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Leaders to Watch 2023
Every year, we recognize rising social innovators that are addressing today’s most pressing challenges. From social advocacy to building AI-powered solutions, these leaders are making waves in their respective fields and working towards a better future for all.
adenike adeyemi
A catalyst for Nigeria's entrepreneurship culture
With a bright spirit, genuine curiosity, and a passion for helping others, Adenike Adeyemi works hard to support small and growing businesses as the Executive Director of the FATE Foundation. It’s the perfect role for someone like her to combine her passions for business and social impact.
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For as long as she can remember, Adenike Adeyemi has been able to connect with people across different walks of life. The tendency, she thinks, partly has its roots in growing up with a Yoruba father and a mother who was half Sierra Leonean and half Efik. “Having a multiethnic background made me more aware of the world outside of just our local community.”
When she moved to the southwest state of Oyo to attend a federal girls boarding school, her community grew more diverse. “It was a melting pot where you could be in the same school with friends from different social, ethnic, income, and religious backgrounds.” Those early experiences engrained in her that common ground is never far away. “We're all human, and there's always something that can connect you with someone.”
Discovering the nonprofit world
Adenike’s affinity for connection and community grew through her university years and beyond, when she began working with nonprofits as part of the Nigerian National Youth Service Corps (NYSC). The NYSC is a mandatory program set up by the Nigerian government that involves recent graduates in national development. Around the time that Adenike was looking for a placement for her NYSC rotation, her uncle reached out with an opportunity at a nonprofit called the West African NGO Network (WANGONet).
“It was pivotal for me to see the role of technology in being able to connect people to resources and democratize knowledge.”
In those days, WANGONet’s work consisted of creating web pages for other nonprofits while also training them to use basic software tools – enabling them to find partners, volunteers, and funding. It was exciting work, but different from the work sought out by her peers. “That year I was earning a fraction of what my friends were earning. But I was connecting people with knowledge, with information, and with technology. Plus I had my own email address – it really felt like a big deal.”
More than just an email address, WANGONet gave her insight into how technology and information go hand-in-hand to empower people. “It was pivotal for me to see the role of technology in being able to connect people to resources and democratize knowledge. I realized that by facilitating and providing access and knowledge, we could give organizations the opportunity to expand themselves.”
Start, grow, scale
Today, Adenike is the Executive Director of the FATE Foundation, Nigeria’s most prominent business incubator and accelerator program, aiming to enable early-stage entrepreneurs to start, grow, and scale their businesses. Their offerings range from courses and events to information and financial support – all in order to harness the potential of the Nigerian entrepreneurship culture. “We believe small and growing businesses power the nation. In Nigeria, they create about 80% of the jobs we have, and they contribute almost 50% of GDP despite a very challenging macroeconomic environment.”
When it comes to the broader business environment, Adenike has come to realize that FATE also needs to focus on legislation. “We can’t support our entrepreneurs beyond the existing policy environment. So for me it’s also about seeing how we can provide policymakers with actionable insights.” With this goal in mind, FATE conducts State of Entrepreneurship in Nigeria Reports that are full of impactful data points relevant to policymakers.
With their audience growing quickly, it’s important to Adenike to maintain a human touch in how FATE interacts with program participants by focusing on growing thoughtful digital offerings. When FATE was founded more than 20 years ago, their methods were manual. The founder himself would meet individual entrepreneurs and connect them personally with relevant people or information. Today, their programs reach more than 245,000 entrepreneurs across 31 states. The successes have meant that manual processes aren’t sustainable anymore. Still, FATE values the individual connections, so Adenike and her team have built new digital tools for the community. “I want to be able to see any entrepreneur’s journey to date and understand their experience. And most importantly, how we can also plug them in with the right person or resources.”
Making connections
With her sights set on expanding FATE, supporting entrepreneurs and impacting public policy, it’s clear that Adenike is a bold and long-term thinker. There is no problem too big to make an impact. “Even a week can make the difference in the life of an entrepreneur – that aha moment can really transform somebody's business.”
That’s what keeps her motivated, but she’s quick to note she couldn’t have made it alone. “I can have all the dreams, the motivation, the inspiration, the excitement. But if I didn't have a passionate team, there’d only be so much I could do.”
“I believe very strongly that we’re always only one person away from information that someone else needs to succeed.”
Despite her vast knowledge and experience, Adenike is wise enough to know that she can never have all the answers or all the resources. But, she says, “I probably know somebody – or I know somebody who knows somebody that’s able to make a connection.” In this way, she’s a catalyst, enabling impact, outcomes and connections. “I believe very strongly that we’re always only one person away from information that someone else needs to succeed.”
Photography by Taiwo Aina
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Angela Siefer (she/her)
Executive Director of the National Digital Inclusion Alliance
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Bourhan Yassin (he/him)
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Carmen Correa (she/her)
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John Callery (he/him)
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Angela Siefer
Paving the way to digital equity, one community at a time
Angela Siefer has an insatiable hunger to make a difference in the world – she always has. Today, she’s a catalyst of change through her work as the leader of the National Digital Inclusion Alliance, an organization advancing digital equity. She works with over a thousand affiliates to understand community priorities and shape policy at the national level.
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Looking back, Angela Siefer has always wanted to make the world a better place. The only problem was that she didn’t know how. Growing up in Lima, Ohio in a middle class family, she was the first person in her family to attend college. During her years at the University of Toledo, she studied sociology, admittedly because she couldn’t figure out what else to major in: “So many people seem to have their futures all laid out. That just wasn’t me.” Even though she wasn’t sure which path to take, her strong community values and persistence paved the way.
Her commitment eventually led her to the growing problem of digital inequity. In graduate school, she worked with a professor researching how the university could better support the local community. As they ran surveys and spent time with people in the community, it became clear that access to and understanding of technology was a major pain point. “I really think that's how I ended up on the path that I'm on – by listening to the community.”
Finding her footing
Not long after graduation, she brought her knowledge to lead the Ohio Community Computing Network (OCCN), an organization born in times of a changing digital landscape that offered solutions to the increasing number of people who needed help navigating it. Back then, the field was called community technology; today, we call it digital inclusion.
“The OCCN existed because a Legal Aid attorney convinced the Public Utilities Commission of Ohio that community access and use of technology was worthy of financial support.” She was left with the question of: where does the money come from to solve these pressing problems? And today she continues to meet that uncertainty with drive. Since her early days at OCCN, Angela has played a key part in advocating for billions of dollars to move digital equity forward.
“Fundamentally, digital inequity is a human problem and we need humans to solve it.”
Still, her expertise didn’t feel like expertise in those days. She recalls some of the first times speaking with policymakers in Washington D.C. about digital equity issues as nerve-wracking. “It wasn’t a position I'd ever been in before, and afterwards I could still feel that huge pressure on my shoulders. I didn’t want to get it wrong.”
Today, she feels more sure of her footing. “I have confidence now that I didn't have then. I can say, ‘Here's what I'm seeing from these local digital equity programs, and here's what they need.’ If I say it enough, sometimes people listen.”
A holistic approach to digital equity
Today, Angela leads the National Digital Inclusion Alliance (NDIA), a nonprofit organization she founded in 2015. She and others in the field saw that the growing digital equity movement needed its own space to build best practices and community. “It seemed like a long shot, but we also saw the reality of folks on the ground who needed more resources.” So, the NDIA is her holistic answer to digital inclusion – addressing internet availability and affordability, access to devices, as well as digital skills and tech support.
Over the last eight years – and especially since the COVID-19 pandemic – the NDIA has grown to include over a thousand affiliates and accomplished an astonishing amount. Their recent achievements include developing standard definitions of “digital inclusion” and “digital equity” in congressional law and expanding outreach programs. “One of our biggest accomplishments was the $2.75 billion for the 2021 Digital Equity Act.”
Angela’s attitude pours over into the NDIA as it’s always trying to identify who is still being left behind in our digital world. While the general barriers to digital knowledge and tools are the same, Angela explains, “The specifics matter – they impact not only our understanding of particular issues, but also how to find the best solutions.” Recently, they have expanded their support in rural and tribal communities. By focusing on their specific situations, the NDIA can make broader insights too.
Long-term sustainability
Zooming out, Angela’s goals for the future revolve around national, long-term solutions. The next challenge is all about the sustainability of the digital equity field. “We're constantly going to need household broadband subsidies; we're always going to need digital skills training; we're going to need digital navigation books; tech support is nonstop. But if you don't have resources, what happens?”
Digital equity impacts everything: “our economy, our social systems, our whole country.” In this way, Angela says that it’s important to remember that, “Fundamentally, digital inequity is a human problem and we need humans to solve it.” Humans that are patient, determined, open-minded, and of course, well-equipped with the information and resources it takes to help people in need.
From her profoundly loving and supportive family to the ever-expanding NDIA community, Angela is deeply appreciative. “I’m always amazed that members of the NDIA community take their own time to share their experience with folks who are new.” Though Angela founded NDIA and launched this community, the digital equity movement continues to grow, and its power, she says, is in the people, in the “heroes” around the country who are advancing digital equity together. “The people around me give me my strength – I don’t do it all for me. I do it for them.”
Photography by Leonardo Carrizo with additional photography by Mike Sanchez
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Carmen Correa (she/her)
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John Callery (he/him)
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Kristian Rönn (he/him)
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Anthony Babkine
No one succeeds alone
Anthony Babkine’s charisma and high energy make him the perfect person to take equal opportunities in tech from dream to reality. As the co-founder and CEO of Diversidays, he works to advance equity within the digital sector in France. Uplifting young talents and challenging stereotypes is a full-circle journey for this leader.
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Anthony Babkine reached a turning point in his career early on. After a couple years on a wildly successful path, he took a long, hard look at the boardroom and did not recognize the world around him.
Anthony grew up in Évry-Courcouronnes, a suburb 15 miles south of Paris – one of the youngest cities in all of France and home to countless different cultures. “By the time I was 15, it was like I’d done a world tour three or four times.” Although he didn’t realize it at the time, the diversity of Évry was one of his biggest strengths. “I can see now that it makes me personally rich to have grown up in this diverse cultural and ethnic landscape. But it took me a long time to understand that.”
During his school years, when he struggled to harness his quick mind and thrive in class, he recalls feeling a deep imposter syndrome. To help him through it, he points to the people who supported him then. “My mother took time off work, a local nonprofit helped me with tutoring, and teachers took extra time to mentor me. I couldn’t have done it alone.”
Changing paths
Once he began a career at one of the biggest advertising agencies in France, digital skills were instrumental in his experience. “At that time, social media was beginning to grow exponentially, and French companies needed strategies about how to best represent their brand on these new platforms.” Anthony’s perspective, talent, and hard work quickly took him to the top: “I took a position on the executive committee and held a place in the young talent program, but I realized that they were lacking diversity.”
“Everything began once I understood that my biggest strength comes from where I grew up and the diverse community I’m a part of.”
Without a diverse team, without social policies to become more inclusive, and without a good internal culture, Anthony began to consider his next move. “Yes, it was a great salary, a great career move, and I had invested a lot of time getting there; but, eventually I had to leave.” The situation uncovered his values, and he wanted to act on them. “You can get upset or you can act. I didn't know what would be a good place to start or how to do it, but I knew I needed to act.”
That pivot changed everything for him. “Everything began once I understood that my biggest strength comes from where I grew up and the diverse community I’m a part of.”
Building Diversidays
In 2017, along with his good friend and longtime collaborator Mounira Hamdi, Anthony co-founded Diversidays, “a nonprofit organization helping people from all different backgrounds play their part in the growing digital industry.” That means providing education, information, advice, and opportunities for individuals and companies through three main programs.
Their Leadership program helps entrepreneurs establish new businesses, while Digital Clicks is an education initiative that provides professional retraining for people who want to develop digital skills. Finally, Tech Your Place is aimed at tech companies that need insights into how to evolve their diversity and inclusion policies. “Since we started Diversidays, we’ve helped over 9,000 people through these programs with their specific challenges and to be more trusting and believe in themselves.”
It’s clear that their efforts are paying off. Anthony speaks with pride about their recent initiative to get more companies to prioritize diversity and inclusion from the start. “Our biggest win overall has been getting twelve of the biggest venture capital firms to include a DEI clause in their investment packages.” This way, a condition of receiving money from any of these funds will be reliant on the company’s diversity practices.
A pragmatic dreamer
Realism and practicality are key facets of not only Anthony’s work but also his personality. “I think that if you want to change the situation in any industry, but especially the tech industry, you have to be ambitious, and maybe a bit crazy. But also pragmatic.” To him, it’s about social advocacy: “Last year we did a study that showed 39% of new employees experienced discrimination during their integration into tech companies.” Studies like this enable change by giving an accurate picture of the situation.
“It's really important for me to measure what we do and how companies take action in order to avoid social-washing. Because it’s easy to say, ‘we want to be more inclusive.’ It's harder to define what that means and how to measure such a commitment.”
Luckily Anthony is no stranger to hard work. He admits, though, “These inequalities have existed in France for decades, and they’re so ingrained. Even if our convictions are strong, and we see a real change — a real collective desire to move the lines. It can still sometimes be a bit frustrating.” So, where does his motivation come from?
Again, Anthony highlights the efforts and successes of those around him. On one hand there are all the messages he gets from participants in their programs. “Hearing from someone that we gave them the tools or the confidence to achieve something makes me feel like we’re making a difference.” On the other hand, he emphasizes the efforts of the over 200 volunteers involved with Diversidays. “The most valuable thing that we have in nonprofits is volunteers and people that just want to help. We have people who are convinced that another model is possible.”
He returns to a familiar refrain – a motto, he says – “You don’t succeed alone.”
Photography by Yamandu Roos
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Bourhan Yassin
Harnessing the power of sound and AI to protect biodiversity
The planet will probably never sound the same as it does today. As the CEO of Rainforest Connection, Bourhan Yassin knows the value and power of listening in the fight against climate change and biodiversity loss. His ambitions were big even before it became his mission to preserve our world’s forests.
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Far from the rainforests he works with today, Bourhan Yassin grew up in Lebanon during the civil war that lasted from 1975–1990. As a kid, his sense of normalcy was moving between bomb shelters, but it didn’t stop him from dreaming about his future. Driven by his affinity for technology, he decided to leave Lebanon at the turn of the millennium and study in the United States.
In the Bay Area, he was surrounded by the burgeoning tech industry and he liked the variety and opportunities that came with its culture. “Startups and small companies were my niche because it was an environment where I could make a big difference and wear many different hats.”
“It was time for me to do something that I could feel proud of, something with a great cause attached to it.”
He worked his way up the ranks at a few tech companies before moving to Dubai in 2014 where he co-founded his own company. “It was actually a fashion company. I’m sure you can’t tell, because I’m not a fashionable guy. But it turned out to be a successful company.” Before long though, “I was starting to get tired of optimizing for revenue and for profit,” Bourhan says. “It was time for me to do something that I could feel proud of, something with a great cause attached to it.”
Making new connections
Although he was hungry to take on more purposeful work, the nonprofit world wasn’t necessarily top of mind to Bourhan. “I had always thought of nonprofits as more policy-driven organizations focused mostly on social change.” His mind changed when he first heard about Rainforest Connection – a nonprofit driven by tech. They leverage their acoustic monitoring systems to halt illegal activities in protected forests in real-time and to support ongoing and future conservation efforts.
Back then, they were a very small team in need of both an engineer and someone with a management and operations background. Despite the seemingly perfect fit, it took some time to adjust his earlier view of nonprofits. “It took me a while before I realized that this new path was actually on an entirely new mountain – a more exciting and meaningful mountain than the last one I was trying to climb.”
Bourhan started by introducing his past to the company’s future. “Previously, I’d worked to create value for investors, but now I turn that approach towards getting the most out of our mission and how to solve these big problems.” Joining his startup background with the purpose-driven efforts of a nonprofit has grown Rainforest Connection in terms of team, partnerships and, not least, impact.
Sound itself is a unique way of understanding an environment because you can listen in any direction.
Meet the Guardian
Rainforest Connection is making an impact in the fight against climate change by amplifying one of our innate human senses with the help of AI. “Sound itself is a unique way of understanding an environment. Our eyes have an amazing field of vision, but we can only look in one direction at a time. So when it comes to identifying things at a distance, listening is the best sense available to us.”
The Guardian device works as Rainforest Connection’s ears in the forest. “It’s a mini computer that sits in the top of a tree canopy and listens to the sounds of the forest 24/7.” He explains that round-the-clock monitoring is the best way to detect illegal logging or poaching in real-time. “In places like Indonesia and Brazil, deforestation accounts for 70–80% of greenhouse gas emissions. Being able to identify, locate, and alert authorities as soon as it’s happening can help halt illegal activities before the damage is even done.”
Artificial intelligence for real impact
Detection is only one piece of the puzzle. “No matter how many anomalies you detect, if you don't maintain the health and biodiversity of the forest, it's going to crumble.” Bourhan and his team at Rainforest Connection use their AI models to enable conservation efforts and preserve biodiversity. “When it comes to synthesizing super large amounts of data, that's where AI is very important because it can fast track a process that would otherwise take months into just minutes.”
Because their Guardians are constantly listening, Rainforest Connection has created a record of the forest’s soundscape. “We have somewhere around 100 million recordings, which equates to almost 190 years of continuous audio. I think by far the largest soundscape collection in the world, perhaps in history. And we're adding somewhere around 1 to 2 million recordings every few days.”
Their data-sets are open and available to anyone because, as Bourhan says, “science is driven forward by massive amounts of data.” The idea is to bridge the gap between data collection and analysis that often slows down conservation efforts. “This way, scientists and researchers can focus on the conclusions versus focusing on the data collection.” Streamlining the collection has helped, for example, state agencies and nonprofits in Puerto Rico that are using the platform to update species status, management plans, and selection of new areas for protection and purchase.
Listen for yourself
True to his ambitious nature, Bourhan has a bold vision of the future of Rainforest Connection. “Eventually, with all this data, we’ll get to a point where we can start ranking what biodiversity looks like all over the world and from that picture, we can start creating a way to recommend actions.”
Our forests are a precious natural resource, after all. “They’re the most amazing natural technology. There’s no human technology that’s cheaper and better at absorbing carbon than our trees and soil and forests.”
Their power is something you’re reminded of as soon as you hear it for yourself. “The cacophony of the rainforest is absolutely amazing and listening to all of the different species interacting is awe-inspiring. We must do everything we can to conserve them.”
Photography by Andrew Loehman with additional photography by Rainforest Connection
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Carmen Correa
Moving forward towards gender equity
There’s never been a time in her life when Carmen Correa doubted the power of women to make an impact. Today, Carmen works as the CEO of Pro Mujer, a social enterprise working to advance gender equality in Latin America. There’s still a lot of work to be done, but Carmen has the vision and the passion for expanding their efforts and, in her own words, ‘reaching every woman.’
Read for five minutes
Carmen Correa has always been surrounded by strong women: “women that were breaking boundaries, challenging stereotypes, and especially in my family, caring for others.” Looking back, she attributes her entrepreneurial spirit and compassionate nature to her upbringing.
Carmen grew up in the countryside of Uruguay, in the Department of Colonia and moved to Montevideo for school when she was just six years old. Still, she often found herself traveling the country with her father who is an agricultural engineer. “It allowed me to get to know people from different backgrounds and learn about their lives and their realities.”
With a gift to encourage and put others at ease, Carmen's optimism is infectious. Facing big challenges, Carmen says, “is not easy, and you have to be proactive. But you also have to be very optimistic. I know we can challenge the way things are right now and construct a better world – of course it can be done.”
An entrepreneurial approach
Carmen’s optimism is well-suited for a person with such big goals. But she’s not simply an optimist, she’s always worked hard towards better outcomes with an entrepreneurial mindset. And, importantly for her, usually alongside other women. “I was very lucky. In almost each place I worked, my boss was a very strong woman.”
Throughout her career, Carmen grew into her own and has held leadership positions at social enterprises like the Avina Foundation and Endeavor Uruguay – to name a couple. When she reflects, though, it’s not the executive-level roles that she emphasizes; it’s the times that she was involved in the earliest days of something that make her light up.
“Women can change the reality not only of themselves, but also of those around them.”
“Being part of initiatives from the start is of course difficult, but it trains you to look for alternative ways of achieving your objectives.” It’s a strength that she uses daily in her work with women across Latin America. “Today, women’s realities are totally different, their needs are different. We have to be looking into more intersectionalities to develop the right tools and services to actually support all these groups.”
For all women
Carmen joined Pro Mujer, an organization working to advance gender equality in Latin America, in 2017. Over the last five years, she’s held several different leadership roles and her recent appointment to CEO is a natural step for someone with such bold vision. “We provide underserved women with financial inclusion, skilling opportunities, and health services in order for them to reach their full potential and become agents of change.”
By providing women with the resources and information that they need, Carmen has seen how powerful women are in creating new opportunities for themselves and their community. This ripple effect is both the heart and the power of Pro Mujer. “When we can change the life of a woman, we change the life of a family and the reality of the region where she’s living. Those changes will persist for generations.”
Generational impact is no small goal, and Carmen doesn’t stop there. Like the visionary she is, she explains, “We want to reach everybody.” To make it happen, they have their sights set on continuing expansion. “I'm always trying to keep moving, keep growing.”
A long way to equality
While Carmen is immensely proud of her work and her team for coming as far as they have, she knows it will always require more. “We are working hard for equality, but there’s still a lot of work to be done.” Rather than feeling discouraged, Carmen sees opportunities where others may see challenges.
Her energy to move forward comes from the women Pro Mujer serves. “They’re the ones driving their own success. To me, they are warriors. Every day, they go out and fight to make a change.” And she’s seen the changes first hand.
“No matter what you do, don’t be indifferent to the needs of others.”
She recalls visiting a woman who owns a pottery business in Nicaragua. She told Carmen about some of the new chairs that she recently bought with Pro Mujer’s support: “She explained how the loan enabled her to develop her business. It’s a microbusiness, but it's her livelihood and it allows her to bring food to her family’s table. Buying those chairs improved her way of living.”
Spending time with these women and hearing their stories is a good reminder that even something relatively small can make a large impact. It’s a lesson she carries with her always, and also offers to others: “No matter what you do, don’t be indifferent to the needs of others.”
Photography by Gabriella Rouiller
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Anthony Babkine (he/him)
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John Callery
Using technology to strengthen community mental health
To some, technology and mental health might seem like a strange match. But John Callery sees an opportunity in artificial intelligence to help humans support each other in times of crisis. As the Chief Product & Technology Officer at ReflexAI, he’s bringing life-saving technology to more people.
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John Callery has always had a mind for tech. “My interest in technology and computers started when I was pretty young.” He remembers his high school days with gratitude. “I was fortunate enough to go to boarding school in Santa Barbara; it was a unique environment for me to actually get to try interesting things at a small scale.” Whether he was fixing a computer for a roommate or building servers to host other students’ projects, he enjoyed life on the edge of emerging technology.
It only made sense to expand his passion into a small business. As a senior in high school John incorporated an e-commerce web hosting company. “I had around 500 clients worldwide. It wasn’t making millions of dollars, but it did manage to cover a lot of my expenses at the time.” Although he might not have realized at the time, it also paid in experience.
Finding his passion for social change
After graduating from the University of San Diego, he started working there as a web developer. It’s a special place to him because it was there, in the cafeteria, one day that he met his fiancé. Josh was also working at the university and volunteering for The Trevor Project – a nonprofit focused on crisis support and suicide prevention in LGBTQ+ youth. “Josh was helping out on their chat and text service, and I became really interested in his work.”
“I’m lucky to have a strong support network and that’s been pretty impactful on how I got to where I am today. I’ve always known that I can reach out for help if I need it.” But John knows that too many don’t have that experience, and so many people don’t know how to help if someone reaches out.
The Trevor Project quickly grew into a passion. From the early days as a volunteer, he eventually moved into a full-time role as the Senior Vice President of Technology. “It was an amazing opportunity to take everything I'd learned in the private sector and apply it in the nonprofit environment.”
“We’re taking some of the principles of training we provided to crisis counselors and instead delivering them to veterans themselves, so they can better support each other.”
It was this position that brought him to Google initiatives like the Google.org Fellowship and the AI Impact Challenge, as well as a close collaboration with his future ReflexAI cofounder, Sam Dorison. “Together we oversaw the conceptualization and development of an AI triage model that could prioritize youth at highest risk of acute mental health crisis to speak with counselors as quickly as possible.” But an even bigger breakthrough came later after showing how the newest large language models could help solve an even more impactful problem. Rather than only optimizing for priority, John and his team shifted their concentration towards training and getting more counselors onto the system.
In order to onboard the number of counselors needed, they would have had to hire hundreds of coordinators to schedule and run trainings for each potential new volunteer – not so practical. “We started looking at using large language models to mimic a training conversation with a young person in crisis and onboard more counselors even faster.” Today, the personas they created have trained thousands.
Using technology to support veterans
By now, it was clear that this approach has extensive impact, and John and Sam saw an opportunity to expand it even further. “We'd been trying to find ways that we could use this technology elsewhere. When we heard about the VA’s Mission Daybreak challenge, we applied with our idea to use a similar type of training to scale the Veteran Crisis Line.”
The veteran community has a deep need for tools and training within the suicide prevention space. According to the VA, there were 6,146 veteran suicides in 2020. While the numbers are slowly decreasing year over year, the rate of veteran suicide is still 57.3% higher than non-veteran US adults.
“During Daybreak, we interviewed dozens of veterans and heard this overwhelming theme that veterans frequently turn to each other in moments of crisis.” Combining these new insights with past experience brought about ReflexAI. John explains, “we’re taking some of the principles of training we provided to crisis counselors and instead delivering them to veterans themselves, so they can better support each other.”
ReflexAI is working to expand the range of organizations that can benefit from these tools. “There’s been so much press about large language models, but this revolution could have a much larger impact on critical areas like healthcare, crisis intervention, and emergency services. That’s why we started Reflex.”
More communities in need
This community approach to mental health is at the heart of John’s work, and he hopes to expand it even further to more communities in the future. In terms of the big picture, John sees progress. “Mental health issues challenge everybody today. As a society, we’ve had some positive conversations about mental health recently, but more needs to be done to destigmatize it.”
But wherever he sees success, he also sees need reflected back at him. “Remote interactions are only increasing, and the 988 Lifeline is the prominent example of this expansion by shattering expectations on growth.” A Substance Abuse and Mental Health Administration report shows that in December 2022, calls answered on the Lifeline increased by 48%, chats answered increased by 263%, and texts answered increased by a staggering 1,445% compared to December 2021. People are reaching out for help, and ReflexAI is ready to step in.
Photography by Alex Palumbo
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Kristian Rönn
Accounting for the planet’s future
Kristian Rönn is on a mission to enable companies to measure, manage, and reduce their carbon emissions. With a quick and philosophical mind, he’s reframing the way we think about responsible business practices in our times. As the co-founder and CEO of Normative he also builds tools to hold businesses of all sizes accountable and enable them to take action.
Read for five minutes
When he introduces his company, Kristian Rönn explains that Normative is named to reflect the new norm they’re building in carbon accounting. It’s a great story, and a true one. But if you dig a bit deeper, Kristian will tell you that it also comes from the branch of philosophy that concerns how one ought to behave, in a moral sense: Normative Ethics.
“I’ve always taken living according to my values extremely seriously.” Kristian recalls visiting a small petting zoo in the Swedish countryside as a young kid with joy. “But I realized at one point that eating meat comes from animals like those, and my consumption actually contributes to them being harmed.” Thanks to an internet deep-dive, he was eventually able to articulate his life philosophy: “What I value most is maximizing the well-being of all sentient beings.”
The internet and philosophy opened his eyes to new ways of thinking about the world. From mathematics and physics to politics and ethics, he was always curious. “It was an eye-opener for me to realize that the actions we take today will affect the well-being of billions of individuals in the future.”
From thought to action
Determined to make a positive impact on future generations, Kristian went to university where he started to study political science. Quickly, though, it became clear it wasn’t for him. “I did the introductory course of pretty much everything but wasn't fully satisfied.” Eventually he chose to focus on math and philosophy, “philosophy because it asks questions about what we want to optimize in society; mathematics because it deals with how we actually perform that optimization.”
This balance between abstraction and action took him far – all the way to the University of Oxford, in fact. After graduation, he went to work at the Future of Humanity Institute, a research center that works on big picture questions about human civilization. It was there that he saw the catastrophic results of the climate crisis, and knew he needed to act. “I wanted to give actionable insights to relevant decision makers at the point of decision making.”
With such clear climate goals being set at the time, he thought, “surely, there must be a way for companies to account for their carbon emissions similar to how they account for the financial numbers. But that did not exist. So I wanted to start it, even though I had almost zero experience with starting a company or software development or anything of that kind.”
Building the new norm
Normative is the world’s first carbon accounting engine. It represents the next generation of carbon accounting and redefines the ‘interest of stakeholders’ as the well-being and longevity of civilization rather than profit alone. It was born from Kristian’s big ideas about society’s climate response and the mechanics of accounting. “At the end of the day, accounting is a fiction. We take for granted that societies are built around profit maximization. But the entire concept of profit is built upon arbitrary arithmetic and could be redefined.”
So redefining is what they’re doing. “At Normative, we help companies account for their full carbon footprint and give them actionable insights in order to go towards net zero emissions.” It’s safe to say they’re on the way; Through the Business Carbon Calculator, Normative has helped more than 2,600 small and medium businesses calculate their emissions and has measured over 7.2 million tons of CO2e across 80 countries. In many cases, that means automating the analysis of millions of invoices to get an accurate picture of a company’s emissions. The data can show businesses which categories and suppliers have the biggest climate impact, so they can prioritize activities to address those areas.
“We take for granted that societies are built around profit maximization. But the entire concept of profit could be redefined.”
The thoroughness of carbon accounting is vital throughout their work, because they’ve uncovered that companies have not been accurately reporting their emissions. “There’s an accuracy gap of somewhere between 40-80%, which means that a lot of companies' net zero targets are based on as little as a tenth of their overall footprints.”
It’s a worrying prospect: “I fear that in 20 years, we’ll see companies proclaiming to be net zero or carbon neutral, but we’ll still see global emissions going up.”
The path to net zero
Accuracy and standardization will be the next big challenges on the path to net zero. While the United Nations and member countries are committed to new regulations, Kristian explains that governments also need to set standards for accuracy.
“Right now we have a lot of carbon disclosure regulations coming out.” But, he goes on, “in order for that data to be useful, we need standardized carbon accounting. It's not enough to have standardized disclosures. So we're in a situation where we have standardized the equivalent of the profit and loss statement, but we haven't invented double-entry bookkeeping which leads to comparable results.”
Funnily enough, Kristian says, “one of Normative’s unique offerings is that we're more accurate than everyone else. If governments set the standard for accuracy, then everyone will be equally accurate. But I'd much rather live in that world.”
Photography by Yamandu Roos
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About Google.org’s
Leaders to Watch
Leaders to Watch is Google.org’s way of uplifting nonprofit and social enterprise leaders from within our grantee cohorts. We’re proud to support these Leaders with financial support, mentorship, and access to the best of our tools and resources. Across diverse causes, industries, and regions, our Leaders to Watch are united by their embodiment of our guiding principles.
Empowering communities
The leaders stay connected to their mission by playing an active part in the communities that they work to empower.
Making bold leaps
The leaders are bringing an audacious vision to solve challenges, applying new technology to advance progress, and often using data and technology to make their work more impactful.
Uplifting their sector
The leaders are driven to accelerate change beyond by sharing what they learn or open-sourcing their tools.
