Justice Served Coffee isn’t just selling coffee — it’s building a pathway from jobs to ownership for formerly incarcerated people. Founded by Rob Kramer, this for-profit model blends community, commerce, and redemption into a bold new blueprint for social impact.

When Steve Gross was a teenager, he discovered something unusual about himself.

He didn’t have the flashiest talents or the sharpest academic skills—but he had a gift for connecting with kids. Whether on a basketball court or at summer camp, he could make them feel safe, seen, and valued.

That gift would one day become his life’s work.

Gross is the Chief Playmaker and Founder of The Life is Good Playmaker Project, a nonprofit that has trained nearly 30,000 early childhood educators, social workers, and caregivers in the simple yet profound art of using play to heal trauma. Together, these Playmakers reach more than 1.3 million children every year, many of them living with homelessness, poverty, or violence.

“This intentional play is medicine,” Gross says. “And it’s more effective than any other medicine for treating adversity and trauma.”

The United States makes up less than 5% of the world’s population yet nearly 20% of its incarcerated people. Represent Justice was born from the Just Mercy impact campaign — the film starring Michael B. Jordan as lawyer Bryan Stevenson fighting to overturn wrongful convictions. When audiences heard directly from people impacted by the system, their voices proved more powerful than any statistic. That insight inspired Daniel Forkkio, CEO of Represent Justice, to launch the Ambassador Program, which equips formerly incarcerated leaders to tell their own stories through film. Their powerful narratives and campaigns are shifting perspectives and sparking change nationwide.

It started in a waiting room.

Bree Groff was sitting beside her mother in a cancer center—overwhelmed, heartbroken, watching others around her cling to every precious minute. In that quiet, heavy moment, a friend texted her: “I can’t wait for this week to be over.”

That message, so casually tossed off, collided violently with the reality around her. “Everyone in the hospital was wishing for more days,” Bree reflected, “and everyone back at the office was wishing for Friday.” That was the moment she realized something had gone fundamentally wrong in how we experience time—especially at work.

The contrast became the seed of “Today Was Fun”, Bree’s radical, hopeful, and deeply human book about reclaiming our workdays—and rediscovering what makes them matter.

What if you could plant a coral the way you plant a tree—and bring a dying reef back to life?

That question became a calling for Sam Teicher, co-founder of Coral Vita, a company working to restore one of Earth’s most vital—and most threatened—ecosystems. Their pioneering approach—combining cutting-edge science with a scalable, for-profit model—has earned them global recognition, including the prestigious Earthshot Prize, awarded by Prince William to the world’s most inspiring environmental solutions.

The Desai Foundation is a public, programmatic nonprofit working across rural India to expand health, livelihoods, and menstrual equity. Over twenty-five years it has evolved from a family philanthropy into a community-led operating model that now runs roughly thirty programs across eight Indian states, reaching millions of people in thousands of villages. 

What if all it took to change a city was belief—in a person, their purpose, and their plan? That’s the founding premise of The David Prize, a $200,000 no-strings-attached award granted annually to five New Yorkers with bold visions for a better city. Now in its fifth year, the Prize continues to prove that real transformation starts with the individual.

This fall, nonprofit creative collective Been There is teaming up with Real Ale Brewing Company to launch a limited-edition beer whose profits will support efforts to end homelessness. For Been There co-founder and co-executive director Lenny Barszap, it’s more than a creative collaboration—it’s a bold step toward a bigger vision: building the equivalent of Product (RED) for homelessness.

We live in a world built on carbon. But for too long, that carbon has come from the wrong places—dug up from beneath the Earth in the form of oil, gas, and coal. What if, instead, we could make everything we need from the carbon already in the air?

What if the key to ending homelessness wasn’t just a roof—but a sofa, a fridge, a toothbrush?

 That’s the insight behind A Sense of Home, the nonprofit founded by Georgie Smith and led by Ken Grouf, which has created over 1,200 fully furnished homes for former foster youth and 225 more for wildfire survivors. Their model shows how dignity, stability, and belonging can begin with the basics—and grow into something life-changing.

Imagine being told the only way to save the planet is to find the impossible: technologies bold enough to cut a billion tons of carbon from the atmosphere.

That’s the challenge Nelson Switzer has set for himself. As Co-Founder and Managing Partner of Climate Innovation Capital (ClimateIC), he leads a venture fund dedicated to backing entrepreneurs with the potential to radically cut emissions and reshape industries.

Since 2006, GO Campaign has grown from helping 20 children in Tanzania to more than 420,000 in 40 countries, granting over $14.4 million with an average of just $35 needed to change a child’s life.

In 2024, the Bencheghib siblings launched Sungai Design — a for-profit social enterprise that transforms hard-to-recycle plastic into beautifully designed products. Their mission is simple but ambitious: reduce river pollution by building a circular system where trash is recovered, cleaned, reprocessed, and remade into something useful and desirable.

Most bottled teas are loaded with sugar or artificial sweeteners, wrapped in glossy promises that don’t always hold up to scrutiny. Just Ice Tea is changing that: not with hype, but with heart.

What if you had a brilliant idea to change the world—but no idea how to turn it into a legitimate nonprofit? What if the biggest hurdle wasn’t inspiration, but infrastructure?

For the last decade, executive director Craig Cichy and the team at Social Impact Fund have been quietly helping changemakers solve that problem.

In the rolling hills of North Wales, a new kind of movement is taking shape—one built not with protest signs or policy papers, but with dirt bikes, skate ramps, and a radical commitment to joy. It’s called Camp VC, and it’s proving that when women and non-binary people are given space to create their own worlds, the results can be both thrilling and transformational.