to extend the BR13 initiative, constructing a teaching plan and mental health student guides and materials. It is also forming vital alliances with educational government offices and institutions. The team has benefited from mentorship in the field of policy communication, which will help the team scale up their work to revolutionise Colombia’s school system.
AstraZeneca will link the team with its Young Health Programme Colombia, which launched in early 2021. Likewise, they are connecting BIVE with two of AstraZeneca’s partner organisations to enhance the value proposition of the BR13 Project.
Deloitte Latin America Social Covid Response
Deloitte Latin America Social Covid Response - Colombia
Natalia Jiménez Esguerra
Business for Social Good
Natalia coordinates corporate responsibility and sustainability initiatives on behalf of Deloitte's Spanish Latin America firm In addition to this responsibility, Natalia leads the Social Impact Committee for the London School of Economics alumni association in Colombia, through which she is launching a programme to mentor 23 NGOs and social enterprises in 2021.
As part of Deloitte Spanish Latin America’s Social COVID-19 Response, Natalia developed a series of nine webinars titled “Impactando para Impactar”. The firm was offering free webinars to clients and potential clients on a diverse range of topics, which led Natalia to design a series to support One Young World Ambassadors.
Natalia and her Deloitte colleagues collaborated with One Young World Ambassadors in Latin America to identify topics of most interest to young leaders in the region. Topics included:
- Coping with the financial impact of COVID-19 on businesses
- Changing the way of working and cyber defence | COVID-19: Cyber-attacks at the remote office
- The organisation in times of disruption: Impacts for the future of work
- Scenario planning-How to prepare for new business scenarios?
- Managing the business cash cycle during and after the pandemic
- Financial literacy - Personal finance in times of crisis
- How to find a job in times of COVID-19
- Leadership and resilient organisations: 5 new realities organisations are facing
The first series of webinars had over 17 Deloitte professionals volunteer and reached 60 One Young World Ambassadors across the region of 16 countries. It leveraged the skills and knowledge of Deloitte’s professionals to support young grassroots leaders in the region, enabling them to find solutions to the challenges of the pandemic and continue to support the region in achieving the SDGs.
Step Up: Totva
Step-Up is Deloitte India’s largest professional skills-based volunteering programme centred on providing skills-based volunteering experiences that allow its practitioners to apply and develop their professional and leadership skills to create positive social impact in areas of personal passion. Dhritiman has been working with Toybank as a Step-Up project lead since late 2019.
Toybank is an Indian charity that works with 50,000+ children and 2,000+ teachers to propagate play-enabled learning. They develop programmes and initiatives focused on the behavioural and mental growth of at-risk children in their most impressionable years of life through “Play-based Learning”.
Through the Step-Up initiative, Dhritiman worked with the Toybank team to develop a five-year strategic roadmap designing the donor targeting, digital outreach and data interpretation/operations processes for the organisation. He led the project with support from a group of colleagues and conducted visioning workshops with the organisation to identify their leadership priorities and align their vision.
The engagement focussed on three major areas. The first was to develop the donor outreach and digital marketing strategy. The second was to help Toybank interpret and present the impact data it collects. The third was to derive insights from their data and create an operations strategy to transform Toybank into a standardised process-driven organisation.
Dhritiman leveraged his own expertise in Deloitte’s strategy consulting to help the non-profit standardise its processes, scale up operations, and secure sustainable funding streams. This will in turn help Toybank develop more beneficial and long-term support of at-risk children, their families and the teachers responsible for their education.
Green Team - Janssen
Green Team - Janssen - Germany
Martha Griese
Business for Social Good
The Green Team was an initiative in Janssen founded by the management board to try and help the company transition to a more environmentally friendly position. After attending the One Young World Summit in London in 2019, Martha became determined to tackle the climate emergency and joined the project team consisting of more than 50 employees, who contribute and implement their ideas for a sustainable future.
The Green Team worked according to sub-streams, addressing travel to and from the offices, food in the workplace, waste management, the campus, printing, and domestic and international travel. The members of the Green Team are highly engaged with the task of improving the green credentials of their office.
Martha works primarily on the first stream, helping to mitigate the environmental impact of over 1,000 employees commuting to a non-urban office in Neuss. This includes a service through which employees can lease bikes through the company, to encourage green travel. Already, 300 employees have explored this scheme with 160 applications for the bikes. There are now also twice daily shuttles to and from the train station, to encourage public transport once employees return to the campus.
The Green Team is making significant inroads into the carbon footprint of the office in Neuss. Healthier food is being served, including eco-friendly milk alternatives, and 7% more vegetarian food is being consumed officewide. The green campus is being developed with 3,000 new plants, and plastic waste is being reduced by 700 bags daily.
In 2021, the team structure is changing to be less divided into separate substreams, helping members to better collaborate on their work. On transport, they will be launching a car-sharing app, and try to increase the availability of bikes in different locations. The team is also looking into increasing recycling capabilities, reducing emissions of company cars, and introducing many more schemes to help transform the office into a more environmentally friendly workplace.
Hamzah Sarwar, Reckitt
Hamzah Sarwar, Reckitt - United Kingdom
Hamzah Sarwar
Leadership Biographies
Hamzah has worked with RB for six years, joining the company with a background in marketing in a role working for the Vanish brand. By 2018, he was working as Global Consumer Insight Lead on a newly launched anti-pollution brand SiTi.
The Hague Summit in 2018 was a turning point for Hamzah. It coincided with the birth of his second child, and this concoction of inspiration was instrumental to Hamzah’s development as a leader. It was the moment he committed to create a better future for his family and for society at large. It also encouraged him to use business and his role more directly to achieve the SDGs.
RB gave Hamzah the space to develop two significant social impact projects. The first, Project Preemie, aimed to reduce the rate of premature births in Indonesia, a project close to his heart due to personal experience and his role working on infant nutrition. In partnership with Epiphany, Hamzah ran a social innovation sprint to identify and solve the root causes. In Jakarta, the team collaborated with local businesses and DSM, a fellow One Young World Partner, on a pilot programme.
Hamzah was also instrumental in establishing RB’s Purpose Council, an internal initiative set up by seven One Young World Ambassadors to institutionalise purpose and embed it in the company. One of their core programmes is the 12-month reverse mentorship scheme which has had participation from the CEO and COO, amongst other senior members in the business. The group has grown to include 100 people working across 22 countries, and is no longer exclusively populated by One Young World Ambassadors.
In May 2020, Hamzah proposed and was promoted to a brand-new position of Global Purpose Director of Dettol, with the mission to embed purpose at the heart of all decisions regarding brand strategy. The role aligns with RB’s Purpose and Fight to protect, heal, and nurture in the relentless pursuit of a cleaner and healthier world. Hamzah targets sanitation as an enabler to improve global health. Examples of his work include a collaboration with the local team in Saudi Arabia to drive behavioural change in the pilgrimage during the pandemic. Additionally, he has led a programme with the RB team in India improving hygiene and sanitation education in schools, which has reached over 13 million children.
Hamzah will continue to shape and expand this new role in RB. He is currently focused on developing a Global Impact Programme, launching high impact WASH initiatives designed to create behaviour change across the globe, and changing long-term habits in decision-making to include purpose as a fundamental consideration.
Gabriella Napier, GE
Gabriella Napier, GE - United States
Gabriella Napier
Leadership Biographies
Gabriella has a long history with General Electric, beginning as a student intern at GE Aviation and GE Healthcare, before joining GE Healthcare as part of the Operations Management Leadership programme in 2014. A seminal moment in Gabriella’s growth as a leader in GE, was being part of the company’s delegation at One Young World 2016 in Ottawa. Gabriella was already a socially-conscious employee, but had no particular focus in her activity. She was introduced to the Sustainable Development Goals, which helped to give her a framework for her future work.
Mental health was a significant focus at the 2016 Summit, and it highlighted a disconnect in GE for Gabriella. Despite the substantial resources available to employees, she felt that there was still little engagement on the issue. She communicated with her peers to start conversations and make people aware of available support, although this did not develop into a formal initiative, it helped her gain experience in creating movements within GE. Having tested the waters, Gabriella was looped into a project with Assist International through the GE Foundation, the philanthropic organisation of GE. This experience set the stage for Gabriella and past One Young World delegates from the Summit to found GEneration Impact.
Though not officially affiliated with the company, this network is motivated by individual corporate social responsibility, and driven by GE employees. What began as the three of them, has grown under Gabriella’s guidance to a core team of five people, which will grow further in the coming year. GEneration impact provides pro-bono skills on projects impacting the UN’s Global Goals for Sustainable Development. The GEneration Impact core operational team source projects and resources teams of roughly five people per project, and this past year has supported 15 non-profits, NGOs, and social enterprises. Whilst primarily based in the USA, they have significant participation in India, Brazil, and parts of Europe.
It is Gabriella’s role in the team to identify the projects for support. One of the largest impacts this year has also been working with Catie’s Closet, an organisation that keeps lower income kids in school by providing clothing and toiletries in schools for children without these basic essentials. The project teams Generation Impact has created has helped Catie’s Closet to develop their website and an app to facilitate donations, secure a sustainable supply chain, and expand their marketing plan.
GEneration Impact continues to grow in popularity, and Gabriella and her team aim to continue to increase their capacity to connect motivated employees with social impact projects. For Gabriella, GEneration Impact continues to offer management experience and personal development opportunities. It has also given her greater access to new colleagues and parts of the business, and individuals and organisations outside GE.
Gabriella continues to set an example for other young leaders, showing that they can develop their own leadership in their business by providing invaluable support to social impact initiatives internally and externally.
Green Team Standardisation
Green Team Standardisation - United States
David Zaremsky, Priya Achaibar
Business for Social Good
A group of 8 GE employees were sparked into action by a simple question, asking how they can take the lessons from the One Young World Summit and make an impact in their own company. Instead of duplicating efforts, they wanted to amplify and accelerate the work already being done by other passionate employees.
In September 2019, GE Renewable Energy announced its plan to become 100% carbon neutral by the end of 2020. Inspired by this ambitious commitment, a group of passionate volunteers created the Green Team Network to support and further GE’s sustainability goals. Various grassroots Green Teams had sprung up in the different offices, many using different methodologies and structures. The team of Ambassadors identified a need for standardised work and structure within the teams.
The group’s aim was to standardise the Green Teams’ structures and replicate them widely. The first stage was to interview over 15 of the different groups. From this, they have produced multiple ‘how to’ documents. They even interviewed McKinsey’s Green Teams’ through a contact they met at One Young World and incorporated the learnings in their own company.
These documents are being used to ensure that the green transformation in GE can be replicated and scaled, in all the businesses in GE, but also they have been shared externally to exchange best practice with similar groups of employees in other organisations.
The Green Teams are also working to drive culture change and support the various initiatives which are tackling the climate crisis. Crucially, the teams are offering an essential connection between GE’s goals as an organisation, and the individual employees who are crucial to achieving them.
People vs Pandemics
Priya has worked with GE Healthcare since 2015, graduating from their Digital Technology Leadership and Corporate Audit Staff programmes, and currently managing AI-driven research projects implementing healthcare innovations with leading clinical organisations. As an engaged employee, Priya is an active participant in GEneration Impact, GE’s unofficial employee network connecting young employees with social impact initiatives.
Due to this commitment to driving social impact, Priya set up the People vs Pandemics initiative alongside a group of 7 volunteers, in March 2020. The website contains easy-to-navigate resource pages to support people who are unemployed, in need of mental health support, or vulnerable to food insecurity during the Covid-19 pandemic. It is a simple, fast way to find local support in these challenging times. The resources are focused on Covid-19 and the consequences and directed users to blacklivesmatters.carrd.co to provide important information during the height of the BLM movement in 2020.
The team also put together the Take Action! Challenge, with curated actions to take every week supporting a different part of the community. People found ways they can make an impact and volunteer from home, as they have a lower barrier to entry than they previously believed. The campaign aimed to inspire people to support their community and share the initiative through the challenge concept.
This is indicative of the innovative projects being led by Priya, and other employees within the company and the GEneration Impact network. A particular focus of Priya and the others now is to develop a process of impact monitoring and reporting which will help them to fine-tune and develop the initiatives they are running.
Corona Donation Initiative
Corona Donation Initiative - Mexico
Tanja Mehes, Isabel Menendez
Business for Social Good
Tanja and Isabel work at Audi in Mexico, and as young socially-conscious colleagues in the company attended One Young World Summits in 2018 and 2019 respectively. In 2020 amidst the Covid-19 pandemic, they played instrumental roles in coordinating Audi Mexico’s community support initiatives, and the impactful use of 200,000 EUR committed by Audi HQ.
The Corona Donations were distributed via three main streams. The first, orchestrated by Tanja, was the provision of facemasks. Initially, this was the procurement and distribution of facemasks, however, by March and April, supply was insufficient and the team changed tack. They worked with an engineer to design a dual-layer, washable mask with additional space for filters. These were produced by small, local family-owned businesses to contribute to the local economy. Finally, deliveries were made house-to-house and each sterilised bag also contained instructional and educational materials. Through this initiative, Audi managed to provide masks to 40,000 vulnerable individuals in the locality of their factory.
Isabel, whilst on furlough, wanted to use her time to contribute productively to the local communities. She worked on two programmes. The first was a medical resource donation to healthcare centres lead by the medical department in Audi México. They donated to 4 smaller health clinics in the region where the Audi plant is located and which tend not to receive the same level of support as bigger state hospitals
The third part of the programme was a bus transport initiative, through which the company which normally brings staff to the Audi offices, was repurposed to offer specially dedicated 24-hour bus travel to frontline health workers to get to main hospitals, between June and November. This has continued even once the regular service resumed as employees were back in the office, as Audi has increased the provision of buses.
Corporate Social Responsibility Week
Corporate Social Responsibility Week - Germany
Eva Herzog, Silja Steinhert, Christin Seidel
Business for Social Good
Inspired by the 2018 Summit in The Hague, Christin and Eva developed the idea of a Corporate Social Responsibility (CSR) week within the company – a project that did not exist at this point in time. As the largest railway operator in Europe, Deutsche Bahn carries a huge responsibility for society. The goal of the CSR week is to transfer this responsibility directly to social and sustainable initiatives across Germany.
Within eight weeks, a concept was born: one employee in each region of the country was acquired, who was then appointed to coordinate social and sustainable initiatives in the respective region. On each day of a chosen week in autumn, employees in different offices could then organise initiatives. #DBhandson (in German #DBpacktan) is by now the biggest CSR week within Deutsche Bahn, taking place once a year. The first step for Eva and Christin was to convince stakeholders like the leadership team and the Works Council. All employees were offered to dedicate one working day during the CSR week to support one of the organised sustainable and social impact initiatives. As enthusiasm and support among the employees involved was so great, even members of the management board joined the CSR week.
Supported initiatives vary in their scope, from virtual projects such as identifying wheelchair accessible locations via an app, engaging with patients at a childs´ hospice to physical projects like cleaning rivers and assisting in homeless shelters, only to name a few. The first CSR-week in 2019 was supported by 350 participants, volunteering in 18 projects in 8 different cities. One year later, the movement managed to increase participation to 400 employees, supporting 28 different projects across 12 cities. The fact that even during a pandemic the level of support for pursuing the CSR week was so tremendous left all project members and supporters filled with pride and conviction to carry on, no matter how uncertain times may be.
#DBhandson has created a community that has a strong social awareness within Deutsche Bahn. Plans for 2021 are to focus even more strongly on virtual activities as well as expanding the CSR week within the company. One example of a planned initiative is to repurpose a VIP customer phone line to provide remote support for elderly people isolated in quarantine. Additionally, Eva and Christin’s colleague and fellow Ambassador, Silja, is currently implementing a consultation process to ensure that people with disabilities who applied for roles at Deutsche Bahn are connected to suitable employment opportunities, inspired by Caroline Casey’s speech at the One Young World Summit.
Less for Live
Less for Live - Turkey
Nuriye Budakoglu
Business for Social Good
Nuriye has worked with Barry Callebaut in Turkey for three years, during which time she attended the One Young World 2019 London Summit. The event piqued Nuriye’s interests. As a food engineer, she had long been concerned with waste and the environment, but Nuriye was also aware that in Turkey there was a lack of awareness about sustainability generally. Returning to her company, she planned to address this.
Nuriye founded the Less for Live project, a sustainability movement in the Turkey offices of Barry Callebaut. The initiative is sponsored by the General Manager in Turkey, with advisory from management, and help from an additional seven volunteers in the organisation. This has the purpose of making the office, factory, Barry Callebaut’s employees, and employees’ families more environmentally friendly responsible for their own carbon footprint.
In March 2020, the team began to monitor the factory and office waste at Barry Callebaut Turkey to create an initial snapshot of its environmental impact. With this information, they reached out to colleagues in a lunch meeting, with contribution from the region’s One Young World Coordinating Ambassador, Dehydys Pimental.
This launched the movement with initial changes including shifting to an environmentally-conscious search engine, supporting a seedling foundation, and starting a Green Talk platform through which employees could discuss environmental issues and solutions. They also employed an engineer to consult and give training on sustainable waste management, Additionally, they have run monthly environmental challenges, through which they crowdsource solutions from employees. Despite the impact of the pandemic, the impact never hesitated as the project moved online seamlessly.
The team has already managed to improve sustainable operations in the office and change the personal actions of 85 different employees’ households. This is just a start. Returning to work more regularly in the office in 2021, the programme will expand, new projects will be launched, and it will look to spread beyond Turkey.
Employee Offsetting
Nick works as an Advocacy Advisor at bp, where he has worked since 2013. However, it was in the Hague in 2018, as part of the company’s delegation at the One Young World Summit, that the idea of his offsetting initiative originated.
Kate Robertson, One Young World’s co-founder, called on the organisation's delegates and partners to help mitigate the Summit’s environmental impact by offsetting their travel to the event. This led Nick, in collaboration with fellow Ambassador and bp employee Luca Schmadalla, to launch a new initiative, marrying bp’s carbon offsetting business with their employee benefits programme.
Through 2020, they launched pilots in the UK, US and Germany with over 3,750 employees signing up to offset their personal carbon emissions. Better yet, bp supported the initiative by covering 50% of employee costs, as well as offsetting corporate aviation travel. The total carbon emissions offset in 2020 was 101,003 tonnes, achieved by supporting a range of carbon reduction and avoidance projects. These range from clean cookstoves in Mexico to forestry protection in Zambia, and biogas in China.
What started as an idea in the Hague, turned into a job as Nick was chosen to lead a new programme driving employee engagement in sustainability. Nick and Luca plan to develop the offer further, expanding the offer to bp employees globally and with a focus on how to reduce emissions.
Global Community Impact Coordinator
Global Community Impact Coordinator - Philippines
Lezeth Garcia
Business for Social Good
Lezeth has worked with Johnson & Johnson since 2016, hired as an Employee Relations Specialist before expanding to an additional role of coordinating the company’s Corporate Social Responsibility initiatives in Manila, alongside work on Employee Engagement.
In this role, Lezeth has coordinated a host of social impact initiatives, with the primary aim of driving employee participation in volunteering which rose from 89% to 116% in her first year in the role. She is also responsible for shaping the global strategy and developing partnerships and diversity and inclusion for GenNOW, a dynamic Employee Resource Group that allows employees to not only bring ‘Our Credo’ to life but also to grow the next generation of Johnson & Johnson leaders as they chart their career trajectory.
In 2020, Lezeth led an initiative to tackle the pandemic. One particular project was in reaction to a rapid outbreak of the virus in Batangas which followed an eruption of the Taal Volcano in January. These two events crippled communities in the province.
Lezeth’s project has supported communities with hygiene education and resources to educate and empower them to stop the spread. They have also donated PPE, hygiene kits, and other vital resources to support frontline healthcare workers in the locality. From March onwards, the focus shifted from healthcare workers to supporting communities struggling during lockdowns. Open bus drivers who lost their jobs have been supported with monthly groceries by Johnson & Johnson’s NGO partners. In total, they assisted 1,000 people.
Lezeth continues to innovate in her role to generate social impact in the company. They are formulating programmes and virtual activities to help tackle mental wellbeing issues for employees. In 2021, this will take the shape of a mental health awareness campaign in Manila. It will tackle the stigma of what remains a sensitive issue, but also extend beyond the company to contribute to passing mental health law.
How to use to the SDG Tracker
Search for projects by the following case study categories:
- Ambassador-led Initiatives: qualitative and quantitative analysis of the social impact of projects which are led by young leaders in the Community.
- Business for Social Good: written case studies for initiatives ran by corporate partner organisations, led by young Ambassadors/employees.
- Leadership Biographies: short biographies of Ambassadors who are growing into influential leaders for social good in some of the world’s largest companies, organisations, and in government.
- One Young World Funded Projects: detailed case studies of grant recipients from One Young World's funding opportunities, including Lead2030, Rebuilding Communities, and the COVID Young Leaders Fund.