SDG Impact Tracker
Interested in supporting impactful initiatives led by young leaders? Search this database of over 200 projects from the One Young World Community to find out more.
$ 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 39 Ambassador-led initiatives addressing the 17 Sustainable Development Goals in 2021
Harvest Craft
Harvest Craft was founded by Dr. Brendon Anthony and Craig Erickson in 2013, while Craig was living in Haiti, to promote what they call the “holistic development” model, designing and implementing food production systems. Haiti suffers from acute food insecurity, the country is one of the least food-secure in the world ranking 104 out of 107 on the Global Hunger Index. In 2018, Harvest Craft set up the Haiti Center for Agroecology (HCA), a research and education institute committed to training local subsistence farmers in agroecological techniques and promoting food sovereignty. Geoffrey serves as Harvest Craft’s Chief Development Officer.
Geoffrey spoke at One Young World’s Environmental Summit in 2016. He had just left university and found the atmosphere at One Young World inspiring through the passion displayed by the delegates and the resourcefulness of their projects. Geoffrey made several important connections at the Summit, which have continued to influence his learning, leadership, motivation, and long-term vision. Over 10 years of planning went into the HCA, and while the focus was initially purely educational it has since also turned into a place for different farming communities to come together.
The HCA has directly impacted more than 400 subsistence farmers and their families. The farmers have seen their revenues increase by between 30% and 75% on average, and more than 90% of participants have reported increased crop yields and sales from implementing the HCA’s agroecological training. Around 90% of programme participants also compost waste and use this on their farms, while 60% use organic pest management techniques to help ensure soil health. Harvest Craft distributes 30-50,000 vegetable seedlings annually to participating farmers, and it has also partnered with the Eden Reforestation Projects to build a nursery of fruit trees as well. It has begun an internship programme which has so far trained two local agronomy students.
"Being around people at One Young World who are so passionate and like-minded, and doing things in their projects that I had never heard of, was very inspiring. And I still carry that with me today. Life can drag you down but I always look back at the Summit and feel motivated"
Treeconomy
Treeconomy is an ambitious, impact-driven start-up on a mission to combat climate change, restore biodiversity, and improve rural livelihoods by accelerating responsible reforestation.
The company is pioneering an integrated suite of remote sensing, data science, and green finance tools to revolutionise the voluntary forest carbon market and address the fundamental financial barriers that oppose reforestation and conservation forestry. In short, Treeconomy is working to align personal incentives and planetary wellbeing to effectively scale ecosystem restoration.
Using remote sensing and machine learning technology to measure and monitor forest carbon stocks, Treeconomy is bringing sorely-needed trust to nature-based offsetting. By generating high-quality carbon offsets that are real, rigorously quantified, meticulously managed, and totally traceable, the company increases carbon revenues to rural landowners, while supporting buyers to invest in truly impactful and ecologically sound reforestation projects. Treeconomy dramatically shrinks the carbon supply chain, acting as the only intermediary between the project and the end buyer.
Global Emergency Response and Assistance
Global Emergency Response and Assistance - United States
Valeria Gomez Palacios
Ambassador-led Initiative
6
SROI
Around 73,000 non-US citizens were evacuated from Afghanistan following the US withdrawal, with thousands still awaiting resettlement in their new country. Global Emergency Response and Assistance (GERA) has stepped in to support the efforts of the military task force, creating a coalition of 20 organisations to this end.
Co-founded by Valeria Gomez Palacios, GERA began as an effort to assist Syrian refugees in New Jersey, a state with an under-supported resettlement scheme. It helped resettle up to 200 Syrian refugees and, in 2017, developed a comprehensive programme to help them adapt to life in the US while maintaining their traditions. GERA’s ESL programme was modified to serve the particular needs of Arabic speakers and also included a community-building component, as well as after-school support for younger refugees.
Valeria attended the 2018 One Young World Summit at the Hague as part of the European Commission Peace Delegation, an experience that elevated her voice when advocating for the rights of Nicaraguan political prisoners. She has since become an active member of the One Young World Community while GERA is now affiliated with the UN’s Department of Global Communications.
GERA has provided the Afghan refugees with over 40 truckloads of essential household items. It has organised entertainment for them, including a barbecue and a concert for over 10,000 people on the base. GERA also supports refugee families who leave the base before completing the asylum process and who are therefore ineligible for government assistance. This includes wraparound services such as accommodation, groceries, and bedding for 30 families. The organisation successfully enrolled 25 Afghan children in local schools, hosted career fairs, and partnered with Pfizer to provide career advancement opportunities to refugees. The organisation has also connected Afghan nationals in Afghanistan and Pakistan with legal aid and hopes to restart its ESL programme for Afghan refugees in 2022.
“Introducing myself as a One Young World Peace Ambassador definitely opened doors to speak to Senators. I was able to talk to influential Senators to give my take. And a lot of that happened because I was like, you know what, I’m a One Young World Peace Ambassador, I’m going to give this a go.”
CIRT
People are better at “wishcycling” than actual recycling. 8 million metric tons of our waste are in the world’s oceans. People in the US rely on faulty, delayed and confusing set of information to deliver their waste to the proper place. About 60% of the waste duties fall on women.
Each community has its own waste rules and waste buyers, and this makes global waste literacy impossible. Can I Recycle This (CIRT) solves the global recycling problem in three ways: gathering the most comprehensive and location specific database of consumer products in the world; turning this database into a simple answering bot; energising behaviour change through consumers to recycle correctly. By empowering people with the data and tools to recycle correctly, consumers will actively re-engineer our global waste economy into one that circulates value, protects our oceans, and nurtures our soil.
CIRT AI technology will bring hope to the recycling industry and the consumers who depend on it; we will streamline complicated information for companies making key manufacturing decisions, and completely outsource recycling education from cities so that they can invest in new technologies, better composting infrastructure, and better wages for their staff.
Tfy-consult
Tfy-consult - Switzerland
Sayuri Berini, Pascal Jenny
Business for Social Good
Numbering approximately 600,000, small and medium-sized businesses form the valuable backbone of the Swiss economy. SME owners are aware of the importance of the topic of sustainability, in terms of gaining trust and enhancing the company's reputation. However, concrete implementations in this area are often not at the top of the agenda, especially because reliable partners with understandable, uncomplicated, and effective solutions are missing. Arosa Tourism, long-time One Young World Partner, and its President, Pascal Jenny, have worked to solve this challenge with tfy-consult.
As an Arosa Tourism employee, Sayuri Berini was the first participant from Arosa at the One Young World Summit 2019 in London. The inspiration for more sustainability (initially in tourism and the leisure industry) was core to the direction of tfy-consult. At the same time, the Summit was also an inspiration for more "meaningful work" which was present at the origin of there-for-you.com.
The initiative, tfy-consult (there-for-you.com) provides SMEs with a digital "SME sustainability check-up". The "check-up" helps to link the topic of sustainability with the corporate strategy and to take the first steps in the right direction by means of a few, but targeted recommendations. Each SME makes an initial commitment when booking the check-up, and half of the costs are donated to the there-for-you.com platform, with which the company supports effective projects in the areas of climate protection, animal welfare, children's aid, and humanitarian aid. Through this enterprise, the organisation has been able to fund over 30 projects tackling issues related to climate change, animal welfare, child protection, and humanitarian crises, with more than €500,000.
“The inspiration for more sustainability already led to ideas in the direction of tfy-consult. At the same time, the Summit was an inspiration for more "meaningful work" at the origin of there-for-you.com.”
Refugee Outreach Programme
Refugee Outreach Programme - United Kingdom
Yousra Abdelmoneim, Deborah Owen
Business for Social Good
Yousra and Deborah were both dedicated to assisting with the refugee crisis before they attended the Summit. Yousra used PwC’s ‘One Firm One Day” scheme to provide time and assistance to the Refugee Council, whilst Deborah grew up supporting “Refugees at Home”. At the Summit in the Hague, Yousra connected with a fellow Ambassador who runs a refugee support centre in the Netherlands and seeing her work motivated Yousra to scale up the initiative and leverage the capacity of PwC.
Together they have developed the Refugee Outreach Programme, partnering with the Refugee Council and the CodeYourFuture team to help refugees integrate into the UK labour market successfully. Support ranges from CV writing to skills-based trainings, and basic introductions to the UK market. Employees who volunteer for the programme also receive training to improve the support they are able to provide the refugees. There was also a campaign during International Refugee Week, which included a documentary screening and a panel discussion.
Internally, as part of the refugee awareness sessions, participants receive contextual information on the refugee crisis and experience in the UK and listen to the personal story of someone from a refugee background. In the pandemic, the programme has been continued virtually, and to date, 463 people have attended 12 awareness sessions. Off the back of a session, one director was inspired to employ people of a refugee background, which has already led to the hiring of two full-time employees.
Of these participants, some of the PwC employees have gone on to use this knowledge as volunteers, to support the Refugee Outreach Programme. Each programme lasts between 4 and 5 weeks, whereby there is a skill-session run in partnership with the clients from a refugee background. Following the PwC-led sessions, partner organisations have recap sessions with the participants to ensure that the information has been received correctly, and 163 refugee “clients” have benefitted from this programme helping them to integrate into the labour market.
“One Young World has inspired me to take action to support Refugees at PwC by promoting refugee awareness and to recognise that everyone can help. It’s opened up my eyes to the role that private organisations can have in driving employability and equipping refugees with the skills to reach their maximum potential and to continue to serve our communities”
“One Young World has empowered me to go further in our work with supporting refugees at PwC, and critically analyse the project, to ensure that we are supporting those who need it most. It has given me the inspiration and drive to change the status quo and challenge leaders on their actions”
Leading Environmental Sustainability, Pfizer UK
Leading Environmental Sustainability, Pfizer UK - United Kingdom
Roos Bruggink, Steph Barnes
Business for Social Good
Environmental sustainability has been elevated to a business priority at Pfizer UK, a change that wouldn’t have happened without the energy of One Young World Ambassadors. The newest Ambassadors, Roos and Steph, are part of Pfizer’s Sustainability Steering Committee and have worked directly with the UK Country Manager and the UK’s Head of Corporate Social Responsibility to transform Pfizer UK’s approach to sustainability. They both attended the 2021 Munich Summit virtually. Together, they co-lead the Sustainability Steering Committee to innovate sustainable solutions through three main avenues: internal activation, governance, and external engagement.
The core of the governance-related work, and origin of the initiative, is carbon footprint measurement reporting and validation. One key success to this workstream has been a business commitment, verified by the Science-Based Target Initiative (SBTi), to the “Business Ambition for 1.5°C”. From humble origins, the team now reports to the Pfizer UK Board twice a year, presenting its findings alongside financial updates.
A large part of the internal strategy has been around fostering employee awareness and engagement. Roos and Steph built a partnership with Today Do This after attending their workshop at the 2021 Munich Summit. In November and December 2021, they ran 4 workshops as a pilot, engaging and educating 48 of their UK colleagues. Today Do This is an organisation that allows employees to think about their passions in the environmental space and to identify what is in their sphere of influence. Participants leave the 2-hour workshop with specific, measurable actions to make a positive difference and make more sustainable choices. A second partnership born of the Munich Summit was a self-facilitated Climate Interactive workshop. This helped their colleagues envision the current world state and the interventions required to keep global temperatures below 1.5-degrees. Externally, the Committee is responsible for representing and communicating sustainability at Pfizer UK to wider audiences and stakeholders.
In 2022, the team is expanding its scope to inform, inspire, and engage - both internally and externally - through a mass communications programme and an expansion of existing initiatives. This includes expansion of the Today Do This workshops, and the introduction of sustainability literacy for all UK Pfizer employees.
“One Young World gave us the opportunity to partner with some incredible organisations that are making real change in the world to empower UK colleagues to make more sustainable choices and take action within their sphere of influence. One Young World has personally given me the inspiration, motivation, and actions to hone my intrapreneur skills to generate positive change, allowing me to live by my purpose, aspire to inspire”
“Sustainability at Pfizer UK could never have had the energy, spark and pizzazz behind it without our attendance at the One Young World Summit. We were able to build connections with amazing people and organisations, even partnering with some to bring their work and purpose into Pfizer UK. Our involvement with One Young World has massively added gravitas to everything we do to make Pfizer more sustainable and has enabled us to continually learn and be inspired to make change”
S.T.A.R. Program
Working as a data scientist at Google, Lara and her colleague were concerned by the stereotypes, prejudices, and lack of female role models, that create obstacles to young women and girls in pursuing education and a career in STEM. Bringing together a group of volunteers in the organisation, with a shared passion for STEM subjects, she created the S.T.A.R. Program. S.T.A.R. is an acronym for stereotype breaking, tech training, advisory, and role modelling.
Lara was invited to the London Summit by her Manager in the Italian branch of the company, as a result of her achievement in this role but also due to her success in starting the S.T.A.R. Program. Already interested in the issue of the gender gap, she was inspired to involve more colleagues in the S.T.A.R. Program and expand its impact to help open opportunities for girls and young women in the area.
The S.T.A.R. Program is a workshop created and organised by volunteers for teenagers between 14 and 18 years old, to convey the importance of this subject and to encourage them to pursue this avenue of education. Lara and the team visit schools with workshops and a gamified approach to education. For younger participants, they developed simple coding exercises to give them the foundation for future education. During the pandemic, they shifted to a digital format to continue the education remotely. This allowed them to reach new people in 2021, with over 800 students, increasing their access to educational programmes through a new pipeline of running an event every month. Lara and the team have also built a parallel Train the Trainer format, to enable their colleagues and external educators to help to spread the content and its message.
The impact is measured through a pre and post programme survey that gauges how the sessions have affected students’ interest and understanding in STEM, and how the programme met students’ expectations. In the two schools where this has been conducted, there has been overwhelming approval of the programme.
“One Young World has been an experience that motivated me not only to do better but be better. A good message from One Young World was we cannot do everything, but we can do something. So I decided to focus more on this project, to strengthen the collaboration with my group, involve other colleagues and give this project a new wave of energy.”
CAMEX Purpose Team
Julián, a Reckitt employee for over 7 years, recently moved to Mexico to take on a new role as Legal Associate Director for Mexico and Central America. In doing so he left behind a legacy of impact in Colombia, typified by the Sustainability School. This project continues to educate employees about the UN SDGs and how their actions can improve sustainability outcomes both at work and in the community. The Purpose team led several programmes to guarantee that purpose is at the heart of decisions at Reckitt. In 2021, Reckitt donated more than 400 tonnes of relief products to people in need during the pandemic across México and Central America markets.
Julián brought his expertise to this new branch to lead a Purpose Team for the Mexico and Central America region. Julián collaborates with 11 other employees to ensure sustainability is at the forefront of decision making in the region. He learned lessons from his work in Colombia and transported the Sustainability College model. This has covered a variety of important topics from the fundamentals of the Sustainable Development Goals, to how employees can take that information home and generate their own impact. The monthly programme has increased from 10 participants to around 220 and continues to grow.
Julián has overseen various projects including a donation programme run in partnership with the World Food Bank. Through this products written off by the company for primarily superficial reasons, such as mispackaging, are donated to certified NGOs. This has expanded to also involve volunteering programmes in the communities where these NGOs operate, to provide hygiene workshops for the recipients to use Reckitt products effectively to tackle sanitation issues. Additionally, in his legal capacity, Julián is working with the Atizapan Factory to install solar panels across the factory to scale up clean, renewable energy use in the supply chain.
Julián also supports Reckitt’s Lead2030 mentorship for EkogroupH2O+. He believes in the importance of partnerships and how together we can accelerate the impact in our communities. See page X for more details on this partnership.
Ana Henriques, Anheuser-Busch InBev
Ana began her career in marketing with a general understanding of ‘sustainability’ but the concept seemed abstract to her work life. Quickly rising through the ranks at PepsiCo, she was invited to attend the One Young World Summit in 2013. The event in Johannesburg transformed this ‘abstract concept’ into something practical and actionable.
The sessions with global icons such as Kofi Anan and Professor Yunus and her personal interactions with young people driving impact provided the mindset shift Ana needed. She returned to her company inspired and motivated to use her skills and platform for social impact.
Back at PepsiCo, the team that attended the Summit was entrusted with an initiative to develop inclusivity and invest in the brain power of the company’s diverse talent. This allowed her to extend the One Young World experience as she continued to collaborate with diverse leaders across the organization. But Ana wanted more and she decided to broaden her horizons by pursuing an international experience, working in a variety of roles over the next 6 years, including placements in China between 2016 and 2019. Her desire to embed the SDGs within all her projects, even in her day to day, remained throughout.
In 2019, a new chapter and a new opportunity for social impact emerged in the form of a Global Vice President position at AB InBev. She was soon selected to lead the company’s global non-alcoholic beverage business, developing talent, and focusing marketing and campaigns around sustainability aligned with the organisation’s purpose. The position gave Ana the scope to manifest the spirit of One Young World.
Ana leads a global leadership programme for women in her team, helping tackle gender equality. The programme supports and empowers women to take on leadership roles, and collaborates with men in senior positions to support this process as allies. Further, in alignment with SDG 5, Ana is proud of the investment that two key brands in her portfolio have made towards gender equality in Brazil and Colombia, particularly focused in the sports’ world. This has included the creation and sponsorship of the first all-female e-sports team with Pony Malta in Colombia.
As a board member of the AB InBev Foundation, Ana worked to support funding for an accelerator initiative focused on underrepresented entrepreneurs who don’t have access to investment and network support. This process guarantees access to the resources required to turn an idea into an enterprise, which is otherwise only accessible by those with a more privileged background and network.
“The One Young World experience was an awakening – the realisation that I did have a platform to enable progress and personally impact change.”
Karla Parajeles, Western Union
As a young Western Union employee, Karla developed an interest in diversity and inclusion after speaking to a colleague who had recently attended a global gathering of young leaders in Bogotá. Her colleague had been inspired to bring sustainability issues back to the company and turn this concern into concrete action. Together, Karla and Bárbara González worked to promote young leaders within the company and launched the first DEI Committee.
Recognised for her leadership potential, Karla was selected to attend the 2018 edition of the international event attended by her colleague, the One Young World Summit in the Hague. This experience accelerated her ideas and her drive to make an impact in her job. One particular taxi journey with a fellow Western Union delegate, David Salazar, after attending a dinner where the two young leaders had interacted with refugees from Turkey, was the inspiration for launching a new project that could address the refugee crisis in Nicaragua at the time.
After the Summit, Karla took on leadership of the DEI committee which had inspired the creation of 10 new committees in WU offices around the world since the group formed in Costa Rica. The team have expertise across various topics from gender identity to mental wellbeing. Karla has expertise in the latter and has driven initiatives with the team to educate managers on identifying and supporting employees suffering from mental health issues, and runs workshops to improve awareness and understanding of mental wellbeing in the office. The growth of these projects and other campaigns on the matter has led to the transition into an independent wellness committee that has created a certification for managers to guarantee leadership in the company are equipped to deal with mental wellbeing matters.
Inspired by the aforementioned conversation with David, Karla launched a programme to assist the integration of refugees in Costa Rica. Taking a lesson from the Summit, she opened a dialogue with people from refugee and immigrant backgrounds to ensure the initiative was designed according to their needs. It explores how Western Union can be more inclusive of refugees in the hiring process, adjusting communications and requests so as not to discourage or discriminate against them. The team runs job fairs, volunteer days for employees to support refugee-run initiatives, and open days for refugee-run enterprises to sell their products or services to staff.
Karla continues to drive forward new sustainability initiatives in the company, with a new Advocates Programme in development. This will help to create a community of allies in the company, who advocate for DEI and support the work of the committee from outside the core team.
“One Young World allowed me to elevate my corporate profile and advance my career development by giving me the unimaginable opportunity to join my passion for humanitarian causes with the development of leadership skills. I have now grown from an individual contributor to a people manager and still invest time on the causes I respect.”
Young Advisory Board
Luka has sought to create more efficient channels of communication between senior executives and junior employees to influence leadership development and drive positive change in his company. Novartis recognised Luka’s potential by sending him to the 2019 London Summit. The stories recounted by highly successful fellow delegates inspired Luka to not just listen but lead, motivating him to take his own action.
Returning to Novartis, Luka held open discussions with senior leaders and explored leveraging the idea of creating broader impact through the ambition of like-minded colleagues and senior executives. The company encouraged Luka to launch a pilot version of a Young Advisory Board (YAB) with a global executive, comprised of fellow Ambassadors, and a Country President, connecting ambitious young minds who seek change and improvement.
The aim of the group is to create a safe, non-competitive environment, fostering collaboration between young professionals and senior executives to exchange ideas that have a significant impact on the business and culture of the company or broader environment. The YAB also serves as a sounding board for management decisions. The current generation of YAB meets monthly with the Country CEO, exchanging ideas and challenges, and collaborating on solutions. This serves both as leadership development for young employees, and as an invaluable resource for senior leaders. After each year-long cycle, 10 new employees aged between 25-35 replace the Board members, whilst two incumbents take on leadership roles for the new group. Each new generation sets out its unique values and goals at the beginning of its cycle.
The group has managed to launch initiatives affecting 6,000 employees in Slovenia with a focus on leadership development, sustainability, employee health and corporate change. As the Board becomes a more embedded part of company decision-making, the Young Advisory Board sets its sights on further improvements in the workplace and even sets an example for other companies in Slovenia to follow. Already, the initiative has been recognised nationally with the Golden Practice Award for innovative and efficient human resource practice.
“One Young World inspired me to take action and create change that impacts the company and broader environment. It has provided a platform to meet like-minded individuals who are creating a better tomorrow.”
Sabrina Wuersch, Buhler Group
Starting out as a young female, polymechanic in Bühler, sustainability has been a concern and a passion for Sabrina. It started out at an individual level, being aware of global inequality due in large part to her Brazilian heritage. However, it was while watching a One Young World highlight video in 2015 as the Bühler Group considered sending a delegation to the Summit that her interest was piqued.
Due to her proactivity and engagement as an apprentice, Sabrina and 5 other employees were chosen to attend the Ottawa Summit in 2016. The CTO & CHRO instructed them to “be inspired” and bring back their ideas and energy to drive the company forward, but she could not envisage how. Delegate speakers such as Micronesian climate activist Yolanda Joab opened her eyes to the inequality of these global challenges, and speeches from global leaders such as Professor Yunus showed Sabrina how change was possible.
Rather than focus upon one initiative, the team decided to try and create a movement in the company. This led to her forming Generation B, a grassroots movement that could drive employee engagement, spread sustainability awareness and action, and give young employees a voice that was heard and listened to by senior management. Inspired by sessions she attended at the Summit, Sabrina & the team launched a series of workshops to educate and train staff for sustainability internally.
She implemented the buddy system to make sure new employees were integrated socially and professionally into the 10,000+ person company. Another core programme of Generation B was the Experience Sharing Series, running mentorship sessions that connected employees to top international managers who shared advice and recommendations to help the team navigate the company and implement their ideas effectively.
To prevent these events and programmes from being dependent on the same individuals, and to encourage fresh ideas and innovations for the movement, Sabrina has passed on her role in the group but continues to support their activities. Instead, outside her current role as a Product Manager, she co-founded the initiative Kickstart with her HR D&I counterpart and fellow Ambassador, Corinne Schneider, and co-leads the group’s initiative inspiring young women to develop a career in STEM. The group of passionate colleagues around the world, platform and promote the stories of successful women in tech to present role models to young women starting out their careers.
Within her own role and as a product manager, Sabrina is also constantly working to minimise the negative impact, predominantly stemming from waste, and maximise sustainable innovations within her processes.
“One Young World was a true eye-opener to me. Back then 'sustainability' was a buzzword but I had no clue about the negative impacts around the world if they were not considered and lived in my life. It really made me think about how I can make change happen and was a driver into choosing a career where I can have impact on the whole world.”
AI Fairness Initiative
AI Fairness Initiative - United Kingdom
Finn Janson, Marta Batlle
Business for Social Good
Clinical trial populations have historically failed to represent certain demographics, in particular minority ethnicities, who are disproportionately impacted by a particular medical condition under research. In the USA, only 2% of clinical trial populations are black, despite Multiple Sclerosis having a 47% higher risk for this demographic than for white patients.
As data scientists at Roche, Finn and Marta are using artificial intelligence to improve patient outcomes. They are working to understand and correct bias in datasets used for medical research, by generating synthetic data that is representative of underrepresented populations. Having shared this solution with senior management, Finn and Marta were selected to represent Roche at the One Young World Summit in Munich.
After attending, they were inspired to formalise the AI Fairness initiative and established a squad to build a tool that identifies and corrects bias in medical datasets. The tool analyses and provides “bias metrics” for each patient population. It will also provide a solution for this bias, using methods such as the aforementioned synthetic data solution. This AI Fairness tool will help scientists to provide fair research outputs, improving patient outcomes across all populations. They are partnering with another group in Roche to apply their tool to the prediction of adverse events in clinical trials based on patients' data. This research will allow scientists to understand better how predictions for adverse events vary for different demographics, improving the predictive model for the benefit of underrepresented populations.
Finn and Marta are also working with a community in the company responsible for defining a best practice framework for using AI models. By integrating their initiative into this framework and giving guidance on the problem and how to solve it, Finn and Marta aim to make the AI Fairness solution standard practice within the research community at Roche.
"One Young World has inspired me to be bold and ambitious. The Summit and my fellow Ambassadors taught me how passion, expressed through dialogue, can be an impetus for powerful change."
Rishi Dorai, bp
For seven years, Rishi worked as a geologist in bp’s exploration businesses on projects across Europe, Africa and the Middle East. Encouraged by the role of large corporations in driving innovative solutions, Rishi was keen to explore the new challenges within bp, while in search of his own purpose. It was the perfect time for his introduction to One Young World.
bp provided Rishi with the opportunity to attend the 2017 Bogotá Summit. The inspiration from this global forum of leaders has since helped Rishi find his own purpose and shaped many aspects of his life and career. It reinvigorated his belief in the role of global organisations in driving positive impact and serving as amplifiers for social change. Since that first Summit, Rishi has returned each year, further honing how sustainability can align with his work.
Testament to bp’s support of its One Young World Ambassadors at an executive level, Rishi’s association with the programme opened doors in the company. With fellow Ambassador Kate Arbuthnot, Rishi was invited to participate in bp’s carbon strategy workshops. Together, they provided the perspectives of an emerging generation of young leaders in a room of industry veterans. The experience built Rishi’s confidence in his own voice and helped him form relationships with highly influential leaders at the forefront of the energy transition.
This experience led to Rishi being seconded into bp’s group strategy team in the summer of 2019. There he was tasked with developing a global portfolio model of bp’s Scope 1, 2, and 3 carbon emissions, the latter incorporating emissions associated with the use of energy products by its customers. Paired with solutions for emissions reductions, this was presented to bp executives, and ultimately landed Rishi a permanent role in the team. As part of Bernard Looney’s transition into his role as bp’s new CEO in late 2019, Rishi was invited to join a special project team tasked with developing the company’s route to net-zero along with a strategy to turn this ambition into action. It was a ground-breaking move – bp was the first in its sector to announce a net-zero ambition and lean into the energy transition at this scale.
It was this spirit of leveraging a company as an amplifier for positive impact that enabled Rishi to find himself in a role that not only changed the course of his company, but trailblazed a path for industry-wide impact, with many of bp’s peers since following suit.
Rishi was appointed to the role of ESG Director in Strategy & Sustainability, where he continues to play an active role in bp’s sustainability journey. Alongside this, Rishi was announced as One Young World’s Coordinating Ambassador for the UK & Ireland, where he keeps Ambassadors engaged and connected, providing a springboard from which to progress their own impact journeys.
“My One Young World experiences inspired a stubborn determination that I needed to find a way to connect my purpose with that of what I do at work. Moreover, it helped me realise that – with the resources, reach and support of a global organisation behind you – you really do have the power to change the world.”
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 Stories: short biographies of Ambassadors who are growing into influential leaders for social good in some of the world’s largest companies.
- Covid Young Leaders Fund: detailed case studies of grant recipients from One Young World's 2020 funding opportunity for projects tackling the COVID-19 pandemic.
- Lead2030: detailed case studies of the Lead2030 award winners and how their projects have generated impact from participating in the programme.