Ambassador Spotlights: June 2022

One Young World Ambassadors are leading projects in every country of the world, creating substantial social impact across all 17 Sustainable Development Goals. Every month our Coordinating Ambassadors select someone from their region who has created significant social impact locally, regionally or even worldwide.

An Overview of this Month's Featured Projects

20 K

homeless people helped

40 K+

young people brought together

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Meet the Ambassadors

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Brazil

Bruna Borges

Um Gesto Solidário is an apolitical non-profit organisation working to help Brazil's homeless population. The project was founded by Bruna as a collaborative effort to coordinate, collect, sort, store and deliver vital supplies. Today, the organisation is made up of a fixed group of 6 volunteers, though other people who want to help are always welcome to do so. Over a hundred volunteers have participated so far, bringing empathy and compassion to those in need. Um Gesto Solidário distributes snacks, drinks, and hygiene items, as well as weather-specific clothing such as hats, blankets, gloves and socks. The organisation has developed key partnerships with schools and companies to promote campaigns and accelerate donations. Recently, a winter-wear campaign was completed through which more than 500 pieces of warm clothing were collected and donated to homeless people.

 

In the past year, Um Gesto Solidário has managed to successfully carry out more than a hundred actions with approximately 20,000 people helped. Bruna is a strong believer in the idea that people need attention and affection in order to change their lives, and her work hopes to plant the seed to help bring positive change today and instil hope for tomorrow.

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Bahrain

Najma Ghuloom

Majra.me is an online career platform that aims to help young people in Bahrain expand their career opportunities and make better career choices. Co-founded by Najma Ghuloom, Majra addresses the issue of youth unemployment and retention by helping jobseekers transition from college life to the professional world. Since its launch in 2016, Majra has helped hundreds of young Bahrainis discover the right career paths for them and land jobs in diverse fields and industries. In the process, it has become the leading platform for hiring local talent.

Majra also works closely with jobseekers to help develop their skills through coaching services, career guidance workshops, and events. The platform has also developed engaging digital content to help jobseekers better understand the work cultures of the organisations they apply to through insider looks at prospective employers.

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Paraguay

Nel Vera

Paraguay has one of the youngest demographics in Latin America, with 77% of the population under the age of 35. Encontrémonos is an organisation dedicated to training young leaders in the country, linking together partners in order to build personal connections to facilitate social development. As CEO, Nel overseas the Encontrémonos' innovative methodology, which includes workshops, meet-ups throughout the country, and training programmes to ensure participants have a global perspective while generating local impact.

Encontrémonos has reached over 20,000 people since its founding, expanding the contact network of participants at both a national and international level. Encontrémonos hopes to reach the entire country and form a national platform, in order to transform Paraguay into a country that exports leaders and ideas.

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United Kingdom

Jemima Lovatt

Thrive Future is a social enterprise founded by Jemima Lovatt in 2020 that believes education is the key to achieving equality and progress for people and the planet. The organisation's focus is on SDG 5, Gender Equality, and it contributes to the fulfilment of this Sustainable Development Goal by providing trainings for corporate businesses to tackle taboo gender inequalities such as domestic abuse, sexual harassment, and unequal pay. To date, Thrive Future has trained 1,944 people, who have consequently developed a thorough understanding of taboo gender inequalities and practical steps to take when facing such problems.

 

The organisation has 750 members on its free digital education platform, Thrive+, and has provided expert research on 186 countries. It has also run a Law Changers' Network of 25 gender equality advocates. Thrive+ is an innovative digital platform offering educational articles, videos and a space for discussion. Jemima also recently won the 2022 Commonwealth Youth Award for Europe and Canada, in recognition of her work.

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Montenegro

Katarina Bošković

Katarina is the Founder and President of The European Association for Law and Finance (EALF), a non-governmental organisation engaged in legal, legislative, economic and cultural issues through advocacy, research, education, and litigation. The EALF advocates for and engages in a multidisciplinary approach to advance peacebuilding and conflict prevention in the Balkans region. It does this by analysing and addressing the causes of conflict, researching peacebuilding in innovative and regionally grounded programmes, engaging with peacebuilding practice and policy, identifying key issues and national players in the transitional justice process, educating young peacebuilders, improving information, strengthening regional youth mobility, providing support for war victims, and establishing national forums.

The initiative has so far brought more than 20,000 young people and 1,000 leaders, civil servants, war victims, and experts from the region and elsewhere, and has provided opportunities to collaboratively reflect on the wrongs of the past and rebuild intercommunal respect and trusting relationships. The initiative emphasises working with groups traditionally under-represented in discourse on war victims, such as sexual assault victims.

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Austria

Flory Achammer and Emma Hoch

Wondr is an app co-founded by 4 women, including One Young World Ambassadors Flory Achammer and Emma Hoch. It enables human connection throughout people's daily lives. Originally developed during the height of the COVID-19 Pandemic, the project began as WondrWalk, an initiative focused on matching people in the same locations with similar interests and time availability to go on weekly walks together with guiding questions. The initiative aimed to help young people maintain a semblance of social life amid lockdowns. This led to an increase in connectivity, positivity, and emotional alignment, all while ensuring regulations were followed.


Wondr has since evolved into a mobile app that anyone can enjoy with any person: family members, old friends, strangers, or even groups. The app encourages users to get to know each other through highly engaging questions and activities. The platform has been used by over 2,000 people worldwide since it went live. 

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Honduras

José Daniel Madrigal Cerrato

Sustenta Honduras is a youth-led NGO whose mission is to encourage youth participation in sustainable development through capacity-building, opportunities, and Action for Climate Empowerment (ACE). As a Founding Member, José has represented Sustenta Honduras in the Task Force on Climate Change in the Northern Triangle, an initiative led by the Inter-American Dialogue. The Task Force met three times between September 2021 and February 2022 to provide inputs for a series of policy reports. Task Force members included representatives of environmental organisations, rural, indigenous, and Afro-descendant communities, young activities, prominent former government officials, business leaders, and technical experts.

José attended meetings with USAID's Northern Triangle Task Force, the Office of the Special Presidential Envoy for Climate, and congressional staff from the House Foreign Affairs Committee, and the Senate Foreign Relations Committee. José recommended incubators as a way to build the capacity of youth climate organizations to advocate for a more inclusive and robust response to the climate crisis.
 

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Timor-Leste

Dircia Sarmento Belo

Timor-Leste is highly vulnerable to natural disasters. In April 2021, the country was hit with catastrophic floods and landslides resulting in loss of life and massive infrastructure damage. To raise awareness of climate change, COY16 country coordinators partnered with the Timorese Youth Initiative for Development and Laudato Si Animators Timor-Leste to organise the Local Conference of Youth (LCOY). The conference connected individuals, academics, and youth groups at both a local and global level, informing them about government responses to climate change, and raising their voices by creating a set of proposed actions to be incorporated into Timor Leste's national statement.

About 30 young people attended the conference, with women accounting for 70% of this number. Delegates attended a pre-conference session in order to understand the international framework for combatting climate change. The main conference involved speakers and panellists from various organisations focused on climate adaptation and mitigation, as well as government strategies for addressing this issue. Delegates also learned about project management. In total, 87 people participated across three days. The LCOY received grants from UNDP Timor-Leste, US Embassy Dili, National Bank of Commerce of Timor-Leste (BNCTL), and in-kind support from Government Timor-Leste through the Secretary of State for the Environment. 

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South Africa

Levern Ramshubby

Along with a colleague, Levern established a staff-led committee formed during the height of the COVID-19 Pandemic in 2020 to support communities in South Africa. The organisers firmly believe that PwC Advisory SA has a role to play in supporting communities in need, and the success of the committee led to the formal establishment of the Societal Impact Strategic Pillar, of which Levern serves as co-chair. The Societal Impact Strategic Pillar is guided by PwC's values and rooted in its corporate purpose. Its approach to corporate responsibility suggests a proactive and intentional strategy to innovate through understanding societal challenges not as business constraints, but as opportunities to utilitise core competencies and bring about positive change.

The Social Impact Strategic Pillar's impact is focused on three key areas: education, environment, and community impact. To date, the initiative has supported over 1,500 people. Through its COVID-19 crisis response, it raised R374,477, supported 422 families with nutrition, helped 15 learners and two early education centres, as well as 14 organisations nationally. The initiative also developed a six-month skilled programme to support unemployed young people, with 36 people impacted in partnership with two NGOs.

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Switzerland

Dennis Beemsterboer

After Dennis came back from the One Young World Summit in Munich, he felt an urge to do something for a more sustainable food system. He noticed while grocery shopping that it seemed almost impossible to avoid plastic waste, and that it was difficult to estimate the exact amount of food you need each week, making waste unavoidable. He realised that this situation can be substantiated using real data: Switzerland generates about 100kg of plastic waste per year per person, more than three times the European average, and 38% of all food waste comes from households. To help combat this Dennis co-founded Happie Zero Waste.

Together with a colleague, Dennis began creating reusable bags and jars to provide customers every week with healthy and tasty seasonal recipes. Each bag provides customers with exactly the right amount of ingredients to make a recipe so as to avoid food waste. The project also focuses on sourcing sustainable, local ingredients, making it to the finals of the Swiss Sustainability Challenge and Climate Launchpad. In the coming months, Dennis hopes to increase the impact of Happie Zero Waste even more by enabling CO2 calculation features on its website.