Veronika Scott, 26
Founder and Chief Executive, The Empowerment Plan
Detroit
Veronika Scott was a 21-year-old art-school student when she got an assignment that would change her life: Identify a community problem and design a product to solve it.
For five months, Ms. Scott spent three evenings a week talking with homeless people at a shelter in a rough part of Detroit. Her big idea was a winter coat that turns into a sleeping bag.
In 2011, she started the Empowerment Plan, a nonprofit that employs homeless women to make the coats — more than 10,000 jackets so far. The design is always changing; there’s now a version in which the sleeping bag can be removed from the coat and carried as a bag.
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