Under 30 2024 Social Impact: Meet The Young Leaders Building Sustainable Businesses And A More Just World

From startups focused on the environment to nonprofits aimed at inequality, these Forbes Under 30 Social Impact leaders are driving real change.

By Jena McGregor, Igor Bosilkovski and Jeremy Bogiasky

R

ajia Abdelaziz started her company, invisaWear, after an alarming experience. As a college student in 2015, the now 29-year-old founder of the SOS device maker was catcalled by men in an SUV, one of whom got out, leading her to run.

TIM TADDER FOR FORBES

She passed on a job with Google post-graduation and cofounded her company in 2018, which creates jewelry, keychains and fitness bands that have discreet buttons for calling friends or 911 if the wearer feels in danger. Since then, she and her cofounder, Ray Hamilton, have generated more than $15 million in total revenue, reached more than 100,000 customers and report partnerships with ADT Security and Telus Communications.

“We’re trying to do our best to convince people to buy the product before they need it, not after a situation has happened,” Abdelaziz told Forbes.

Abdelaziz is just one of thirty innovative founders and leaders to appear on this year’s Forbes Under 30 2024 Social Impact list. This year’s listmakers were handpicked from more than a thousand nominations, and narrowed down by Forbes editors and a panel of all-star judges in the social impact space. These include Jean Case, chairman of the National Geographic Society and CEO of the Case Impact Network and Case Foundation; Cheryl Dorsey, president of Echoing Green, a global nonprofit that supports and invests in emerging social entrepreneurs; Wemimo Abbey, a 2019 Under 30 honoree and cofounder of fintech company Esusu; and Randall Lane, chief content officer of Forbes Media.

The result: A list of founders and leaders whose collective efforts are not only funded by major backers—with more than $80 million total in funding between them—but helping to build sustainable businesses and nonprofits for a safer, cleaner and more just world.

Abdelaziz is also hardly the only member of this year’s list to tap a personal experience to help launch her idea into the world. Olivia Bowser, a former competitive athlete, was motivated to start “mental fitness” platform Liberate after her own struggles with anxiety led her to discover the power of mindfulness. After seeing the challenges faced by a close friend in high school with Down syndrome, Josh Fields helped found The Next Step Programs, a nonprofit which helps people with intellectual and developmental disabilities after they age out of public school. And the founders of Prepared, which developed software that turns smartphones into a “personal body cam” that streams live to 911 centers and first responders, was started by a trio—Michael Chime, Dylan Gleicher and Neal Song—who had each been personally touched by school shooting tragedies.

Another common theme: Young leaders focused on inequality. Sydney Montgomery founded the nonprofit Barrier Breakers to help more underrepresented applicants to college and law school with the admissions process, along with other efforts. Kavya Krishna’s Society of Women Coders aims to improve the digital literacy of girls in low- and middle-income countries; she reports the nonprofit has taught coding and tech skills to more than 40,000 students in 57 countries. Megha Agarwal leads an experiment called The Bridge Project, launched in 2021 by the Monarch Foundation, that provides low-income mothers monthly guaranteed income for three years—with no strings attached.

Meanwhile, many more names on our list are founders focused on products or tools to help the planet. There’s Gabrielle Bourret-Sicotte, the cofounder of Greenr, a platform that uses AI to give individuals and businesses “personalized carbon coaching” to measure and reduce their carbon emissions. In 2020, Franziska Trautmann and Maxwell Steitz started Glass Half Full, which recycles glass into sand and has diverted more than 6 million pounds of glass from landfills in Louisiana.

And then there’s Wasted* PBC, founded by Thor Retzlaff, Brophy Tyree and Taylor Zehren, which builds waterless flushing, solar-powered ventilated porta-potties with sustainable toilet paper that process waste separately into fertilizer. It offers not only cleaner toilets for outdoor concert venues but is building help for rural communities or other groups, such as disaster relief workers or refugees, without reliable plumbing. The company, which has raised $7.7 million in seed funding from backers like Collaborative Fund and Susquehanna Investments, followed the trio’s first sustainable sanitation nonprofit, which was called Do Good Sh*t. Apparently, they still are.

To view all of the 2024 Social Impact list, click here. Or comb through all of the categories here.

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