social-enterprise
(25)
Amy Williams
Amy Williams built Good-Loop around a stubborn question: if advertising can buy attention, why can’t that attention fund something useful? A decade later, her harder project is proving that purpose belongs in the machinery of business, not at its margins.
Karen Lithgow
Karen Lithgow is the Chief Marketing Officer of Goodwill Industries of South Florida, the Miami-based nonprofit that employs roughly 3,600 people and reports annual revenue near $196 million. She arrived at Goodwill after a corporate and consulting career that included brand and marketing roles connected to P&G, Disney, ADT and Western Union, followed by partner-level brand strategy and interim CMO work at the consultancy Chameleon Collective. At Goodwill South Florida she oversees marketing for an unusually wide portfolio: a chain of donation centers and thrift stores, an e-commerce operation, and Blue Box Solutions, the organization's B2B manufacturing and logistics arm that produces tens of millions of dollars of military apparel each year. Her public message centers on a single idea she has stated plainly - focusing on abilities rather than disabilities.
Goodwill Industries International
Goodwill Industries International is the umbrella organization for a North American network of about 150 autonomous, community-based Goodwill nonprofits. Founded in Boston in 1902 by Methodist minister Edgar J. Helms, it runs the classic model of collecting donated clothing and household goods, reselling them through thrift stores and, increasingly, online, and using the proceeds to fund free job training, career services, and support programs. The parent body sets brand standards, coordinates national partnerships, and runs shared initiatives such as the online marketplace GoodwillFinds and the Goodwill Digital Career Accelerator, while local members deliver services on the ground.
Goodwill Industries of South Florida
Goodwill Industries of South Florida is a Miami-based nonprofit social enterprise that funds training, employment and job placement for people with disabilities and other barriers to work. Founded in 1959, it runs a self-sustaining business model spanning donated-goods retail and thrift stores, technically complex apparel and flag manufacturing for the U.S. military, commercial laundry, janitorial services and third-party logistics. With roughly 3,600 employees and about $196M in annual revenue, it is one of the largest Goodwills in North America and the largest employer of people with disabilities in Florida.
Firebrand Artisan Breads
Firebrand Artisan Breads is an Oakland-founded, Alameda-based wood-fired bakery that describes itself as a jobs program that happens to sell bread. Founded in 2008 by Matt Kreutz, it wholesales artisan breads and pastries to hundreds of Bay Area retailers - including Whole Foods - and runs a direct retail cafe. Its defining feature is an Open Hiring model that prioritizes people with high barriers to employment (formerly incarcerated, formerly homeless), paired with a perpetual purpose trust that locks the mission in permanently and shares profits with workers.
Red Rabbit
Red Rabbit is the largest Black-owned K-12 school food management company in the United States. Founded in 2005 by former Wall Street trader and MIT graduate Rhys Powell, the company runs full-service cafeteria programs that cook made-from-scratch, culturally relevant meals for students in New York, New Jersey and Pennsylvania - treating good, diverse food for children as an act of social justice.
The Aruna Project
The Aruna Project is a Cincinnati-based nonprofit athleisure brand that creates lifelong freedom for survivors of sex trafficking through employment supported by holistic care. Founded in 2014 by Ryan and April Berg after time spent in Mumbai's red-light districts, Aruna employs survivor artisans in India and the US to craft premium bags, totes, and hair accessories - with 100% of sales revenue reinvested into freeing, employing, and empowering women. Its 'Freedom Business' model reports an 86% sustained freedom rate versus a 23% industry standard, and its national Aruna Run 5K series mobilizes thousands of runners to 'Run for Her Freedom.'
Emily Stone
Emily Stone is the founder and CEO of Uncommon Cacao, the first specialty cacao trader to publish verifiable prices for every transaction along its supply chain. From a base that started in the jungles of Belize and Guatemala, she built a Transparent Trade model that sources from more than 10,000 smallholder farmers across 15+ countries and supplies hundreds of craft chocolate makers worldwide. An Ashoka Fellow and Georgetown-trained sociologist, she is trying to decommoditize cacao by making farmers the protagonists of the chain rather than its afterthought.
Madeline Hilliard
Madeline Hilliard is the founder and CEO of DopaGE, a gamified overdose-prevention education platform built by physicians, neuroscientists, and video-game engineers for colleges and healthcare organizations. A USC computational-neuroscience graduate and Nationally Registered EMT who treated overdose patients in ambulances and ERs, she founded the nonprofit Team Awareness Combating Overdose (T.A.C.O.) in 2020 the same day a college friend died from a polysubstance overdose. T.A.C.O. now runs on roughly 300 student volunteers nationwide and is credited with saving lives in the four digits. She and co-founder Amanda Grennan were named to the 2023 Forbes 30 Under 30 list in Education.
Rustam Sengupta
Rustam Sengupta is the founder and CEO of Tuktu Care, a Vancouver-born platform that matches older adults with vetted community helpers for companionship and everyday tasks so they can keep living at home. A serial entrepreneur who previously built solar microgrid companies across rural India, he turned a pandemic-era scramble to care for his aging parents in Singapore into a fast-growing agetech company backed by Techstars and Melinda French Gates' Pivotal Ventures. He holds an MBA from INSEAD, an MS in Electrical Engineering from UC Irvine, and a Chevening Fellowship from Oxford, and teaches social entrepreneurship at the University of Vermont.
Ryan Berg
Ryan Berg is the co-founder and CEO of The Aruna Project, a Cincinnati-based athleisure bag and accessories brand stitched entirely by survivors of sex trafficking. With his wife April, he built a hybrid model that fuses a for-profit fashion label with nonprofit holistic care - transitional housing, counseling, healthcare and a living wage - to create what he calls lifelong freedom. The work started after a single TV news brief about children rescued from a brothel sent him hunting for that brothel on a business trip to India, where he found a two-mile stretch holding an estimated 15,000 enslaved women. The Aruna Project says it has helped free and employ more than 160 women across India and the Tri-State and contributed to an 86% drop in trafficking in that part of India.
Stephanie Lawrence
Stephanie Lawrence is the co-founder and co-CEO of Traveling Spoon, the marketplace she built to put travelers at a stranger's dinner table around the world. Born from a failed quest to learn dumplings from a Chinese grandmother, the company connects guests with vetted home cooks - 95% of them women - across dozens of countries for private meals, cooking classes, and market tours. A Dartmouth and UC Berkeley Haas MBA who worked with Alice Waters and Google.org before launching, Lawrence turned a travel frustration into a business that funnels income to local women while preserving family recipes that might otherwise vanish.
Vanessa Coleman
Vanessa Coleman is the co-founder and CEO of Oceanworks, the largest global marketplace for recycled plastic materials and products. A serial entrepreneur with an MIT engineering and Sloan MBA background, she has turned mismanaged ocean-bound plastic into a traceable, brand-grade supply chain. Before Oceanworks she was founding CEO of power-electronics company FINsix and co-founded the clean-water social enterprise Saha Global. Her work connects hundreds of brands to vetted regional recyclers, backed by the Oceanworks Guaranteed certification and shore-to-shelf traceability.
Everytable
Everytable is a Los Angeles-based, mission-driven food company that makes fresh, nutritious meals affordable and accessible to everyone. Built around a central commissary kitchen and small-footprint stores, subscriptions, delivery and refrigerated SmartFridges, the company prices meals by neighborhood - keeping food affordable in communities often treated as food deserts. Founded in 2016 by former Wall Street trader Sam Polk and ex-private-equity executive David Foster, Everytable is a public benefit corporation pioneering a Social Equity Franchise Program to build generational wealth for entrepreneurs of color.
Maternova, Inc.
Maternova is a woman-owned, woman-run social enterprise based in Providence, Rhode Island that curates, evaluates, and distributes evidence-based medical devices and diagnostics for maternal, neonatal, and reproductive health in low- and middle-income countries. Founded in 2009 as the first e-commerce marketplace for global health technologies, it connects inventors and manufacturers who lack distribution with the governments, NGOs, hospitals, and clinicians who need life-saving tools - aggregating small orders to unlock manufacturing runs and accelerate access to innovations that prevent maternal and infant deaths.
wikiHow
wikiHow is a collaborative, wiki-based platform on a mission to teach anyone how to do anything. Founded by Jack Herrick in 2005 and run as a self-funded 'hybrid' company that pairs a profit-making ad model with a nonprofit-style public mission, it hosts hundreds of thousands of community-written, expert-reviewed how-to articles in 19 languages and has reached tens of millions of monthly readers worldwide.
Maria Gabriela Salvador
Dr. M. Gabriela Salvador is the CEO of Maternova, Inc., a Providence-based global health company that runs an e-commerce marketplace for vetted, life-saving medical devices, diagnostics and nutrition products aimed at low- and middle-income countries. A physician trained as a pediatric ophthalmologist in Argentina, the United States and Mexico, she spent two decades building high-impact health programs at Americares, Grameen Foundation, Freedom from Hunger and Pro Mujer before taking the helm at Maternova in March 2023. Originally from Salta, Argentina, she pairs a medical degree from the National University of Cordoba with a Harvard MPH in health policy and management.
Sam Polk
Sam Polk is the co-founder and CEO of Everytable, a Los Angeles social enterprise that sells fresh, scratch-made meals priced to what a neighborhood can afford. A former hedge fund trader who walked away from a multimillion-dollar Wall Street career, he chronicled that exit in the 2016 memoir 'For the Love of Money' and has since built Everytable into a food-justice company that has raised more than $100 million and distributed millions of affordable meals through grab-and-go stores, SmartFridges, and direct-to-consumer delivery.
Kevin Zerber
Kevin Zerber is the Founder and CEO of Treering, the edtech company that turned the school yearbook into a personalized, sustainable, and digitally-native experience. Since co-founding Treering in 2009, Zerber has guided the company from a scrappy startup to a platform serving 15,000+ schools across the US, Canada, Australia, and New Zealand - printing over 11 million yearbooks along the way. With $7.6M in funding backed by notable investors including Rich Barton (Expedia, Zillow) and Mike McCue (Flipboard), and recognition on the 2025 Inc. 5000 list, Zerber has carved out a distinctive niche at the intersection of nostalgia, technology, and inclusivity.
Sama
Sama is a San Francisco-based AI training-data company that combines a 5,000-plus full-time annotation workforce - most based in Kenya, Uganda and India - with proprietary tooling to deliver labeled data, model evaluation and red-teaming for the world's largest AI builders. Founded as the nonprofit Samasource in 2008 by the late Leila Janah, it relaunched as a for-profit B Corp in 2019 and counts Google, Walmart, NVIDIA, Ford and Microsoft among its customers.
Wendy Gonzalez
Wendy Gonzalez is the CEO of Sama, a mission-driven AI data annotation and model evaluation company that employs thousands of workers in East Africa. She joined Sama in 2015, rose through the ranks as COO and President, and assumed the CEO role in 2020 following the passing of founder Leila Janah. Under her leadership, Sama closed a $70M Series B - at the time the largest funding round for a woman-led AI infrastructure company - achieved Forbes AI 50 recognition, and scaled to over 3,000 employees while maintaining its B Corp certification and social mission of lifting people out of poverty through dignified work in the AI economy.
Radha Basu
Radha Ramaswami Basu is the founder and CEO of iMerit Technology, a leading AI data annotation and services company that employs over 7,400 people worldwide - 52% of whom are women, and 80% from underserved communities. With 40+ years in tech spanning Hewlett-Packard (where she built the India software center into a $1.2B operation), Support.com (which she took public on NASDAQ), and now iMerit, she sits at the intersection of AI infrastructure and social impact. She co-founded the Anudip Foundation in 2005, which trained 120,000+ youth from low-income households - and it was those same graduates who became iMerit's first annotators. Today iMerit powers AI pipelines for autonomous vehicles, healthcare imaging, and generative AI at scale.
Kesha Cash
Kesha Cash is the Founder and General Partner of Impact America Fund, the largest VC firm in America run entirely by a Black woman. Based in Oakland, California, she manages $65 million across two funds, backing technology-enabled startups that serve low-to-moderate income and overlooked communities. Her portfolio includes Esusu (a fintech unicorn), Mayvenn, SoLo Funds, and CareAcademy. A former Wall Street analyst who grew up on a farm in South Carolina and was the first in her family to attend college, Cash draws on lived experience of economic inequality to identify billion-dollar opportunities that traditional investors routinely miss.
Leonard Adler
Leonard Adler is the founder and CEO of Green Jobs Network, a San Francisco-based social enterprise he launched in 2008 to connect job seekers with careers in sustainability, conservation, and clean energy. A Stanford-educated political scientist who went on to earn a J.D. from Georgetown Law and an MPP from Harvard's Kennedy School, Adler parlayed his early work in public-interest law and poverty research into building one of the internet's most active communities dedicated to green and climate careers. Under his leadership, Green Jobs Network has grown to run the largest LinkedIn group focused exclusively on green jobs—135,000+ members worldwide—while publishing a newsletter with more than 100,000 subscribers, hosting the Green Jobs Pod, and launching ClimateJobs.AI, an AI-powered career coaching platform. An Echoing Green Global Fellow and serial social entrepreneur, Adler has spoken at Stanford, the Commonwealth Club's Climate One, the National Career Development Association, and the Green Festivals, making him one of the most visible connectors in the climate workforce ecosystem.
Mandy Cabot
Mandy Cabot co-founded Dansko in 1990 from the back of a station wagon and built it into a $140M comfort footwear empire - then gave the whole company to her employees. Now she's running Silk Grass Farms in Belize, a vertically integrated agribusiness sitting atop 24,500 acres of protected rainforest. Chapter three of an already remarkable life.