Blake Mycoskie is a 35-year-old entrepreneur from Arlington, Texas. Prior to TOMS, he started five other companies, including an on-campus laundry service while a student at Southern Methodist University and an outdoor media company in Nashville. He was inspired to start TOMS after a 2006 trip to Argentina, where he witnessed the constant struggle of children growing up without shoes. Mycoskie spends most of his time traveling around the world and spreading the inspirational TOMS story. He currently lives in Los Angeles. 

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Neil Blumenthal and David Gilboa of Warby Parker, an eyewear company that donates a pair of glasses for every pair sold, do not finish each other’s sentences. Nor do they really look alike. But spend time with the in-sync, bespectacled duo and you start to think you’re seeing — and hearing — double.

Neil and David are in fact just one half of Warby Parker (the other founding members are fellow Wharton alumni Jeffrey Raider and Andy Hunt), but all four share the same innovative vision. “We were just close friends,” says Neil, “commiserating over the high price of glasses. And suddenly the light bulb went off, and I was like, You know, it doesn't have to be this way.”

Adds David: “What most consumers don't realize is there is essentially an oligopoly which controls the eyewear industry. These huge, multi-national companies control the entire supply chain, and are marking up glasses between 10 and 20 times what they cost to manufacture. The technology behind a pair of glasses was invented over 700 years ago — it’s ridiculous that a pair of glasses should cost more than an iPhone or an iPad.”

Neil discovered the importance of proper eye-care in economic development during the five years he worked for VisionSpring, a non-profit enterprise that trains low-income women in the developing world for careers in optical retail. “We were providing people with the tools to see, tools which they would use to learn and work,” he relates. “If you're a farmer, how do you separate seeds to plant if you can’t see? If you're a tailor, how do you thread a needle? We did impact assessments with the University of Michigan, and found that a pair of glasses increases someone's income by 20 percent. I mean, it makes a pair of glasses one of the most effective poverty-alleviation
tools in the world.”

In the end, though, it is not just their own cause that keeps them going. “One of the most exciting things about doing this work is the other entrepreneurs and innovators who we're able to meet,” offers Neil with a broad smile. “All the creativity gives me hope that we can actually solve some of the problems that we see on the news every night and make us depressed before we fall asleep.”

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On any given day, there are usually five things in Jeffrey Azize’s pockets: a set of keys, a cell phone, a wallet, and a pair of rosaries. The face of Grassroots Films, an independent film company based in Brooklyn, N.Y., Azize is as sweet and simple as his pockets suggest. However, beneath the soft-spoken, at times childlike, warmth, is a wisdom borne of circumstances that were far from charmed. Azize grew up in Queens with a physically abusive father, who regularly gambled away the small income Azize’s mother earned as a medical assistant.

“As I got older, the family started to split up,” Azize, 25, recounts, “and so, I found myself in Brooklyn at the age of 16, living at the St. Francis House.” Founded in 1967, the St. Francis House is a safe haven in Greenpoint, Brooklyn that provides a home environment for young men in need. “Pretty much all the guys that come from the St. Francis House make up the film company,” Azize points out happily.

“We were just a bunch of misfits from Brooklyn. We didn’t like the films that were out there, and we thought we could do a better job. So, we started our own film company. It was our way of giving back to society.

”With the critically acclaimed documentary, “The Human Experience,” Azize and his partners did just that. The documentary followed him and his brother Clifford as they traveled around the world in search of nothing less than the meaning of life. He may not have solved the entire puzzle, but Azize believes he has some of the answers. “You have to give more than you take,” he says matter-of-factly. With the continuing success of Grassroots Films, he is in the position to do so on a larger scale than even he imagined. “Life is a gift and we need to recognize that, and appreciate it, and always try to do the best that we can. That’s it.”

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On first meeting, there is something all knowing about Graham Hill. When he strolls through the door, shouldering a sleek, all-white bicycle (which, oddly enough, appears to be folded), he seems to be the bearer of some secret knowledge. Yet the eco-activist and design entrepreneur is not a messenger from a better future. He is an agent for a better now.

Raised in the small Canadian town of Sutton, Quebec, Hill holds degrees in architecture and industrial design. In 2003, he founded TreeHugger.com, a blog designed to push sustainability into the mainstream. He has just wrapped up his latest project, LifeEdited, an open competition that challenged contestants to design a completely functional, ultra-low-footprint, 420-square-foot apartment. Although he is busy spinning several other plates in the air, including a ceramic cup business of all things, Hill is no scattershot dilettante.

The common threads uniting his various projects are environmental activism and innovative design. For Hill, the principles of good design are more than form and function: they constitute an ethic, and the foundation for a bold and viable model for how we ought to live in the world.
“When I was starting out, there just wasn’t anything in the media, or in the conversations surrounding environmental issues that was about ‘yes,’” Hill says emphatically. “The discussion was focused on the things that you should not do. I wanted to do something that was really aspirational and exciting and useful — something inspired by hope, instead of fear.”

In his many businesses and projects, Hill marries beauty, ingenuity and possibility, and in the process challenges us to re-encounter the world.
The bicycle sitting behind him best exemplifies this vision. He came up with the idea for its design after one too many trips transporting his old bike to and from his sixth-floor Manhattan walk-up.

“Bikes are awkward in corridors, and in small spaces like Manhattan apartments,” he explains, in the midst of his demonstration, “mostly due to the width of the handle-bars and the pedals.” A couple snap-and-clicks later, the master of design has folded down the bike’s handle-bars, and collapsed its pedals. What was once a normal bicycle, is now a sleek, white line. “How long did that take me?” he asks ruefully. “Ten seconds.”

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Jim Moriarty is not due to leave for a surfing trip in Morocco for a week, but a part of him appears to be already there. His gaze isn’t roving, nor is he in any way distracted. On the contrary, the dapper surfer is fully attentive: his eyes are sharp and his mind focused. Still, it’s hard not to feel like you are keeping him from an important date.

“When you're a surfer and you're in the waves or you're under the water, you are transformed,” enthuses Jim, a former technology entrepreneur whose enduring passion for the sea led him to his role as chief executive of Surfrider, a dynamic activist network committed to the protection and preservation of American coastlines. “The water envelops you, and you're transported to a different place. That mystery of being encapsulated by nature — to me, it's just something you don't get anywhere else. If you skateboard, you're on concrete; if you snowboard, you're on snow. Those surfaces don't move. With surfing, everything's moving, everything's dynamic, and if you're underwater, everything's dynamic as well. You could compare it to flying in space.”

To Moriarty, the need to preserve this experience and the coasts and oceans that provide it was purely instinctive. “That’s what Surfrider is,” he says, “a group of people who are affected by the coasts, and the water, and the waves, and transform that into love, and then, into
action.”

But for all his concern Moriarty preaches enjoyment as well as protection: “Our goal is not to velvet rope off the coast. We're surfers, we're divers, we're snorkelers, we like to walk on the beach — we want that recreation, that use, to go hand-in-hand with preservation.” This unity of purpose and passion can make his work uniquely edifying. It can also make it wrenching. Moriarty describes how his “heart drops” whenever a floating piece of trash interrupts a morning surf. Ultimately though, he feels that such frustrations are essential for the would-be activist.

“No one is born an activist,” he explains. “There's a catalyst for all of us to become activists. And living, and knowing, and working with activists, day in and day out, is the source of my hope.”

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Affable, unassuming and warmly intelligent, Adam Braun has something of an American everyman quality to him. Not that there is anything average about the 27-year-old adventurer-entrepreneur. Braun runs Pencils of Promise, a non-profit organization that builds schools in the developing world. To date, Pencils of Promise has built 41 schools in Laos, Nicaragua, and Guatemala, and raised over $3 million. From his earliest years growing up in Connecticut, it had always been a small world — two of Braun’s brothers were adopted from Mozambique. During his time as a student in Brown however, his global perspective widened when he began traveling in earnest. It was in the midst of one these trips that Pencils of Promise was born. 

During a stay in India, he asked a small boy what he wanted most in the world. The child’s response? “A pencil.”

“I expected to hear an answer like a PlayStation or a flat-screen TV,” Braun explains, still amazed years later. “At that moment, I realized the power and importance of education.” Braun’s mission extends beyond the new schoolyards of, say, Verapaz or Houy Thong. He also seeks to educate would-be activists across the world.

“Part of our mission is to train this next generation of leaders to take action,” he says thoughtfully, “and ‘taking action’ doesn’t just mean going out and starting a non-profit and building schools or providing clean water. It really means finding ways to help other people through what you love doing.” This philosophy is what drew him to Edun and the Pioneers project: “Edun pursues its core mission — to create amazing clothes, and have people feel good about themselves through wearing those clothes – but in the process of doing so, it also empowers locals on the ground in Africa. It’s the type of company that the Pencils of Promise movement wants to help create more of.”

When he is asked to tell the story behind his own fashion accessories, Braun smiles. “These?” he asks, lightly tugging at the medley of thin, woven bracelets dangling from his wrist. He explains that each bracelet comes from a different place he has been. “And there’s dust from each of those communities that rests on each of these bracelets. They carry dust, and that dust keep me honest.”

“When I walk into these really high-end business meetings that I’ll attend as part of my job with Pencils of Promise, these keep me tied to the people that the meetings are really supposed to be about.” His gaze remains fixed on his wrist. “They never come off — ever.”

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There’s a subtle yet palpable shift in the room’s energy when Sean Carasso walks in. At first glance, Carasso, who is 29, is the very picture of young idealism: all bright eyes and bright smile, aglow with an eager — and, at times, outsize — energy. Carasso is the founder and powerhouse behind Falling Whistles, an organization devoted to raising awareness about the ongoing conflict in the Democratic Republic of the Congo. He is at once spontaneous and controlled, a beguiling mix of can-do optimism and on-message erudition whose conversation transitions seamlessly from casual anecdote to history lesson without ever sounding belligerent or preachy.

It is an oratory skill he learned early on. “When I first got back from Congo, I was screaming at people,” he recalls. “I’m broke, I’m sleeping on my buddy’s couch, and I’m just yelling, ‘Kids are dying!’ And if you start yelling at people, they stop inviting you back. ‘Who wants to hang out with that guy?’” Carasso became enraged about the situation in Congo after visiting a military camp where captured child soldiers were being mercilessly beaten. “I freaked out,” he says. “These boys were being treated like war criminals. These kids who were too small to carry a gun had been sent to the front lines, armed with only a whistle. They’d been sent as human shields.”

He discovered that the tragedy was only a part of a much larger — and long-running — horror in Congo: the systematic oppression of an entire people that had been taking place for more than a century. In response, he founded Falling Whistles, which sells its signature protest necklaces — vintage whistles hanging from thin chains or leather straps (priced from $34)— at boutiques such as Atrium and Curve.

“For us, it has been about creating new distribution channels for information that impacts people in new ways,” Carasso explains. He picks up the iconic Falling Whistles necklace and gives his trademark smile, then adds, “We take retail and use it as a modern-day town hall.”

“You know, this was information that was suppressed systematically by the Belgian government for almost a hundred years, and we’re making it dope; we’re making it accessible. We’re putting it in retail stores, and people are excited to buy it and read about it. We’re able to use these new channels to create our own press.”

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It’s something of a contradiction in terms: teaching someone how to make their own way. Yet with the Make Something program, Aaron Rose is doing just that. It’s a fitting challenge for a 42-year-old creative firebrand who continues to defy categorization. “I’ve never really had a career,” he proclaims, laughing brightly. Even here, Rose is being a bit coy: the artist-filmmaker-writer-musician-painter-curator-magazine editor who in 2008 added “educator” to his resume, has had no shortage of vocations. For Rose, though, becoming a teacher is his most important
achievement to date.

Based in Los Angeles, Make Something brings together renowned creative personalities and youth from around the world for a series of art, design, music, fashion, and film workshops that emphasize hands-on practical skills and do-it-yourself creativity. The program was designed as an answer to the art schools which Rose believes have become little more than corporate training centers for commercial artists. “I didn’t go to art school,” he explains. “I decided that rather than spend a bunch of money on an education, I would just educate myself by living my life. So, at the age of 18, I hit the road.”

Despite having found his way in the world, Rose lamented the relative absence of a support network for creative youth. “After complaining about it for 20 years,” he says with a playful roll of his eyes, “I decided to put my money where my mouth was and start a school. I brought in all of my artistic friends, and we created this whole network of people who were not quote-unquote professional teachers, but who had a lot of life knowledge to draw from.”

This raw, practical savvy continues to shape the mission of Make Something. Indeed, one of the school’s core philosophies grew out of a lesson Rose learned from sneaking into concerts. “Don’t wait in line for things,” he offers with a laugh, “just use the back door. Everybody else is waiting in line with their portfolios in hand, waiting for opportunities.” He shrugs ruefully, “Most colleges and schools will teach you how to make a record and then shop it to a record label - we teach you how to make the record label.”

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Waris Ahluwalia

Waris Ahluwalia is a man of two worlds, and his goal is to bring them closer together. “I’m from the old world,” says Ahluwalia, a Punjab-born, New York-raised jeweler, actor and man-about-town, “but I’m living in the new world – and so now I’m going back to the old world.” For Ahluwalia the journey home has led to the House of Waris, his eponymous jewelry line of intricate pieces manufactured using traditional (sometimes centuries-old) techniques by craftsmen in India, Italy and Thailand.

It was this old-world artistry that first attracted the 36-year-old multi-hyphenate to the world of accessories. “I don’t have a jewelry, fashion or design background,” he explains. “I fell into this. What made me fall in love with it were the craftsmen, the people that I worked with. In Italy, we have a small workshop with a goldsmith, an apprentice, and a diamond setter. In India, we have stonecutters and goldsmiths.” The glittering pieces reflect a world beyond the finished product and the narratives behind them add to their glamour. “It’s not just that something’s made,” he declares. “It’s how something is made. What is the story and the people behind it?”

Ahluwalia sees his approach as the fashion equivalent of the ‘slow food’ movement. “It’s okay that things take a little bit longer,” he says. “They are hand-made so they will take a little bit more time. We’re not making hundreds of thousands of them. It’s considered,  thoughtful. As consumers, we make these decisions. You can buy a white shirt from anyone, you can buy shoes from anyone: but don’t you deserve the best? Don’t you deserve to know how it was made?”

Ultimately, the point is not to forsake new world for old, but to bring the two into deeper conversation. “I’m pro-building, pro-commerce,” he says with a laugh. “I have no problem with change. I just think that tradition and progress can coexist.” He continues, not skipping a beat: “For a long time, progress — growing yourself, growing your company — meant raping the land; the new idea has to be giving back to the land. The more you give back to it, the more it feeds you.”

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Jonathon Prince

Jonathon Prince is not supposed to be here. According to his schedule, he should be somewhere along the Northern California coast, in the 18-mile stretch separating the cities of Elk and Point Arena. The athlete-activist has flown to New York City for a photo shoot on Monday, but by Wednesday he will be back on the road, continuing his latest mega marathon, California Dreams. The run spans 796 miles, taking the 31-year-old Las Vegas native from the California-Oregon state line to the Tijuana border.

A recreational runner who picked up the hobby from an ex-girlfriend, Prince first hit the road in earnest in the wake of Hurricane Katrina. (He ran from Los Angeles to New Orleans and then to Atlanta, raising $13,000 for Habitat for Humanity.) “Katrina was more than just a physical hurricane; it was a spiritual hurricane, as well,” he explains, “I thought to myself, if I can just run to inspire other people who are still here, who lost everything overnight, then maybe I can do my part. After that run, I started to realize that my legs had a purpose.”According to Prince, the life of a solo runner is not as lonely as one might imagine and he estimates that he has met thousands of people on his travels. Which puts him in as good a position as any to gauge the country’s morale.“It’s mostly low,” he observes thoughtfully. “That’s what inspires me to keep going. The idea that people think, ‘If he can run across the country, if he can do 25, 30 miles a day, then I can do XYZ, I can do my thing.’”

He continues: “I come across people from a variety of nationalities and beliefs and the one thing that they all have in common is that each of them has, or once had, an idea or a dream.” As he talks, Prince grows more spirited, as though each word were another milestone on a long road to change. “People aren’t dreaming as much as they used to,” Prince explains with a shake of his head. “The world will be a better place when people start dreaming again — when they put action behind their dreams.”

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Marcus Samuelsson

As Marcus Samuelsson sinks comfortably into the couch, his arms draped over it in classic movie-theater-date style, it’s hard to imagine any couch — or any room, for that matter — in which he does not feel at home. It’s an affability that has served him well on his many travels and endeavors. Samuelsson was born in 1970 in Ethiopia and moved to Sweden when he was 3 years old. At 21, he came to New York to take an apprenticeship at Aquavit and within three years was the restaurant’s executive chef. Since then, he has garnered no shortage of accolades, among them a James Beard Foundation Award for “Best Chef: New York City” in 2003, a win in the reality TV show “Top Chef Masters,” and the honor of preparing President Barack Obama’s first state dinner.

Though Samuelsson is involved in numerous philanthropic causes and runs the Food Republic blog, the politics of food means more than immaculate dinners for the first family. “Food is absolutely political,” he says, leaning forward a bit. “Take America. Ten million kids in America go to bed hungry every night. As a chef, I have a responsibility to do something about that, whether I do cooking classes or write a blog about food prices going up.” As his career develops — his newest restaurant is Red Rooster, in Harlem — Samuelsson is learning to reconcile his desire to stay local with his drive to reach a wider audience. “I want to interact with people in a sincere way, and a restaurant allows you to touch people and have them eat out of your hands, basically. On a blog, you have to create another, completely different presence. I’m learning that. I don’t think I’ve hit it perfectly, but it’s not really about hitting it perfectly.”

Critics have suggested he’s come pretty close with Red Rooster. Samuelsson prides himself on sourcing locally for ingredients (right down to buying meat from the butcher down the street) as well as for talent. “Harlem has given me a sense of terroir,” he says, “a sense of belonging, so I have a responsibility to hire from Harlem.” Local artists are also showcased in the restaurant. But if Red Rooster is a valentine to his neighborhood, Samuelsson insists that ultimately he is the son of many places: “I know the person who I am — I need Scandinavia, I need America, and I definitely need Africa.” — UZOAMAKA MADUKA

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