Kiera Peltz, 28, Founder, The Coding School
A nonprofit focused on training students with coding and tech skills for the modern age, The Coding School specializes in making emerging fields like quantum computing, AI, and cyber security accessible to K-16 students and educators. In addition to a number of other programs, like workshops and camps, TCS offers large-scale virtual courses with live instruction for K-12 credit, reaching up to 7,500 students in a given course. To date, it has trained 40,000+ students from 125 countries, has partnered with some of the world’s top companies and universities, including IBM, Google, Amazon, Caltech, Stanford, Johns Hopkins, and others. TCS was also recently asked to join the White House’s K-12 quantum education partnership, Q12.
Full article below.
BY OLIVIA PELUSO and IGOR BOSILKOVSKI
Under 30 2023 Social Impact: Meet The Young Leaders Building Bold Businesses—And A Better Tomorrow
These Forbes Under 30 Social Impact listers are embracing cutting edge science, creative technology and entrepreneurship to fight climate change, social injustice and food shortages.
Noah McQueen is a climate rock star. McQueen, who earned a Ph.d. in chemical engineering, cofounded Heirloom to turn superheated limestone into natural CO2 sponges that suck greenhouse gasses from the atmosphere.
Limestone is one of Earth’s biggest carbon dioxide absorbers, but the natural process is glacially slow. Heirloom supercharges the process by superheating the rocks, extracting the CO2 and stores it underground. The treated limestone then acts like a dry sponge, soaking more CO2 from the air.
McQueen, just 26 years old, and their cofounder Shashank Samala manage a team of nearly 70 people and more than $70 million in funding. With a background in chemical engineering, running a company while leading research and development is like “putting the airplane together while you’re trying to fly it,” McQueen says.
McQueen is one of 30 Social Impact founders harnessing technology and creative companies to improve the environment, social justice, education, nutrition and other pressing problems. To create the 2023 list, Forbes writers and editors combed through thousands of nominations. Next, we leaned on the wisdom of expert, independent judges: Jean Case, chairman of the National Geographic Society; Cheryl Dorsey, president of Echoing Green; Melissa Roberts, founder of the American Flood Coalition and Under 30 alumni; and Randall Lane, Chief Content Officer of Forbes. The final product: a brash class of social impact entrepreneurs who have raised more than $215 million in funding to create influential businesses—and lasting change.
Other 2023 listers are tapping soil to fight climate change. Hunter Swisher, 28, founded Phospholutions to boost the efficiency of phosphorus fertilizers. The company makes RhizoSorb, an soil additive that, when mixed into fertilizer, can increase potency by 50%.
“Our technology has the potential to bridge the gap in supply shortages contributing to mass famine in some of the most fragile food systems,” says Swisher, who’s raised $22 million.
Others on the 2023 Social Impact list are out to improve the justice system. In 2012, Leon Ford, 29, was paralyzed after he was shot five times by a Pittsburgh police officer during a traffic stop. Now Ford, a three-time author, advocates police reform. In 2020, with Pittsburgh Police Chief Scott Schubert, he founded The Hear Foundation to offer programs addressing gun violence reduction, trauma and community development. The foundation has raised more than $1 million worth of grants in just six months.
Gabriel Saruhashi, 24, cofounded Ameelio to bridge the gap in communication between prisoners and their families. Under the current system, families must pay expensive tolls to call their loved ones behind bars– often, around $.50 per minute, although many prisons can charge between $3 to $5 per minute. Ameelio offers a free-to-use virtual communication platform called Connect which supports call, video and text communication between inmates and families.
To help with the transition from prison to public life, Ameelio offers educational resources, legal aid and vocational training for inmates. The company is currently scaling in three state prison systems—Iowa, Colorado and Maine—representing 35 prisons. Since its inception in February 2022, Ameelio has raised $11 million in funding from tech titans Reid Hoffman and Jack Dorsey.
Other listers are out to innovate the way we consume. After an awkward encounter at a drugstore involving a pregnancy test and a boyfriend’s mother (need we say more), Jamie Norwood, 29, and her cofounder Cynthia Plotch created Stix to offer reproductive and vaginal health products, nationwide and on-demand.
Nuha Siddiqui, 26, and Kritika Tyagi, 26, the founders of Erthos, are filling the shelves of commercial retailers with their plant-based plastic alternatives that are FDA compliant and biobased certified.
This year’s Social Impact list was edited by Olivia Peluso and Igor Bosilkovski. For a link to our complete Social Impact list, click here, and for full 30 Under 30 coverage, click here.
This article was original published by Forbes on November 29, 2022 and can be viewed here.