A Community Built On Shared Agency

The 2025 beVisioneers Global Summit brought together both Cohort 1 and Cohort 2 Fellows for an intergenerational celebration of impact, collaboration and community.

Throughout the three-day event, the Global Summit enabled conversations between Fellows and experts in the field, creating a shared experience to challenge prevailing preconceptions about who can contribute to real change and how sharing agency leads to successful solutions.

Fellows were invited to take to the stage to share how their projects - and the communities behind them - bring real change to the world.

Whether through clean energy access, regenerative agriculture or circular design, the Fellows’ stories highlighted the diverse ways young people are leading environmental change, powered by the support of the beVisioneers ecosystem.

“Everyone here has something to offer,” says South African Fellow Likhona Mkonto, who, since receiving a project scholarship from beVisioneers in 2024, has started market testing furniture made from construction waste. “Community is where your mission finds its people.”

South African Fellow Maya Zaken, graduate of the University of the Witwatersrand, Johannesburg and creator of the Philafeed, spoke to the ripple effect of collaboration: “Our power multiplies when shared,” she says, describing how partnerships with other Fellows and organisations helped her scale her circular farming solution.

Bonisiwe Kumalo, graduate of the African Leadership University is the founder of Buhlebelanga Energy Solutions, a clean energy venture using anaerobic digestion to convert organic waste into biogas for cooking and biofertilizer.

Buhlebelanga Energy Solutions addresses rural South Africa’s dual crises of energy and poverty and soil degradation with a science-based, community-first approach.

During the Global Summit, Kumalo showcased her work creating female-led energy hubs in underserved South African communities, emphasising that “change is a team sport”, where the right support at the right time can unlock local leadership and livelihood.

Qualities Needed To Evoke Change

When building something great that could potentially change the world, it takes resilience - a quality Spanish Fellow Luis Borja Garcia Gimeno demonstrated with his own personal story.

After launching a sustainable chocolate alternative made from carob - a crop rooted in his grandfather’s post-war legacy - Gimeno lost his entire inventory and manufacturing site in a devastating flood.

Give up or rebuild? That was the decision Gimeno faced, turning to the community he had found through beVisioneers for clarity.

Mentors encouraged him, peers supported him and with a renewed belief in his purpose, he rebuilt his operations and is currently scaling his carob-based product line across Spain.

The power of connection and its importance was a common viewpoint during the Global Summit - with 19-year-old Piyush Jha being one of the Fellows to talk about it openly.

Jha, from Cohort 1, grew up in the slums of Mumbai, where waterborne diseases like dengue and typhoid shaped his commitment to solving India’s water crisis.

Today, he leads Vasudeva Innovations, a cleantech startup pioneering the EcoSustain Water Purification System, a solution that purifies industrial wastewater while generating renewable electricity and green hydrogen.

Jha’s wastewater-to-energy system - designed to convert industrial wastewater into electricity and green hydrogen - has now reached Technology Readiness Level 6 (TRL-6), signifying the technology has been demonstrated in a relevant environment, and has since attracted industry partners.

Although Jha’s innovative nature and drive speak for themselves, he says it was a personal connection he made during Cohort 1 that has made an unexpected difference for him and his company Vasudeva Innovations.

“I thought I was just meeting another Fellow,” he says of his collaborator. “Now he’s my big brother and business partner.” Their project partnership exemplifies how shared agency within the fellowship can lead to real-world enterprise.

The summit was the first opportunity for many Cohort 2 Fellows to step into the spotlight - a pivotal moment as they prepared to apply for their own project scholarships.

Although Cohort 2 Fellows are at the beginning of their journey with beVisioneers, their stories provide a powerful glimpse of what’s to come.

German Fellow Sophie Fasshauer was shocked by the long-lasting impact of a single plastic bag in the ocean. Fasshauer in turn has made it her mission to change waste management with biotechnology, using genetically modified cyanobacteria cultivated in custom bioreactors to break down waste.

Jithin Kumar’s project was similarly born from a frustration of wastage, namely the robotic industry’s ‘build-break-discard’ lifecycle. Kumar’s mission is to slash e-waste and emissions while democratising access to ethical tech through modular robots built from 90 percent recycled materials. He aims to design robots that live forever.

American scientist Shannon Henry’s innovation also focuses on waste, but in this instance reusing the chocolate industry’s waste materials to develop bio-based textiles. Henry’s project aims to transform fashion production while reducing environmental impact.

Fabricio Oviedo, founder of Semillas Regenerativas, describes his project as “a holistic initiative rooted in dignity, justice and regeneration”. Oviedo used his time on stage to urge greater global connection, saying: “While many of our governments are investing in preparing for war, we as youth must be investing in meeting each other.”

Joshua Eun Jo Kim is tackling Seoul’s flood risk with a sustainable material breakthrough - by repurposing coffee waste into high-permeability pavement bricks, improving water absorption in flood-prone urban areas.

But to Kim, the summit served as a reminder that innovation needs more than just ideas - it needs support to succeed. “Ideas only cannot change the world. I needed structure, strategy, and collaboration - beVisioneers gave me that.”

The 2025 beVisioneers Global Summit offered something increasingly rare in a world where environmental crises are growing rather than depleting, and that was, a room full of hope.

Executive Director Mariah Levin says: “Young people here are not naive about the challenges ahead—but they’re not frightened to take initiative.”