Once an outsider, environmentalist Manvi Bhalla is now at the center of a movement

Manvi Bhalla, a Canadian environmental youth advocate, is a force to reckon with when it comes to bringing awareness and accountability to the climate crisis. At only 23 years old, she has made it onto Corporate Knights magazine’s 2020 class of its Top 30 Under 30 sustainability leaders in Canada, and was also named one of the Top 25 Environmentalists Under 25 by environmental advocacy group The Starfish Canada the same year.

“One of my big worries is that the people currently in the positions of power do not represent the people who will be most impacted by climate change,” says Bhalla.

The activist is most passionate about using her voice to represent underserved communities and takes an intersectional approach to address the inequities in health and the environment. Being a woman of color who has been diagnosed with ADHD in adulthood, she hopes that by sharing her own identities, she will be able to best represent others like herself.

Inspired by her family, Elizabeth Masiyiwa is commanding the fields of philanthropy and entrepreneurship

“I’m definitely not one of those people who has a good work-life balance,” Elizabeth (or Tanya, as she prefers to be called) Masiyiwa says, smiling. “But I absolutely enjoy it—nothing is more fulfilling than transforming lives.”

She is the eldest of six children born to her mother, a philanthropist, and her father, the founder and executive chairman of Econet Global, an international technology group with operations and investments around the world.

Equally devoting her time between business and philanthropy, Masiyiwa has adopted a similar work ethic to the one her parents modeled for her and her siblings.

Today, at 29 years old, Masiyiwa is a social entrepreneur in her own right.

“I had to figure out who I was,” she says frankly. “I didn’t want my father’s success to be my crutch.”

Monica Yunus and Camille Zamora are bringing people together through music

When acclaimed American sopranos Monica Yunus and Camille Zamora first met as opera stu- dents at Juilliard in the early 2000s, they not only bonded over their shared joy of music, but they also discovered they both wanted to contribute to their communities on a deeper level.
“Our hearts resonated with questions around the role that the arts could play in the capacity of healing,” Zamora says.

As fate would have it, when the horrific events of 9/11 transpired, Yunus and Zamora responded immediately by gathering a group of their friends to perform at Juilliard’s local firehouse, which had lost 12 of its 13 firefighters that morning. Singing for frontline heroes and their families, and nursing homes, witnessing how moved they were, the two friends recognized the strong impact that the arts could have in society, especially in times of crisis.

“Both of us had a desire to bring the excellence that we were cultivating in our tiny practice rooms at Juilliard to as many communities as possible, and to forge new creative connections,” Yunus explains.

And so, in 2006, at the beginning of their blossoming operatic careers, Yunus and Zamora co- founded Sing for Hope (SFH), a New York–based nonprofit organization dedicated to harnessing “the power of the arts to create a better world.” With an annual budget of $3 million, today, SFH brings a multitude of creative-arts-based programs to hundreds of thousands of people in hospitals, nursing homes, schools, transit hubs, treatment centers, community spaces, and refugee camps in the United States and worldwide.