OZY’s Top OGA Winners – OZY

1 – Amanda Gorman – Words of Hope

When we first introduced you to Amanda Gorman in 2017, she was 19, a student at Harvard, and an OZY Genius Award winner. In our How was your day? series, she wrote about her project called Generation Empathy, the seed of which “came out of this experience I had on Martin Luther King’s birthday.” She reflected on what it meant, how “we were visiting these museums, exhibiting, talking about identity, making changes. What really interested me was thinking: What if there was a way for all students, regardless of zip code or socioeconomic status, to go on field trips like this? While a lot has changed for Gorman in the years since, one thing hasn’t: his instinct to think of others.

2 – Grace Fisher — Arts for Children with Disabilities

The first signs of acute flaccid myelitis (AFM) struck Grace Fisher on her 17th birthday. She was rushed to hospital and later diagnosed with the rare neurological condition. While hospitalized, a family friend made a film about Fisher, who was later accepted to Berklee College of Music in Boston to pursue her dream of playing guitar. She decided to start the Grace Fisher Foundation (GFF) with a rather singular mission: to bring artistic programming to people with disabilities. After winning the OZY Genie Award 2021 and the cash grant to continue the work of her foundation, she is heading for an uncertain future but one that will certainly be full of the kind of disability rights advocacy that brought her here. “My only limit will be my imagination,” she says.

3 – Dan Eggers — Public Education for Trans People

“Just as a trans person in the world, there’s a lot of education you need to do, wherever you go,” says Eggers, who is from Birmingham, Alabama. As the first openly trans student to get into a high-level college musical theater program, Eggers is no stranger to feeling alienated. And so, he’s committed to making all classrooms — not just theater and art spaces — more LGBTQ-friendly. Since many trans youth don’t have parents or other supportive adults in their lives, Eggers sees educators stepping in and they’re already responding. “An educator in Canada reached out and said, ‘Hi, I have a group of trans students at my high school in the performing arts. Would you come talk to them to help support them? »

1 – Rohan Pavuluri — Bankruptcy, access to financial support

If Pavuluri had any financial advice, it would be to file for bankruptcy when needed, no questions asked. While a student at Harvard, Pavuluri recognized bankruptcy as a civil rights injustice: the poor were unable to hire the help they needed to file complicated bankruptcy forms for a essential new start. “It really pissed me off,” Pavuluri recalled. So he decided to do something about it, and to make his idea a reality, he turned to OZY’s Genius Awards. Pavuluri was appointed to Forbes’30 Under 30 and featured in the Time100 Next list 2021.

2 – Antonia Ginsberg-Klemmt — Solar Cell Portable Car Shelter and Energy Provider

Before “Toni” was born, her parents lived on a sailboat powered by solar panels. “If it hadn’t been for my dad, I probably wouldn’t have gotten into solar power,” she told OZY. “I was born in Hawaii and literally grew up on a boat. That childhood helped shape a lot of his young life. Ginsberg-Klemmt is a 2021 OZY Genius Award Winner for his patent-pending invention, Gismo Power, a portable solar carport with an integrated electric vehicle (EV) charger. This OZY Genius hopes to one day work for a renewable energy company, and she’s particularly interested in researching ocean energy by harnessing the power of currents, waves, tides, and pressure differences. “Gismo Power is the beginning of my career,” says Ginsberg-Klemmt, “but certainly not the end.”

3 – Brandy Star Merriweather – Platform to support BIPOCS in technology

This OZY Genie Award 2021 The winner created Creator Equality, a union for Black, Indigenous and color digital creatives that is designed to amplify their stories, set standards and provide free financial, legal and advertising support. “Digital creators are kind of thrown out there,” she says. “And so I saw that it was a need.” Merriweather realizes how non-white creatives aren’t properly recognized for their talents. She also runs a public relations firm, BStarPR, and heard from customers about how fellow content creators were being exploited and abused behind the scenes. “I was tired of seeing even the digital creators I’ve worked with feel like they’re running a deficit.”

4 – Aidan McCarty — Unum ID – A digital identification centralizing information

This Stanford dropout wants to make it harder for Russian hackers to influence elections. How? ‘Or’ What? A co-founder of ePluribus with his brother, McCarty was driven to make it “incredibly easy” for Americans to reach their public representatives with comments, questions or concerns. “We wanted to allow ordinary people to have a voice again. I had this idea of ​​editing the legislation on wiki: people could write it together and bring it to Congress,” he wrote on our pages when he won an OGA in 2017. McCarty went on to was named to the Forbes Under 30 Top 30 and co-founded Unum ID, a passwordless platform that turns your 34 passwords, half a dozen email accounts and multiple phone numbers into an online identity simplified.

1 – Kalina Silverman — Connecting people across divides

Kalina Silverman felt terribly alone when she first left home to attend college across the country. “There were a lot of small talk, but it was hard to connect with people,” she told OZY when we first featured her in 2015. Silverman first started a coalition of Métis students, but then she started to think of other ways to bring people together. She wanted to show how, despite their differences, everyone has things in common. To do this, Silverman built a kind of social experiment called great speech. Now a Fulbright U.S. Ambassador, the sky’s the limit for Silverman.

2 – Michael DeVore – App for BIPOC Self-Care

Michael DeVore is a man of ideas who carries a notebook everywhere he goes. His OGA genius idea of ​​2015? Imagine a world in which broke college kids never have to walk into a job interview with unruly hair again. Although DeVore has since left the company, Live Chair Health is moving forward. Barbers in collaborating shops are now working to convince minority men to check their blood pressure when cutting their hair. As far as we are concerned, everyone is a winner.

3 – Gabriel Saruhashi – Communication + learning app for the incarcerated

Did you know that in the United States, the $1.2 billion for-profit prison telecommunications industry charges up to $25 for a 15-minute phone call between an inmate and a loved one on the outside? ? Incredibly, 1 prisoner out of 3 goes into debt maintaining contact with a family member behind bars. It moved OZY Genie Award 2021 winner and Yale graduate Gabriel Saruhashi in action. With a colleague, Saruhashi created improvement, an application that allows families to send free personalized letters, photos or postcards to their incarcerated loved ones via their smartphone or computer. Since its launch in 2020, users have sent more than 700,000 letters and postcards through the app, which also offers games, online articles, sudoku and self-help materials. This is called real change.

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