Each year Forbes ranks the 30 Under 30, an annual encyclopedia of the brashest entrepreneur across United States and Canada. Following are some of the 30-under-30 social entrepreneurs:
Bee Downtown
A fourth-generation beekeeper, Leigh-Kathryn Bonner, founded Bee Downtown to save the dwindling honeybee population while simultaneously providing corporations with a novel approach to sustainability. It installs and maintains beehives on corporate campuses, counting Delta Airlines, Chick-Fil-A and IBM as clients. Bee Downtown currently maintains over 200 hives and has been profitable since inception.
Leigh-Kathryn Bonner’s company, Bee Downtown, isn’t even five years old, but it has earned her plaudits the world round.
From features in major glossy magazines to the local news and even the BBC in the United Kingdom, Bonner’s quest to build a company that takes on the issue of a fragile bee population has propelled her from a recent graduate of N.C. State University to one of the region’s most interesting entrepreneurs.
LegWorks
Brandon Burke, cofounder and chief product officer of LegWorks, headquartered in Buffalo, New York, is also among Forbes 30 Under 30 entrepreneurs and innovators. LegWorks produce and deliver high-functioning and affordable prosthetic technology globally. The awards are given to “bold risk-takers who put a new twist on the old tools of the trade,” according to Forbes.
Burke was named in the social entrepreneur category. LegWorks uses a multi-tiered pricing model that has allowed 30 percent of the company’s total volume to be sent to the developing world. Burke, who has a transformable amputation himself, uses the company’s prosthetic device. According to the award, LegWorks has served 1,300 patients and has $2.8 million in funding.
BoxPower
Angelo Campus, founder of BoxPower, has also made his way to the Forbes list of 30 Under 30. Angelo Campus is the founder and CEO of BoxPower, a renewable energy company providing off-grid communities with affordable microgrid infrastructure. Angelo was homeschooled by his mother, and at an early age, began designing bicycle generators and solar water distillers.
As a freshman at Princeton, Angelo joined a research team designing rapidly deployable renewable energy systems for disaster relief and rural electrification. Over the next three years he assumed a key leadership position on the design team, and during his senior year, he commercialized the technology under the name BoxPower. Angelo conducted his senior thesis research on Native American reservations, where more than 14 percent of residents lack access to grid electricity. Angelo graduated Magna Cum Laude from Princeton in 2016, and is now working full time to launch BoxPower’s pilot program on the Pine Ridge Reservation, where it will provide power to the first all-girls indigenous college prep school in the United States. BoxPower plans to expand internationally with a pilot program in the Philippines, where they will provide power to an un-electrified fishing village.
BoxPower manufactures solar micro grids that can be quickly deployed via shipping containers to communities in need. Each unit can be assembled (without specialized equipment or technicians) in just five hours and powers six homes–or can be linked together to form a localized grid. BoxPower was used in Puerto Rico after Hurricane Maria and has offset nearly 6.2 million pounds of CO2 this year.
These and other of the Forbes 30-under-30 entrepreneurs are making waves socially and globally. Not content to be solely profit-driven, these young upstarts want to make a difference in the world. Like an aspiring young teen entrepreneur, 17-year-old founder of Halfcode Richard Black says: “Chasing money won’t make you as happy as doing something to help and empower others… We’re balancing being innovators who are mission-driven with being entrepreneurs who are profit-driven. I’m truly convinced that we can change the world and that’s what drives us every day.”