RECENT WINNERS
Veronika Scott – The Empowerment Plan
empowermentplan.org | Detroit, MI
Veronika Scott started The Empowerment Plan as a 20-year-old product design student in Detroit. She was told over and over again that it would fail because the homeless people she wanted to hire would be worthless. In her own w0rds, “everyday I enjoy proving all of those people wrong. Everyone I hire is powerful, driven, and I’m lucky to be a part of their lives.”
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Arif Khan – Depave
depave.org | Portland, OR
Arif Khan became obsessed with depaving after moving into a home in northeast Portland in 2001 which had a back yard that was completely paved over. Attracted to the opportunity for destruction, he looked at this as a wonderful way to transform a dead space designed for car storage into an urban oasis filled with herbs, vegetables, flowers, fruits, and native plants.
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Dr. Geoff Tabin – Himalayan Cataract Project
cureblindness.org/ | Waterbury, VT
Dr. Geoff Tabin and Nepalese eye surgeon Dr. Sanduk Ruit established the Himalayan Cataract Project in 1995 – with a vow to work to eliminate all preventable and treatable blindness from the Himalayan region in their lifetime, a goal, in Tabin’s words, “more audacious than setting out to make the first assent of the East Face of Mount Everest.”
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