human-rights
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Amanda Nguyen
Amanda Nguyen is a Vietnamese-American civil rights activist, author, and commercial astronaut who founded the nonprofit Rise after surviving sexual assault as a Harvard senior. She drafted the Sexual Assault Survivors' Rights Act, which passed Congress unanimously in 2016, and has helped pass dozens of laws protecting survivors. Nominated for the 2019 Nobel Peace Prize and named a 2022 Time Woman of the Year, she became the first Vietnamese and Southeast Asian woman in space aboard Blue Origin's NS-31 flight on April 14, 2025, fulfilling an astronaut dream she set aside for a decade to fight for survivors.
Victor Boutros
Victor Boutros is the CEO and co-founder of the Human Trafficking Institute, a Dallas- and Washington-based nonprofit that embeds investigators and lawyers inside the criminal justice systems of developing countries to help them dismantle trafficking networks at the source. A former U.S. Department of Justice federal prosecutor who tried human trafficking cases of national significance, he co-wrote the Washington Post bestseller The Locust Effect with Gary Haugen, work that earned the 2016 Grawemeyer Prize for Ideas Improving World Order. He left a stable government career with no safety net in 2016 to build an organization that has helped Uganda prosecute traffickers at nearly ten times the global average.
Patrick Cook-Deegan
Patrick Cook-Deegan is the founder and CEO of Wayfinder, a K-12 curriculum company that teaches purpose, belonging, and durable skills to more than 1.5 million students across roughly 4,000 schools. A former All-American lacrosse player turned human-rights advocate in Burma, wilderness guide, and Stanford d.school fellow, he built Wayfinder out of five years teaching character development in an Oakland public high school. He named the company after the ancient Polynesian navigators who crossed oceans without instruments - his bet on how to redesign the American high school for the 21st century.
Leila Chreiteh
Leila Chreiteh is a digital communications strategist and activist who has spent her career bridging social justice causes with the people who care about them. A Georgia-raised, Agnes Scott College honors graduate with a self-designed Human Rights major, she founded a refugee resettlement nonprofit on her college campus, ran for Alabama state legislature, championed immigrant rights at the Justice Action Center, and brought her storytelling instincts to the startup world as Communications Strategist and Director of Community at Outlander VC in New York - weaving a thread of progressive purpose through every platform she touches.