SOCAP21 Virtual Scholarship Entrepreneurs Winners
Every year, SOCAP grants scholarships to social entrepreneurs from all over the globe. This year’s entrepreneurs represent incredible solutions to pressing social, cultural, and environmental problems. Check out the full list of winners here.
Below, see how six entrepreneurs from around the world are making a difference in multiple sectors including water and sanitation, the arts, ethical apparel, and women empowerment. And, be sure to join us at SOCAP21, alongside all of our social entrepreneurs who are bringing the most innovative solutions around the globe to scale.
Water, Sanitation, and Hygiene
What is your company solving for?
Flowless contributes to water sustainability by helping utility companies and agribusinesses increase water efficiency, utilizing IoT and AI technologies for process optimization and automated faults detection. Flowless system ensures reliable water supply for thousands of people by contributing to reducing water losses and enhancing operations efficiency.
What is inspiring you now?
My vision is to contribute to communities’ resilience by applying the values of sustainability, combining professional knowledge with entrepreneurship and innovation for positive change in challenging contexts. Guided by the ambition to achieve social and environmental impact, for sustainable resources and resilient communities.
What call to action or advice do you have for others?
To apply agility, collaboration and synergies for active change and achieving positive impact
What is your company solving for?
Live Clean serves the underserved by providing access to clean, safe, and affordable water, sanitation, and hygiene services in a conducive environment that enables productivity, growth, and comfortability.
What is inspiring you now?
Serving the underserved to have access to basic human rights.
What call to action or advice do you have for others?
To shed light on the simplest but most effective innovations that aim to help low income people.
Arts, Culture, and Media
What is your company solving for?
We stand for social justice. At Giant Steps Music, we believe in the fundamental right of every person to live with dignity, with freedom, and with access to opportunity—to live healthy, successful lives. We are a global community tackling poverty and injustice by unleashing the power of music to advance rights, build vibrant communities, and create opportunities for all.
What is inspiring you now?
We are inspired by the grit, resilience, and tenacity of the community of impact entrepreneurs that continue to adapt and evolve to ensure their solutions deliver the greatest impact to their beneficiaries during this time of unprecedented time of challenge and change. We’re also inspired by the growing and much-needed respect and attention to well-being and mental health as a foundational practice and value in our field, as well as the voices in the field and others that focus on difficult emotions such as sadness and shame as being the engines of courage and growth. This is a very real concern for founders and entrepreneurs that can become barriers to growth and effectiveness if not attended to properly.
What call to action or advice do you have for others?
We believe that self-care is critical to founders’ well-being, and as a result, to their ability to lead effectively. It’s OK to have a bad day. Know that whatever you are doing within your capacity is enough. Reach out when you need help from your mentors, friends, family, peers, and colleagues. If we don’t seek support, we can become increasingly isolated. Only by caring for yourself can you care for others.
Space in the Gap in collaboration with Phantom Galleries LA
What is your company solving for?
Space in the Gap makes vacant space productive for property owners, creators, small businesses, neighborhoods, and municipalities. We create networks that harness local talent and energy and create synergies through cross-promotion, giving small creative businesses brick-and-mortar space and opportunities to earn revenue.
What is inspiring you now?
The deep and endless needs of the community for our programming.
What call to action or advice do you have for others?
We welcome any and all partners, education, collaborators, and mentors to reach out. Open heartedly, we will share energy, resources and ideas.
Ethical Apparel
What is your company solving for?
Conscious Gear designs outdoor gear and apparel for plus-size enthusiasts and endurance athletes. We support their desire to live a healthy lifestyle using the outdoor activity of their choice and with the availability of products that fit, are comfortable, and support their athletic performance goals. Bigger bodies deserve to be the center of design.
What is inspiring you now?
The importance of inclusion in outdoor spaces and activities especially as it relates to outdoor gear and apparel for people with bigger bodies including BIPOC communities.
What call to action or advice do you have for others?
Engage strategies to ensure inclusion in outdoor spaces and to ensure that the outdoor industry retailers and product makers of gear and apparel will invest in the design of extended sizes so people of all sizes who want to live a healthy lifestyle can partake in the outdoor activity of their choice.
Women and Girls Empowerment
What is your company solving for?
VisionVoice Inc. is a virtual community focused on structured mentorship programs that empowers female Black/AfroX youth and junior software engineers to solve inaccessibility to careers as software engineers in the tech ecosystem by pairing scholars with software engineer volunteers who are employed at startups seeking to diversify their engineering teams and grow their social impact.
What is inspiring you now?
My profound sense of purpose in life is what inspires me daily; it is the why behind my choices; what I choose to do or not do. This purpose is given clear direction by my core values of:
- Honesty — Telling, and not hiding, the truth;
- Grit — My passion, perseverance, and resilience in achieving long-term goals;
- Proactivity — My strength of will to take initiative and innovate;
- And intellectual humility — Recognizing that my knowledge base can grow and expand with time and meaningful effort as well as my genuine, caring regard for others and commitment that all the people I encounter should be that much richer, blessed, and inspired having interacted with me.
What call to action or advice do you have for others?
Join us in empowering female Black/AfroX students and junior software engineers to solve inaccessibility to careers as software engineers in the tech ecosystem partnering with us! Sign up as a software engineer mentor and to hire the software engineers in our community by visiting our website.
