Seval, Rani, and three other colleagues attended One Young World The Hague in 2018 as part of the first delegation representing Centrient Pharmaceuticals. They returned to the company with the message “If not me, then who”, and the sense that no one is too small to make a positive social impact.

They realised there was a lack of platform for passionate young professionals to get together to co-create. Thus, they established an internal “Global Purpose Platform” led by young professionals.  The purpose of the platform is to engage and empower young professionals to work on initiatives contributing to social and environmental issues and their own professional development, through collaborative means and engagement programmes.

There are now a total of 11 One Young World Ambassadors based in a variety of locations around the world leading their operations..  In Mexico, kick off of purpose platform included external NGO and government authorities to inspire employees to take action and  bring it positive change to their communities and environment. In 2018, they identified five themes they would aim to address: Environment, Social, Health, Inclusivity and Youth. To address these through the platform, they have organised four awareness workshops and mini-conferences on issues related to antimicrobial resistance and sustainability issues, climate change and irresponsible manufacturing practices.

At the One Young World Summit in London, Ambassadors led a workshop on the threat of antimicrobial resistance with fellow pharmaceutical company GSK. In the Netherlands, the local team started to improve office sustainability inspired by One Young World Ambassadors taking action on plastic pollution, and launched the “No disposable coffee cups challenge”.  This is slowly being adopted in other sites globally. So far they have avoided over 80,000 cups going to landfill/incineration and over 140,000 kg of CO2 emissions within a year. They also placed recycling containers on each floor to separate waste and to make people more conscious about what they produce daily in the office. 

The Ambassadors run monthly board meetings with ‘regional champions’ to monitor the engagement and plan for upcoming activities. This group is just at the beginning of its journey as it seeks to build engagement in their activities and the frequency of their events to ensure their sustained positive impact.
 

Sean and Iina credit the One Young World Summit in 2019 as the launchpad for their new initiative, The Activist Network. The aim of this project is to use the scale and reach of The Coca-Cola Company to make positive change on a scale not feasible as an individual.

A first step they took was to map the company’s social impact and focus to align with the SDGs, a ‘language’ they had not been using prior to the Summit. They identified SDG 10, 12 and 13 as the closest to their goals and values as a business in Western Europe. They explored the policies the company already had, and simultaneously identified areas they could push the business to go further on to drive change. From this research, the team proposed their vision for the company’s future and presented it to the senior leadership with the basic principle of making their company, Coca-Cola, the best it could be. 

The Activist Network was announced at the company-wide conference at the beginning of 2020. It is open to anyone who works for The Coca-Cola Company in Western Europe and has a passion to drive change within the organisation. All are invited to identify the SDG they most align with, and from these they identify a core project they will dedicate their time to. They will then reconvene to discuss the impact and where they can take the initiative forward. This varies from internal projects to make the workplace more inclusive, to external initiatives to benefit the community they work in.

The group is aligned with the CEO’s purpose, and will monitor the impact which is accelerated through their network.
 

Jordan leads Dove Men+Care’s social mission to pass the national Paid Family Leave policy in the USA, where 85% of fathers do not have a single day of paid paternity leave. This entrenches workplace inequality and traditional gender roles. 

In 2018, on Father’s Day in the USA, the company announced the its commitment to paid paternity leave. However, it was returning from the One Young World 2018 Summit in The Hague, galvanised by the words of other Ambassadors and Paul Polman, CEO of Unilever at the time, when Jordan was inspired to take a step further and combine brand marketing with a social movement. His own expertise lobbying for climate change solutions gave him the foundations to utilise the mechanism at Dove Men+Care’s disposal to change governmental legislation. 

Since it launched the public mission in February 2019, over 40,000 people have joined the pledge. After Jordan led a day of action in Washington DC, the team met with 23 bipartisan members of Congress, have received coverage from every national news network, and moved the topic onto the national media agenda when a Congressman from Texas referenced the work in a public hearing since the House of Representatives. 

In 2018 the group also championed the Unilever Paid Parental Leave Standard that gives over 81,000 global Unilever employees a minimum 3 weeks of paid family leave regardless of working status. More so, Jordan is at the forefront of this campaign with the potential to impact over 200 million working men and women.
 

With a partnership established through Sebastián Arévalo and Jesús Tabares, fellow Ambassadors at the One Young World Summit in Bogotá, Pasos Libres and IBM joined forces to run the Data Jam Pasos Libres in Colombia. 

The DataJam Pasos Libres is a technological innovation competition that seeks to develop data-based solutions to identify human trafficking patterns, networks and hotspots. The event is characterized by bringing together young people, non-profit organizations, companies, governments and international cooperation interested in the use of technology and data to solve complex problems. The competition was born out of the success of the BlueHack Against Human Trafficking created in 2018 by Fundación Pasos Libres and IBM and supported by the One Young World, the British Embassy in Colombia and the Bogotá City Hall.

From DataJam, Pasos Libres has become the first Latin American partner of the Traffik Analysis Hub (TA Hub), a revolutionary partnership across industries and sectors including financial institutions, NGOs, law enforcement and government agencies, all unified by the common goal of sharing data to stop human trafficking. Now live and operational, using advanced cognitive technologies developed by IBM, the TA Hub partners gather information and share highly accessible analysis of human trafficking as part of their day-to-day business. Other TA Hub partners and founders include IBM, Stop the Traffik, Barclays, Interpol, Liberty Shared, Love Justice International and Western Union.  

The new version of the DataJam Pasos Libres in 2020 will be a means to promote the TA Hub in Latin America and a source of solutions and data cases that can be incorporated into the Hub from a Latin American perspective. IBM has also committed to providing a Service Corps team to Pasos Libres in 2020, to be comprised of six IBM consultants and data scientists who will engage on the ground in support of the DataJam and output for projects to be implemented in South America.
 

Together with Founder Mario Aguilera and Co-Founder Yesika A. Robles, Caritta co-founded Tespack, a social enterprise which aims to make people energy-independent by designing and developing unique mobile energy solutions by combining solar energy with power electronics and IoT. She attended the One Young World Summit in The Hague through the Audi Environmental Foundation Scholarship, a relationship which developed into an exciting collaboration to create social impact.

Audi Environmental Foundation and Tespack are launching a pilot project in Peru to provide environmental awareness on the topics of rainforest and deforestation. This is being run in collaboration with a Peruvian NGO, and the NGO workers require energy sources to operate in remote locations. As a result, Tespack is providing the front-line educators with renewable energy sources so they can operate in remote communities with no energy grid. This replicates the work of other successful projects using off-grid renewable energy sources in Ethiopia and Uganda as done in collaboration with Plan International. 

Through this project, future initiatives, and the long-term partnership which they have established with the Audi Environmental Foundation and Plan International, Tespack has exponentially increased its capacity for social impact by facilitating the essential work of Plan International. The renewable and clean nature of the energy they provide also prevents the harmful consequences of alternative solutions.

Carlos was a part of BRP’s 2018 delegation at One Young World The Hague. With a newfound appreciation for BRP’s connection to the environment, he established a partnership with a local NGO called Fundación Conciencia Biológica to support a conservation initiative in the Chihuahuan Desert outside Ciudad Juárez, one of two cities where BRP is based in Mexico. The project has 4 main goals: water retention; soil retention; biodiversity and conservation; storage and capture of CO2.

BRP provides the necessary equipment to support and monitor the conservation effort, including BRP’s own off-road vehicles. The initiaitve includes an assessment of vegetation density, identifying areas that require immediate attention, recording the endemic flora and fauna and calculating the CO2 stored. 

This project is carried out in 20 visits to the area, the selection of six sample areas, and drone monitoring. Through protecting this region, the team are helping to preserve an area which stores 13,985 tonnes of CO2, 49 animal species, and 25 plant species. This goes some way to mitigating the organisation’s footprint in the region. The scientific research and practical results can also be used to improve environmental awareness and education in the area, so landowners will protect their own land. The NGO hopes this will have a multiplier effect.

BRP and Carlos’ model in Mexico is one which can be replicated worldwide, and serves as a benchmark for social impact action in the company.
 

Julián left One Young World 2017 inspired but with no clear route of action. He connected with a project supporting the most vulnerable communities in District 18 in Cali. The forced migration of rural communities as a result of the civil war has resulted in many being underserved by social services such as healthcare and education.

In the last few years, with the support of RB, the project has provided five protective spaces for over 5,000 children, providing nursery spaces, education services and new opportunities to grow and live in peace.  It has impacted over 400 families with a social programme to help the community to better support itself. A further 20 women have been provided with leadership training. These initiatives contribute to the long-term sustainability of the project so it is not indefinitely reliant on support from volunteers and RB. 

The next phase is for Julián and RB is to leverage the company’s expertise to address clean water issues and sanitation in the community, and replicate this model in more and more communities around Colombia.

This new stage is transforming cultural hygiene practices linked with Lysol and Sanpic brands impacting more than 560 families and around 3.800 people in this same district through social and environmental education programmes which will allow people to have healthier lives and happier homes.  

This is a new era of the project. RB is now restoring the communities eco-socially allowing them to have a new way of living. Eco-restoration will reduce the environmental impact on the Melendez river which is one of the main hydric sources of Cali, Valle del Cauca. Social-restoration will transform hygiene practices by changing the waste management habits.
 

Since 2018, when she attended the One Young World Summit in The Hague, Andrea has been part of a team leading a pilot project on recycling for Coca-Cola in Ica, Peru. Andrea and the group of young leaders have installed PET bottle collection bins at shops throughout the city. These collection points serve the community in three ways; they create recycling opportunities and awareness amongst consumers, allow for the reduction of CO2 emissions through the reuse of materials and provide formal employment for waste collectors.

The collection bins make recycling of PET bottles easily accessible for consumers. To further increase the attractiveness of recycling, prize draws are run for those who return their bottles in these bins. In doing so the pilot makes recycling more fun and attractive. The PET materials are picked up by waste collectors once a week. Through an app, collectors connect to those involved with the incentive. 50 collectors have secured employment in this manner collecting 3 times more than a regular collection point. This adds to the primary positive environmental outcome, that the collection of these bottles serves the purpose of recycling. 

Another key feature in this project are alliances between Coca-Cola, government and civil society. Local authorities are supporting it as a partner. The team aims to scale up from this pilot to a nationwide programme and in doing so, hopes to contribute to awareness amongst consumers and a world without waste.
 

Rosario is the producer and host of the podcast ‘Prix Pictet: A lens on sustainability’ where they ask: can photography save us from ourselves? She founded the project as a spin-off of the Prix Pictet due to the lack of awareness of the role that photography plays in sustainability outside of industry circles. 

As part of her role as Corporate Communications Officer, Rosario is part of the team that manages the Prix Pictet, the leading global award on photography and sustainability. Her podcast spreads the message of the prize to a wider audience, outside the fine arts community. It aims to draw global attention to issues of sustainability through the medium, interviewing prestigious thinkers such as war photographer Don McCullin, Turkish novelist Elif Shafak, Editor of GQ UK Dylan Jones, and Curator of Photography at the MET Jeff Rosenheim, among others. 

In the first series, Rosario addressed the topics of hope, conflict, consumption, and displacement. They have reached well over 2,000 individual listeners primarily based in France, Switzerland, UK, and the USA. One of these listeners, inspired by the podcast, invited Rosario to speak at the TEDxHultLondon event, widening her audience even more.

Her podcast was recently renewed for a second series, which will be aired in 2020, wherein Rosario aims to widen the scope of the topics and their reach. The One Young World Summit inspired her to broaden her scope and ambitions, and to tap into the inspirational Community of young leaders with experience and expertise on the issues she hopes to address.

Carolina started working for AB InBev in 2017, taking the role of Sustainability Lead and then Manager in Colombia at the time of a new sustainable direction for the company. 

As a result, Carolina launched a project in the High Andean Wetlands, on which 70% of Colombia is reliant for water. The area is extremely vulnerable to the consequences of climate change. Carolina sought to address this with a conservation initiative in Santurban, a High Andean Wetland that provides water to more than 2 million people and is critically endangered. The project promotes voluntary agreements with local farmers to do forest restoration, preservation and sustainable agriculture in the buffer zone of the High Andean Wetland, the zone where the ecosystems suffer more pressures due to unsustainable productive activities.  The pilot programme was launched in 2018. The project has worked alongside farmers to improve their livelihoods and ensure local ownership simultaneously. The programme was launched in full as of 2019 when it became one of the key initiatives led by the company with an investment of nearly $1 million to scale up its ambition. Currently the project has impacted 9 municipalities, protected 3,700+ hectares and benefited more than 590 farmers.   

To ensure the longevity of the High Andean Wetlands project, the team designed and launched a new water brand called Zalva, the first purposeful brand in AB InBev’s portfolio in Colombia.  The brand has committed to invest most of its revenue to High Andean Wetland protection, initially funding this project in Santurban and then investing in other High Andean Wetlands in the country. This has ensured the project’s long term sustainability and scale. Aligned with the sustainability commitments of the project, this water was the first to be sold in 100% recycled PET bottles and will transition to more sustainable packaging such as returnable glass. The success of this project has led to the demand for its replication in eight more high risk watersheds across Latin America in Carolina’s new role as Sustainability Manager for the Middle Americas region that covers more than 10 countries. Her two main projects will focus on improving water availability for the Rimac River Watershed in Lima, Peru, and in the Calera aquifer in Zacatecas, Mexico.
 

In her role as Sustainability Manager at Waitrose & Partners, Danielle was on the core team delivering an industry-leading packaging reduction initiative, Waitrose Unpacked.

The Waitrose Unpacked test launched in Oxford in summer 2019 and saw more than 200 products removed from their packaging to test how customers might be prepared to shop differently in the future, with the aim of saving thousands of tonnes of unnecessary plastic.

The concepts tested included, the largest range of loose fruit and veg of any national supermarket, 28 varieties of dried goods available to buy from refill dispensers, beers and wines on tap, frozen fruit to pick and mix, coffee to dispense and grind in store. Customers were encouraged to bring their own containers, or were able to borrow reusable boxes in store. The test period was initially 11 weeks, but an overwhelmingly positive response saw the trial extended and introduced into three further stores by the end of the year. 

Danielle has been working with environmental specialists to model the environmental impact of the Unpacked across the full supply chain. The findings have not yet been published but it is clear that it has the potential to significantly reduce single-use packaging. 

Additional initiatives which Danielle has worked on include Plan Plastic: The Million Pound Challenge, to fund five of the most innovative, impactful and interesting approaches to tackling plastic pollution. She presented her story during the Ambassadors in Action sessions at the One Young World 2019 Summit in London, and spoke at a One Young World London Caucus on solutions to climate change. Danielle has been a leading figure in the One Young World Plastics Working Group.

The UN has reported that 1.6 billion people live in inadequate housing in a push for affordable homes (1). Another troubling statistic regarding the construction industry is that it is responsible for around 40% of global energy consumption (2). Inspired by this issue, Yaseen and two fellow civil engineering students founded ModulusTech in June 2016. 

ModulusTech has invented a housing design that can be flat-packed and built in as little as three hours, at an extremely affordable cost of $11 per square foot. The flat-pack design allows 11 of these houses to be transported on a single truck, making it cheaper to transport. The materials are environment-friendly while the structure can withstand cyclonic winds, earthquakes and survive harsh climates. 

The organisation operates in Pakistan with a tight knit team of nine full-time employees, and has been supported with grants from their partners UNIDO, UNEP and the Islamic Development Bank totalling $120,000. The team has also secured cumulative $5,000 from the Momentum Tech conference and Hashoo Youth Entrepreneurship. This money has been invested into buildings which have provided accommodation to over 150 people. 

An expansion ModulusTech built for a local school provided access to education for 100 young girls. Additionally, the houses provide insulation three times more efficient than standard housing guidelines saving on utilities spending.

The team is currently developing a model that allows the refugees or the underprivileged population to mortgage these houses on simple and beneficial terms. Yaseen refers back to being connected with Paul Polman at the One Young World Summit which pushed him to focus more on the sustainability of their work, whilst fellow Ambassadors instilled in him an ambition to scale their work as much as possible.    

Sources:

(1) https://news.un.org/en/story/2017/10/567552-affordable-housing-key-deve…

(2) https://www.euractiv.com/section/climate-environment/video/decarbonisin…

Wandile is the CEO and Co-Founder of Ubuntu Design Group, a project which uses architecture and housing to overcome financial exclusion in a sustainable manner. He identified the issue that around 13% of South African families lack access to dignified housing (1) and set about correcting that injustice with his idea in 2015.

Wandile and his team recognised that the flaws of social housing is that it excludes consultation with the families, often are located far from economic opportunities, and lack the space for growth. As a result, Ubuntu properties are designed for each family specifically with the capacity to add space later, and each one contains a commercial space to allow for them to move beyond poverty. 

In 2017, the company built their pilot project for a low-income Durban based family also struggling with a disability. The commercial space was designed for their daycare SME. This project inspired Ubuntu to develop a unique model to work with both public and private companies to provide micro-mortgages for entrepreneurial low-income families. Not only did this provide dignified housing to a vulnerable family, but tripled the income of their small-business. 

Since the organisation was officially accredited in 2018, they have built households for 10 families, including rainwater collection systems which provided free, clean water directly into each household.

In 2020, Wandile aims to build a further 36 households, for which the organisation must fundraise an additional $1 million.

Sources:

(1) https://www.ohchr.org/Documents/Issues/Housing/InformalSettlements/SERI…

Sara founded BUTA Art & Sweets to tackle the issue of unemployment in underprivileged communities, particularly vulnerable women. In Azerbaijan, there is no specific constitutional protection for the rights of women with disabilities (1). Sara’s personal research uncovered that 95% of women with ‘special needs’ are unemployed.

She began her organisation with a personal investment of 160 manat. The principle is to provide vocational skills training to women who are domestic care-givers, and women with disabilities, to financially empower them. 

Sara has organised over 20 programmes, led by women, for 17 women who are part of the organisation. Using the skills they learn from this programme, and with access to the 60 partner organisations Sara has identified, the participants earn around 200 manat per month from their produce. 

An additional 15 women from outside the programme have also attended workshops to develop their skill base, receiving the same access to education without the in-kind social support which Sara offers to the regular programme participants (e.g. travel discounts). 

This has all been achieved with no grants or sponsorship, growing organically to become one of the first organisations in Azerbaijan to focus on this issue. Sara hopes to have an indirect and exponential impact on cultural attitudes to disabilities and gender issues. 

Sara is also promoting the concept of social business in the country, where there is currently no definition in official legislation. Her proposal is currently being pushed through the government, and could have substantial long-term contribution to social investment in Azerbaijan.

Sara’s attendance at the One Young World Summit in 2018 has altered how her work is perceived locally, as it has received global recognition. She has reached bigger prospective partners as a consequence, and is on the verge of establishing 20 new business partnerships to accelerate her work.

Orlando is the Founder and Director of Km1, a youth-led coastal and marine conservation team focused on addressing marine litter, while also seeking to empower and involve the next generation of ocean leaders with environmental education programmes, social innovation workshops and citizen science projects.Since those humble origins, the organisation has formalised and professionalised with two main arms to its social impact: education and action. 

On the frontline, Orlando organises monthly beach cleanups, mobilising a network of young students. These efforts have intercepted and removed approximately 80,000 pounds (36,287kg) of plastic waste, which would otherwise be washed out to sea and incur irreversible damage to the ecosystem. 

As a long-term solution, Km1 hosts educational workshops in schools, businesses and even government departments to espouse the values of Km1, teach the science of climate change, and educate people how to make a difference. This reaches around 2,000 people per month. Since inception of the programmes in 2016, they have provided environmental education to over 100,000 Mexican youths. 

The support of the UN Environmental Programme Mexico and the Commission for Environmental Cooperation has been essential in reaching the level of impact Km1 have achieved. 

The organisation has also established a partnership with the UN for Clean Seas Workshops, and advocated locally and with a regional Commission to ban plastic bags in the city of Tijuana, the first Mexican city on the border with the US to approve a ban on disposable plastic bags. This measure will come into action in 2020 and will grant businesses a 24 month adaptation period. In a city which consumes 10.2 million single-use plastic bags, the impact will be monumental. 

Additionally, Km1 is building the Youth for the Ocean National Network, a structure that will gather coastal, marine and oceanic youth-led projects from across the country and will focus on advancing research, innovation, capacity building, and public policy.