15 More People Changing the Nonprofit World

These nonprofit leaders are finding innovative ways to take on society’s toughest problems.

Norman Atkins

Relay Graduate School of Education
New York

In the late 1990s, Norman Atkins co-founded the North Star Academy Charter School in Newark, which was soon celebrated for improving academic achievement for poor minority students. Now Mr. Atkins is taking on an even bigger task: transforming teacher training in the United States.

The nonprofit Relay Graduate School of Education, which he co-founded in 2011, puts practice ahead of theory. Classroom veterans do the teaching, and students immediately start working full-time in schools. They squeeze in their formal education in the off hours. Certification depends on their success improving student performance. This school year, Relay is serving 3,000 current and aspiring teachers across 15 campuses.

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Greg Bloom

Open Referral
Washington, D.C.

No single charity can provide all the services a person in crisis might need. But without up-to-date information about which groups provide what services, making referrals becomes a difficult, time-consuming task.

Greg Bloom saw that when he worked at Bread for the City, a social-service organization in Washington, D.C. Now he’s trying to solve the problem with Open Referral, an effort to build open-source, cooperative technology systems nonprofits and government agencies can use to track such data. The first big test: Jewish Community Services of South Florida, which runs the county’s “211" information service, is working with Open Referral to open up its service. The partners aim to start testing the system in 2018.

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Yolanda Coentro

Institute for Nonprofit Practice
Needham, Mass.

Yolanda Coentro would like to see more people of color and people from modest economic backgrounds in positions of authority in the nonprofit world. Since 2016, when she became CEO of the Institute for Nonprofit Practice, she’s focused on making that happen by providing low-cost leadership training through the organization.

“People who have experience with the issues that we’re grappling with today know what’s worked. They know what hasn’t,” she says. “They have a perspective that can ensure that people and organizations are really being sensitive to the full spectrum of the issue.”

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Chrystel Cornelius

Oweesta

First Nations Oweesta Corporation
Longmont, Colo.

Chrystel Cornelius was just 27 when she started a community-development finance institution on the Turtle Mountain reservation in North Dakota. It was the reservation’s first nonprofit. Now, as executive director of the First Nations Oweesta Corporation, she’s putting together a $10 million loan fund to provide much-needed capital to native community-development finance institutions.

The economic nonprofits make a big difference in the lives of residents who live in a virtual desert for financial services. “Some people have to drive more than 100 miles to go to a bank,” Ms. Cornelius says.

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Sarah Emerson

Project Concern International
San Diego

A lot of people in international development believe that women are key to helping communities climb out of poverty. Sarah Emerson heads a program at the nonprofit Project Concern International that helps poor women start savings groups, with funds used for emergencies, children’s school tuitions, or seed money for small businesses. Ms. Emerson, who has lived and worked in Iraq, Kenya, and Tanzania, led the program’s growth from four countries to 12. Now nearly 500,000 women participate.

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Chekemma Fulmore-Townsend

Philadelphia Youth Network

Chekemma Fulmore-Townsend, the dynamic chief executive of the Philadelphia Youth Network, has brought together nonprofits, schools, government agencies, businesses, and more to tackle Philadelphia’s high dropout and youth-unemployment rates.

“Chekemma is uniquely inspiring and uniquely a force in systems building to expand support and opportunity for young people,” says David Shapiro, the chief executive of Mentor: the National Mentoring Partnership.

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Jesús Gerena

Family Independence Initiative
Oakland, Calif.

The Family Independence Initiative takes a revolutionary approach to fighting poverty. Trusting that poor people know best what they need, the nonprofit creates groups of families who work together to set goals, hold each other accountable, and decide how to use financial assistance from the charity.

Jesús Gerena joined the Family Independence Initiative to start its Boston program, which grew from 35 families to 800 in just a few years. This year he took the helm of the national organization.

Sam Greenberg and Sarah Rosenkrantz

Courtesy of Y2Y Harvard Square

Y2Y Harvard Square
Boston

Sam Greenberg and Sarah Rosenkrantz are doing big things at a young age. They graduated from Harvard in 2014, and Y2Y Harvard Square, the youth homeless shelter they co-founded, opened its doors the following year. The nonprofit has four employees who handle administration and finance, but student volunteers run the shelter’s operations.

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Saru Jayaraman

Sekou Luke, ROC United

Restaurant Opportunities Centers United
Oakland, Calif.

As co-founder of Restaurant Opportunities Centers United, Saru Jayaraman helps lead the fight for better wages for food-service workers. She’s also part of a vanguard of activists modernizing advocacy work.

“Saru is on the cutting edge of how to use technology and social media as an organizing tool,” says Fred Blackwell, chief executive of the San Francisco Foundation.

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Bob Libal

Grassroots Leadership
Austin, Tex.

Immigration detention and mass incarceration share a lot in common, argues Bob Libal. Both often start with a crackdown on petty crimes in communities of color and benefit the same private prison companies, he says. Many people when they leave prison feel as though they’re undocumented: They lose some of the rights of citizenship and struggle to find jobs and housing.

Grassroots Leadership, the advocacy group Mr. Libal leads, takes on the two hot-button subjects together. “We believe that there’s more power when the communities that are impacted by these issues come together and fight alongside of each other.”

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Ari Roth

Mosaic Theater Company
Washington, D.C.

For 18 years, playwright Ari Roth led Theater J, producing plays that explored Jewish identity and interfaith relations. Among his favorite productions every year was the festival Voices From a Changing Middle East, which explored Israeli-Palestinian tensions. The controversial subject matter led to conflict with the company’s parent organization, DC Jewish Community Center, which canceled the festival and ousted Mr. Roth. So he started a new company dedicated to productions that explore those tensions and social justice more broadly.

Among the subjects that Mosaic Theater Company is tackling this season: economic inequality, the Palestinian diaspora, and the life and music of Bessie Smith.

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Melissa Sawyer

Youth Empowerment Project
New Orleans

Melissa Sawyer co-founded the Youth Empowerment Project in 2004 to provide much-needed mentoring and re-entry services for young people leaving the juvenile-justice system. Since then, the nonprofit has added programs to prevent at-risk kids from getting involved in the court system in the first place.

“Her model is being replicated in other parishes throughout Louisiana,” says Martha Landrum, a vice president at the Greater New Orleans Foundation. “She’s a rock star.”

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Nathaniel Smith

Courtesy of PSE

Partnership for Southern Equity
Atlanta

Nathaniel Smith started the Partnership for Southern Equity to promote balanced growth and prosperity for all in the American South. The group got a big boost this spring when it won a $1 million grant from the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation to help people of color and low-income people push for clean energy.

“It’s an honor to be recognized for our efforts,” he says. “But it’s also a great responsibility to serve as a voice for communities who deal with the harshest effects of environmental injustice yet stand to benefit the most from climate solutions.”

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Daniel Zaharopol

Bridge to Enter Advanced Mathematics
New York

Daniel Zaharopol’s effort to share his love of math with talented students from low-income neighborhoods started small. Just 17 students attended the first math summer camp he organized in 2011.

Since then, Bridge to Enter Advanced Mathematics has worked with more than 400 young people, and the program has expanded to offer mentoring and challenging year-round activities. Mr. Zaharopol’s ultimate goal is to open new pathways for underserved students to become scientists, mathematicians, engineers, and computer scientists.

Correction: An earlier version of this article incorrectly described Open Referral’s work as building a website. The group develops technology systems that can track referral information and provide it to multiple websites and apps.