Benelab is an alternative search engine that donates all of its ad revenue to charity. Jack Kim founded the non-profit when he was 16, in 2011, after realizing how much money a major search engine, like google, is able to generate. Searching for information is one of the largest markets on the internet and Benelab seeks to tap into that by redirecting funds to help solve issues around the world. Each month, the team (initially consisting of Kim and his schoolmates) selects a new charity to support and sends out a newsletter to keep their users updated. Benelab highlighst how if just 0.0001 percent of the aproximate 4.1 billion web searches each day occurred through the site, it could donate $250,000 a month to non-profit causes.
Archive for Social Entrepreneur – Page 3
Zhang Yiming is the founder of Beijing ByteDance Co. This includes Tik Tok and Toutiao (very popular platform in China). Zhang was boring in 1983 and began a job at a startup company after college called Kuxun. He started as an engineer, but then during his second year he managed the people responsible for the back-end technology. Zhang learned a lot about perseverance and responsibility because of his first job and how he quickly was given a large role. In 2009, Zhang had started up his first business called “99fang.co
m.” It was a property search site; however, he quit after three years because he didn’t have enough drive for his business. In 2012, he found that Chinese smartphones were inefficient when it came to providing information and news that was relevant. His goal was to create something that gave users relevant content and gave them recommendations. ByteDance was created in a four bedroom apartment. Toutiao, a news app, was created first and gained over 13 million users daily. In 2015, Zhang created TikTok with the goal of having an app that had news, social media, and a place where young people can spread their ideas. ByteDance bought Musical.ly, basically buying the competition. TikTok boomed and became very successful. Zhang’s employees commented about how his leadership is “soft-spoken” and “charismatic”.
In 2013, Bonnie Chiu launched her social enterprise Lensational to help underrepresented women share their stories. Since then, Bonnie and her team have taught photography to a thousand women in 23 different countries. The Lensational program provides women with practical vocational skills as well as emotional and financial support and training. These women’s stories invite the audience to see the world through their lens. Bonnie’s success is Lensational launched her career in global development and gender equality.
More recently, Bonnie has been appointed to the board of LHA London, writes as a Forbes Senior Contributor, and serves as a member of the Expert Review Committee of the World Benchmarking Alliance’s Gender Benchmark, a member of Steering Group of Big Society Capital’s Women in Safe Homes Fund and as a Non-Executive Director of City to Sea.
Zev Shapiro is no ordinary college student. His childhood was unlike his peers. Born and raised in Cambridge Massachusetts, he is currently a sophomore at Harvard University. At the age of 10, he helped manage Senator Elizabeth Warren’s campaign. In 2014, he was invited to the State of the Union Address as Elizabeth Warren’s guest. He enjoys reading academic law and public policy journals for fun and discussing politics. He always has had an entrepreneurial spirit, especially with his visionary personality; he often looks ahead as to what can be solved and improved in our society. Before graduating high school at Cambridge Rindge and Latin in 2020, he launched TurnUp (in 2019), a non profit application dedicated for young activists to increase voter turnout. TurnUp targets Generation Z progressives by having the capability to connect with other progressive individuals for specific causes. Zev wants to provide his peers with a network to organize events, marches, and protests for teenage activists. He specifically focuses on increasing voter turnout in all U.S elections but there are some other causes such as social justice, racial inequality and educational rights issues. The use of TurnUp proved to increase 36 million young voters nationally in 2020. Additionally, TurnUp made it possible for 17,000 people to make connections with one another and attend progressive events and it has over $2,000 individual donors. This new progressive activism app has grown in such a short amount of time. Through TurnUp, Zev Shapiro brings together a new generation of young activists for leftist causes.
Despite Zev Shapiro’s political beliefs, as Christian entrepreneurs we should be inspired by his entrepreneurial spirit and dedication so that we can create some kind of innovation which spreads Biblical Truth, the Word of God, and conservative thought to Generation Z. So what are we waiting for?
To Learn more about Zev:
At the age of 17, while watching a video of Michael J. Fox, Erin Smith noticed something that she couldn’t get off her mind. “Whenever a Parkinson’s patient would laugh or smile, it came off as really emotionally distant,” she says. With this in mind she contacted clinicians and caregivers and found they’d noticed similar facial expressions in some of their patients often years before these patents were officially diagnosed with Parkinson’s. Erin Smith set to work on developing a diagnosis system that uses AI to view changes in facial expressions over time to detect disorders like Parkinson’s. Parkinson’s is a difficult disorder to detect and diagnose but Erin’s new system, which she named FacePrint, has an 88 percent accuracy rate. Erin is receiving support and funding from pharmaceutical companies as well as from the Michael J. Fox Foundation. As one of twenty young innovators selected for the Thiel Fellowship, Erin will be on leave from her university studies while she completes research and her technology undergoes clinical trial at Stanford University, where she is enrolled.
Erin Smith has also done her own TEDx talk which can be watched here:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6pS3UftoWpo&t=124s
Erin Smith’s research and innovation is very impressive and inspirational, she saw a possibility to create something that would help people and instantly got to work.
To say that our ecosystem is important would be an understatement. It is absolutely vital to the world’s health and the care of our human society. Forests are one of the main factors in supporting a strong ecosystem, but deforestation is a major problem that many countries face around the world. Deforestation is when woodlands are purposefully cleared for agricultural expansion, logging, or infrastructure growth. However, one new entrepreneur, Angelique Ahlstrom, hopes to improve the ecosystem with her own business, Flash Forest.
Cofounded by Angelique Ahlstrom, Flash Forest is a “Canadian reforestation company that uses UAV technology, automation, and ecological science to regenerate ecosystems on a global scale.” She started the company this year in 2021 and uses advanced technology of artificial intelligence, Plant Science, unmanned aerial vehicles (UAV), and geographic information systems (GIS) to map, analyze, and automatically plant tree seeds in damaged forest areas. This company’s technology costs less and is safer and faster than other traditional methods. Flash Forest is actively working towards the goal of planting more than one billion trees by 2028 to reduce carbon in the atmosphere and restore worldwide ecosystems. They have tested 18 species of trees in planting trials to achieve biodiversity in forests. Flash Forest works with different organizations and industry partners to help plant trees and fulfill their “carbon offset pledges.” They even work with government industries to help them meet their reforestation targets that are expensive and difficult to complete.
Angelique says, “Our motivation is to have a tangible impact on climate change and all species within our lifetime, to revolutionize the reforestation industry on a truly planetary scale.” This is a very ambitious goal put forth by Flash Forest, but the first step to develop a socially minded business is to have a goal and fall in love with the problem, not the solution! Currently, Canada is one of the world’s leaders in sustainable forest management and Angelique aims to continue this with her company. She found a problem and used her passion for the environment to cause true social impact with her innovative brand and design.
“I left Stanford thinking that I would be a professional circus performer,” says Clementine Jacoby, who graduated from Stanford in 2015 with a degree in software engineering. Interestingly, Jacoby spent her first year after graduation teaching acrobatics in a Brazilian gang diversion program. During that time, Jacoby witnessed the flaws of the criminal justice system in Brazil, which disproportionately targeted citizens of lower socioeconomic status and often imprisoned those who committed petty crimes with excessive sentences. At the time, Jacoby did not realize that her experience would become the foundation needed for a company that advocates for criminal justice reform here in the United States.
More than 2 million people remain incarcerated in the United States, and among those in prison, experts say thousands of them don’t pose a public-safety threat. The problem? The data that allows them to be released is backlogged because it is spread out among different departments.
That’s why in 2019, Jacoby created Recidiviz, a nonprofit that works with more than 30 states to consolidate key data points of prisons around the country, such as whether an incarcerated person has shown progress by completing a treatment plan or how well equipped a correction facility can handle a COVID-19 outbreak.
Although no algorithm is perfect and there is not one solution that can solve the criminal-justice system problem alone, Recidiviz demonstrates early signs of success. To date, Recidiviz has released nearly 44,000 inmates in 34 states. Despite her young age of 29, Clementine Jacoby is changing the way our country views the criminal justice system. It’s giving those who deserve another chance, a second chance beyond the bars.
To read Clementine’s feature in Forbes 30 Under 30,
click on the link below!
Clementine Jacoby (forbes.com)
Eli Zied is the founder of the clothing brand Habits 365. Eli has the mind of an entrepreneur from a very young age. When he was 12, he started buying and reselling sneakers which then eventually lead him into the clothing industry. At the age of 15 Eli started a few different streetwear lines that eventually formed his brand Habits 365. Eli said that one way he learned was following and watching what other companies were doing. He would watch what other companies would do on social media and started developing ideas of his own by taking what he saw other brands doing and adding his own ideas into the mix.
Eli’s motivation for Habits 365 came from his passion to create a lifestyle brand. Meaning a brand that had more of a social impact that promoted a positive way of life. He wanted to draw people’s attention to their habits and remind them how important it is to have good habits. Since these are things, you do every single day he wanted to remind people that bad ones can have a huge negative effect in their lives, and they should try to change bad habits into good ones.
Eli started designing the brand logo, clothing designs, and took to social media to start building his brand presence. Eli really took a leading role in the startup of his business, and I think this shows great entrepreneur characteristics. He tackled each piece of the puzzle that came up and successfully created a brand with a positive reputation that represents his original message well. Habits 365 started to spread by word of mouth and social media and any other ways Eli could get the name of his brand out there. Today Habits 365 is still doing well and Eli has not stopped developing and improving his brand into something unique and special. I think it is cool to see a young entrepreneur doing his best to spread such a positive message.
We don’t think much about soap. It’s just a simple necessity for us to wash our hands and keep ourselves clean. But would you be surprised that there are people in the world that have never seen a bar of soap before? Probably not, but in many impoverished countries today, over 800 children under the age of 5 die from diseases as a result of compromised hygiene and sanitation. Erin Zaikis hopes to change all that with her company, Sandara.
Erin’s company Sandara recycles used hotel soap to redistribute across Uganda, India, and Myanmar in an effort to increase hygiene and education as well. She knew that children around the world were dying without access to sanitation products, while big corporations like hotels were throwing out old soap after just one use. Erin saw what a big problem this was and founded Sundara in 2013 to combat this current issue. Sundara first started as a non-profit business recycling used hotel soap, but it evolved into a bigger company that now works across different countries and provides education and work opportunities to single mothers, domestic abuse victims, and widows. Their main values include fostering dignity, building sustainability, agility, and female empowerment. This is shown through Sundara’s two different programs, Rise Fellowship and Emergency Aid. Rise Fellowship provides “mentorship, seed funding, and resources to female entrepreneurs living in low to middle class income countries.” In addition, Emergency Aid is a program dedicated to providing urgent, short-term relief to those who need it immediately. Erin’s company has impacted thousands of women and children around the world and over the past 8 years, has recycled over a million bars of soap and reaches 200,000 people with serious hygiene education every year.
Erin has worked with Sundara for the past several years to help fight the rampant issue of sanitation and hygiene for women and children in poor countries around the world. Her company has changed the lives of many, giving dignity and respect back to those who need it. Erin Zaikis is a true entrepreneur with her company and let’s hope she continues to change the world with her innovative ideas.
Trisha Prabhu is a 21-year-old social entrepreneur and the founder of ReThink, a patented technology that detects and stops online hate. In the fall of 2013, Trisha, then only 13 years old, read the shocking story of Rebecca Sedwick’s suicide. Rebecca, after being cyberbullied for over a year and a half, took her own life at only 12 years old. As a victim of bullying herself, Trisha felt heartbroken and horrified. In that moment, she decided to no longer be a bystander and created ReThink, which detects online hate at the source before bullying occurs.
Trisha has received worldwide acclaim for her endeavors. In 2016, former President Barack Obama invited to Trisha to the Global Entrepreneurship Summit to share her story with other entrepreneurs. ReThink also made an appearance on Shark Tank, and not long after, Trisha received the prestigious Elevate Prize, as well as an Adrian Cheng Fellowship at Harvard. Trisha is the youngest honoree named to this year’s Forbes’ 30 Under 30 Social Impact list.
To date, Trisha has spread the message of ReThink to over 30 cities in 3 languages. Trisha is also an avid supporter of empowering women in the entrepreneurial community. Whether volunteering her time to teach young women how to code or finding ways to bridge the diversity gap in entrepreneurship, Trisha is inspiring a generation of fierce young women to tackle the world’s most important issues.
Check out Trisha’s TED Talk below!