From an extraordinarily young age, Maya Penn has had a strong ambition to create positive social change by utilizing her gift and passion for fashion. Her main mission is to pursue sustainability and environmental justice, and she’s not afraid to think big to achieve those goals. Though she is twenty years old now with more accolades than most people will achieve in their lifetimes, her journey started when she was eight years old when she told her mom she wanted to create sustainable fashion. She started this process, still as an eight year old, by making headbands and scarves from old clothing around her house. By ten she taught herself to code HTML in order to develop a website for herself to sell her products. Her fashion ecommerce business is called Maya’s Ideas for the Planet, and is still booming online today. As a result of her ten year old ecommerce creation, she received recognition from Forbes magazine, and since then has also been featured in Huffington Post, Business Insider, Entrepreneur Magazine, NPR, ESSENCE, The View, CNN, TIME, CBS This Morning with Gayle King, O Magazine, Ebony, The Steve Harvey Show, VICE, Wired, Adobe, and more.

Since she opened her online business, she has expanded to creating and selling a wide variety of products including artwork, bags, hair accessories, hats, jewelry, beauty products, scarves, blouses, vintage clothing, and yoga wear. Not only does she have a great number of different types of goods, but each one is surprisingly unique and also sustainable. With all of these unique products, Maya exhibits an unthinkable level of creativity and boldness, making her a fantastic inspiration as an entrepreneur.

Maya differentiates herself in a way that has proved to be particularly motivational to a watching world and key to her success. She emphasizes her mission “to fight for environmental justice, climate justice, and diversity and equity in STEM and tech in creative careers.” In fact, she has made such an impression through her business that it has led to many speaking engagements, making her into a “humanitarian and environmental activist.” Her dedication to her various passions is surely an inspiration to me and to all who know her!

My incredible roommate Emma Ruby has always been artistically talented and ambitious for her age. As a young teen, she started her own blog where she expressed her creative talent through words, although she knew she had a gift for painting as well. When she was 15 years old, she got the idea, with the help of some inspiration from Pinterest, to try painting Bibles, and to simultaneously use that artistic exploration as an element of content for her blog.

She started off small, giving her first painted Bible to a young girl she was mentoring through a program called Bright Lights. Soon after that success, she decided to make a few new designs and try selling them through her blog and Instagram account that she created for the new company. Much to her delight, this primary launch sold out within the first few days.

Not knowing anyone who had painted Bibles before, Emma Ruby started trying this painting project from scratch and learned a lot through trial and error. She tried painting different types of covers, including hardcover, softcover and glossy, and found out soon enough that only hardcover worked for the paint. She went through a similar discovery process with the paint itself, and reflects that this process of experimentation helped her to learn to not give up or throw it away when it wasn’t working. She says “there were so many times when I thought I can not do this… but you just keep trying until it works and eventually it will work.” With that came “a lot of disasters… a lot of spilled paint, spilled water” but she says that she eventually realized “you can recover from anything.”

As Emma refined her product, she was able to connect with a local boutique called this Little Light of Mine in downtown York, PA where the owner graciously let her sell her Bibles through the shop. This helped grow her business significantly, enabling the transition from selling mainly to friends and family to having strangers reach out to her after picking up a business card at the boutique. Ultimately, through her blog, Instagram, personal networking and the boutique, she sold around 54 hand painted Bibles in the span of a year and a half before moving on to another job where she was able to save up more for college.

Though her business wasn’t the biggest, most booming or flashy startup on this blog, Emma Ruby’s entrepreneurial spirit blesses me. I love her desire to use her God given gift to inspire in people a desire to read the Bible, the very Word of God. I hope Emma Ruby’s story can be a motivator for all young Christians to decide to put their love for God into action by using their gifts, because we never know what the Lord may do with that obedience to bring glory to Himself!