Elevating Young Leaders

After working to grow the Resolution Project from a volunteer endeavor as a co-founder, volunteer, and Board Member, George became The Resolution Project’s CEO in 2016, catalyzing action in young people by providing them with the resources and support to address pressing global challenges through social entrepreneurship. 

Prior to leading Resolution, George co-founded and grew Group 113, a certified B Corp providing impact-focused organizations with branding and marketing services, and was the company’s Managing Director for over 10 years. He also played various roles in other entrepreneurial ventures, including an ecommerce company with a valuation over $300MM. Before Group 113, George began his career at a large public relations firm. 

He and his work have been featured in the New York Times, Forbes, Bloomberg, Huffington Post, Vice Impact and others.  George earned his BA with honors from Harvard and his JD with high honors from St. John’s University. 

The Resolution Project’s mission is to develop socially responsible young leaders and empower them to make a positive impact today. We seek to fill a global gap in leadership by providing a launchpad for underestimated young people committed to changing their communities and the world. While society frequently overlooks the potential for youth to be agents of change, our fellows demonstrate that with support and resources, youth from any socio-economic background can be changemakers and can serve as the ultimate global rapid response network for creatively solving local and global issues . Through our program, we identify, fund, mentor, and support young people starting social ventures to tackle the world’s most persistent and challenging problems, from COVID-19 to climate change. By empowering young people to bring local, scalable solutions to their communities, we can create both immediate impact and a generation of socially responsible leaders building a just, sustainable world.

The COVID-19 pandemic has made one thing abundantly clear: our world faces a global leadership crisis that is deeply exacerbated by inequality. The world’s young people, who make up the largest generation of youth in history with a population of about 1.8 billion, have the potential to set the world on course to a more just and sustainable future. Moreover, if young people don’t act, they will be the ones to inherit a host of intractable problems like climate change. While many youth have passion, will, and vision, they often lack access to the requisite capital, network, and support to transform their ideas into reality. Barriers to social entrepreneurship are particularly great for traditionally underrepresented communities, including women, minorities, indigenous peoples, and youth from socioeconomically disadvantaged backgrounds. For example, in 2018, Entrepreneur reported that less than 1% of venture funding in the US goes to women of color. Resolution exists to fill this gap, with a focus on creating a diverse, equitable, and inclusive global community for young people to launch and grow their social ventures and develop into socially responsible leaders. 

Resolution has a proven model for identifying and empowering young people to solve pressing social issues in their communities by launching and growing social enterprises. This is our anchor point for building resilience and sustainability in some of the most marginalized communities around the world.

Resolution is always the first to fund and the first to believe, serving as a catalyst for young social entrepreneurs through Social Venture Challenges (SVCs) held with partner organizations around the world (or virtually). Nearly two out of three Fellows tell us that, without Resolution, they were unlikely to start their social ventures.

Resolution awards the winners of these competitions with lifelong Resolution Fellowships that provide dynamic hands-on support, mentorship, and seed funding, enabling Fellows to implement their social ventures and develop as leaders. 

Resolution extends its impact and transitions capacity to local communities through our Innovation Hubs and forthcoming Studio. Innovation Hubs provide a space for Fellows to partner with community members in building local innovation ecosystems that catalyze and sustain social entrepreneurship locally. The Studio is Resolution’s planned accelerator that takes Resolution’s proven delivery model for mentorship, expertise, resources, professional services, opportunities, and network, and speeds up delivery to match real-time urgency.

Resolution serves young people around the world with a passion for social impact and a desire to improve their communities. Resolution prioritizes young people with proximity to the issues they are addressing and from communities that are underrepresented in social entrepreneurship, namely women, socioeconomically disadvantaged groups, and people of color (52% of our Fellows identify as women and 75%+ identify as non-white). 

The Resolution Fellowship provides an ecosystem of technical, financial, and advisory support to help these young people launch a social venture and develop their leadership skills. For instance, Resolution helped Leonard Kilekwang and Andy Chen launched Tecnosafi to communicate public health information to residents of Chepareria, Kenya. Their mobile service is now used to disseminate educational material about slowing the spread of COVID-19. 

While Fellows like Andy and Leonard begin as students, Resolution stays with them throughout their careers—including through additional ventures. 

At Resolution, our motto is “Fellows First,” and we constantly refine our Fellowship to meet our Fellows' ever-evolving needs. We employ a comprehensive semi-annual impact evaluation methodology that invites Fellows to report on their skill development, share the value of support they receive from their mentors and Resolution, and identify how the Fellowship can be improved.

Resolution, like the Elevate Prize, recognizes a global need for good leaders and role models, and we believe that each Resolution Fellow is a “Global Hero,” creating a multiplier effect in their communities through their social ventures. We are deeply committed to focusing the Resolution Fellowship on young people from diverse and marginalized backgrounds: we believe that courageous young people who have overcome difficult personal circumstances—from being a refugee to surviving homelessness or eating disorders—are best positioned to uplift others through their work. We provide the anchor point and the service focus to amplify and elevate their efforts.

In college, I co-ran a youth leadership summit called World Model United Nations with my now Resolution co-founders. Nearly a thousand young people from around the world came together, inspired to change the world. Yet, while this event cost hundreds of thousands of dollars, it missed the opportunity to truly empower its attendees and give them the ability to make change. These motivated, optimistic people were repeatedly told they were the “leaders of tomorrow.” From our conversations with these young people, we knew they had tangible ideas and many of the skills needed to succeed. They just needed someone to believe in them, a little bit of funding, and a network that would support them. We could be that catalyst. Just out of college, we went back to that same conference with the Social Venture Challenge and Resolution Fellowship to provide a pathway for young leaders to drive impact while still in school. After three years of piloting this at World Model UN, Resolution expanded to other conferences, scouring the globe for the best raw talent that just needed a spark and a chance. Now, over 500 Resolution Fellows in 80 countries have benefited over 2.7 million people.

When we held the first Social Venture Challenge, I witnessed one of the greatest displays of passion in my life—a young man could barely hold back tears as he recounted the terrible pollution of his home city of Caracas, and he insisted that he would be the person to address it. I have since met hundreds of young people with that kind of passion, and it is impossible not to be transformed by it.

Resolution stands to end some of society’s greatest inequities, transforming power dynamics, providing access to otherwise inaccessible networks, and reinstating local leadership to communities from which resources and talent have only been extracted. Resolution exists to re-seed communities with sustainable leadership—born from youth and supported by the resources they need.

When I co-founded Resolution, I aimed to reimagine the power of young people to influence the world around them. I am profoundly inspired by our Fellows’ work: as a Resolution Guide (mentor) myself, I have seen their conviction and innovation in action. For instance, James Madhier, a refugee from South Sudan, who has since returned to his home country to improve water access for agriculture in highly climate-vulnerable communities.

Resolution is well-positioned to advance youth leadership—by being issue and model agnostic, we leave it to youth to freely design the solutions that they imagine, creating an immense sense of trust and community that centers on their ability to drive impact. 

Resolution has an incredibly skilled and diverse hybrid team of 14 staff and over 500 volunteers, which allows our organization unusual flexibility, dynamism, and efficiency. Our team spans the public and private sectors including luminaries at senior levels. One co-founder runs a venture firm with over 25 portfolio companies; another is a Managing Director at a global investment bank; and two of us are proven entrepreneurs. Our Board includes a former head of an international multilateral institution, heads of large global organizations, and board members of organizations with billions in revenue. Resolution’s Director of Programs, Rachel Brophy, has been with Resolution for eight years and was the organization’s first hire. The range of experience and dedication across the organization gives us an immense depth of human capital with which to support our diverse and distributed Fellows; it is also a lean model that is scalable with technology and replicable in local contexts (which is what we have been doing with our Innovation Hubs in Kigali and Nairobi, in partnership with Dalberg Group).

Over the past ten years, Resolution has emerged as a global leader in youth-led social entrepreneurship, with our Fellows proving that they can activate our resources most effectively, benefiting over 2.7 million people to date.

COVID-19 has presented substantial challenges for our organization, and our programmatic and fundraising activities in particular. Unfortunately, some of our youth conference partners have been forced to cancel their 2020 convenings, thereby jeopardizing our ability to run our Social Venture Challenges (SVCs) and recruit new Resolution Fellows. However, we also realized this was a unique opportunity for Resolution to adapt our SVC model to a virtual platform. We have since secured new funding for this endeavor and are hosting three SVCs this summer. One of these SVCs will allow participants from the cancelled World Model United Nations (WorldMUN) conference to pitch their ventures, one SVC will be a competition for students who have previously made it to a SVC Finals round in the past year but were not awarded a Fellowship, and the third will be in partnership with the Mastercard Foundation. We believe that developing a virtual SVC model will make Resolution more flexible and resilient, while also enabling us to advance our mission of making the Fellowship more accessible: whereas students previously had to travel to a youth conference to pitch their idea, any aspiring social entrepreneur with an internet connection will now be able to participate.

Since the beginning of the coronavirus pandemic, I have been working tirelessly with Resolution staff, leadership, and volunteers to adapt our operations to protect our community while redoubling our efforts to support our Fellows as they mobilize and pivot their ventures to provide essential services. Besides my own commitments as a CEO to help stop the spread, I set about making sure Resolution could support its Fellows and their pivots in their communities, which are among the hardest hit by COVID. To ensure Resolution's financial security, we successfully transformed our spring dinner into a virtual day of giving and secured funding for our virtual summer and fall programming. I also secured a fund for Fellows facing a basic needs crisis and partnered with the Roddenberry Foundation to get extra funding to Fellows responding to COVID-19. Meanwhile, I continue to serve as a Guide to several Resolution Fellows, while providing ad hoc support to many others—from introductions to experts on ventilators and UV sterilization for a Fellow leading Nepal’s National Innovation Center manufacturing response, to connecting a Fellow’s on-demand food rescue service to a kitchen partner so they could feed NYC’s homeless shelter system with fresh meals daily.

Resolution’s catalytic, idea stage investment in youth from vulnerable communities is unique. We make early investments in young entrepreneurs with new, unfunded ideas, while mitigating risk through a robust selection process and a mission focus on the leaders themselves. 

The most innovative aspect of our model is that it reaches marginalized communities and supports them through a number of critical stages:

1. In selection, by helping them de-risk their venture;

2. In operating and scaling, by making catalyst and accelerator level resources and network available to them;

3. In building their capacity, by utilizing our deep network of partners to provide them with follow-on funding and leadership development opportunities;

4. In pivoting, by leveraging partnerships with rapid response funds to provide a creative rapid response network to emerging crises;

5. In life, by helping them through transitions and giving them soft landings after they take the risk of starting something; and

6. In the community, by investing in its capacity, resilience, and sustainability through Innovation Hubs and support of the Fellows’ local activities.

This holistic approach gives us deep relationships with our Fellows that drive connections in this diverse group and amplify their changemaking capabilities.

A concrete example of this has been to boost our Fellows’ resilience and responsiveness to COVID-19 as launch partner for the Roddenberry’s +1 Global Fund to fast-track funds and support to Fellows pivoting their ventures in response to the pandemic. This partnership is free of applications, restrictions, and reporting; instead leveraging the position of trust that Resolution holds within the sector.

Resolution has a proven model for creating immediate impact for a growing generation of young leaders and humanity more broadly through the reach of our Fellows’ social ventures.

Resolution leverages a variety of inputs, including passionate young people with good ideas, staff, volunteers, financial resources, partnerships, networks and pro-bono expertise and services to enable our programs.

These activities include our Social Venture Challenges, the Resolution Fellowships, our Guide program to provide mentorship and resources for Fellows, and our growing Innovation Hubs and forthcoming Studio.

These activities produce a variety of outputs, comprehensively tracked through our impact evaluation methodology, including, number of Fellows, number of social ventures, number of partners, Fellows taking advantage of Pathway Partner opportunities, volunteer hours committed, and direct and indirect venture beneficiaries.

In turn, Resolution’s impact is deep and wide-reaching:

• Fellows develop into effective socially responsible leaders

  • Resolution inspires a life-long commitment to social change

  • Fellows develop and use social entrepreneurship skills

  • Fellows are resourced with knowledge, expertise, opportunities, and networks

• The social enterprise sector values and nurtures young leaders who otherwise would not have the resources to engage in social entrepreneurship

  • Partners provide Fellows with pathways toward socially responsible leadership 

  • More young people are exposed to social enterprise

  • Increased coordination and collaboration among social sector organizations

• Resolution volunteers grow into a cohesive community and have a deepened commitment to social responsibility

  • Volunteers are part of a community of like-minded peers

  • Volunteers are able to give back in a meaningful way

  • Volunteers are able to develop meaningful and useful skills

• Ventures positively impact target communities and contribute to the realization of the Sustainable Development goals (SDGs)

  • Fellows’ ventures create positive local impact 

Since 2007, Resolution has supported 518 Resolution Fellows, who have in turn implemented more than 300 ventures in 80 countries on all six inhabited continents (and all across the United States). Their social ventures are accelerating change in vital sectors such as humanitarian relief, healthcare, the environment, and women’s empowerment, and have benefited over 2.7 million people to date.

Each year, Resolution typically hosts 5-8 Social Ventures and recruits between 50-80 new Fellows. As universities have created more “home-grown” competitions, we have continued to expand this effective and holistic ecosystem of support further down the opportunity ladder to young people facing socioeconomic barriers to pursuing social entrepreneurship. This has meant partnering with community colleges and scholar programs.

In 2020, we anticipate that we will have a slightly smaller cohort of Fellows due to the programmatic impacts of COVID-19, with perhaps 50-60 new Fellows identified by the end of the year, bringing our Fellow community to about 580 young people.

By 2025, we expect to have identified and activated over 1,000 Resolution Fellows with a measured expansion of our program. We also expect to create impact for five million direct and indirect beneficiaries around the world through their social ventures, particularly through the added scaling support that the Resolution Studio will deliver. We also expect to have expanded our Innovation Hubs to 30 cities around the world, supporting and serving thousands of other social entrepreneurs through these vibrant, local ecosystems, ideally spawning locally-owned, sustainable Resolution spin-offs.

In 2020, Resolution launched an Emergency Relief Fund for Fellows in need of emergency support to access basic needs, as well as a COVID Response and Relief Fund to deploy unconditional investment to Fellows building COVID-19 response infrastructure, for a total investment of $350K+. 

We also piloted two virtual Social Venture Challenges (SVCs), and are using these experiences to inform an SVC at Mastercard Foundation’s virtual Baobab Summit—inspiring young people to take action to build society back better.

With support from the Elevate Prize, over the next five years Resolution will:

1. Create inclusive pathways to social entrepreneurship for youth from underserved racial, ethnic, and socioeconomic backgrounds by establishing partnerships with youth organizations serving these communities. We have successfully piloted this model with the Mastercard Foundation in Africa and Henry Ford College in Dearborn, Michigan and aim to apply it to other regions where systemic barriers persist for youth with impact-oriented ideas.

2. Provide localized support to Fellows and build a more global, diverse community to support them. We will continue expanding our Innovation Hubs in key geographies identified and directed by Fellows through partnerships with aligned organizations. In addition, we will recruit more international Guides, particularly from Latin America, Africa, Asia, and Oceania, who better represent our Fellows and understand the contexts they work in.

3. Launch the Resolution Studio.

4. Create added capacity for these communities to take ownership of driving and sustaining change through the above activities and continued capacity and capital building.

COVID-19 presents a challenge to Resolution’s programmatic activities. Continuing to make good on our mission to empower passionate young people with the tools they need to improve their communities requires innovation, creativity, and an expanded portfolio of resources and partnerships to meet the challenges of delivering programming virtually and providing emergency funds and support to Fellows on the front lines of the COVID-19 response, such as Anh-Thu Ho, whose US-based venture, Ladon, has been translating medical documents for non-English speakers, for free, throughout the pandemic. 

In the longer term, Resolution must meet the challenges of becoming more global and decentralized in our programs (in order to provide more localized, helpful, and culturally relevant support to Fellows across the globe), ensuring that we reach more socioeconomically diverse communities of young people, and deepening the support we provide to more mature Fellows in the later stages of venture development. We are seeking temporary financial growth, but enduring partnership growth, so that we can transition capacity and resources locally so that these efforts can sustain and grow themselves.

At a higher level, Resolution will continue to face systemic cultural and social barriers to advancing our mission to activate the latent ocean of youth talent, from encouraging risk-taking among youth, to trying to figure out how to tap into talent from financially resource poor communities and less formal education systems.

With regard to the challenges of COVID-19, we have pivoted to an online Social Venture Challenge model and secured some additional funding to support our programmatic activities for the remainder of 2020. We are also innovating on our fundraising activities by converting our annual events to virtual events—an initiative that has already shown promise, as demonstrated by our recent virtual day of giving, Giving AMPlified.

We have, and will continue, to pursue creative partnerships with our vast network of social sector organizations, as we have already done with the Mastercard Foundation and the Roddenberry Foundation, to provide crisis funds, expertise, and pro bono support to Fellows who are boldly marching to the frontlines to adapt the infrastructure and mechanisms of their ventures to combat COVID-19. 

In the longer term, Resolution’s objectives of launching additional Innovation Hubs, regionalizing our SVCs to new regions worldwide, reaching underrepresented communities, and expanding our resources for Fellows through the Resolution Studio, are all core to Resolution’s Strategic Plan. But the Elevate Prize’s support would be transformative in helping us reach the prospective partners and outlets to achieve at our greatest potential and to celebrate this community. 

We will continue to combat the opportunity crisis and support community resilience through our commitment to making our Resolution Fellowship accessible to young people growing up in economically disadvantaged settings. By keeping talented youth in their communities and giving them access to global resources, Resolution combats brain drain, and youth in turn strengthen opportunities and livelihoods in their communities.

Resolution actively collaborates with a variety of partners from the social and private sectors. We partner with domestic and international youth leadership conferences, such as the Mastercard Foundation Scholars Program, to host our Social Venture Challenges and recruit undergraduate students to pitch social ventures. In addition, we are also building a rich social sector ecosystem to support our Fellows through our network of 100+ "Pathway Partners," such as Kiva Zip and Echoing Green, to both source Fellow candidates and provide current Fellows with access to additional funding, lenders, educational programs, and scaling opportunities. Lastly, we have created multi­faceted corporate partnerships with leading global firms such as Gerson Lehrman Group, General Electric, DuPont, JPMorgan Chase, and others, to provide our Fellows with a wide portfolio of pro bono resources and advisory services, including Subject Matter Experts. These partners make a philanthropic investment ­­of time, talent, and financial resources ­­in support of our efforts to provide burgeoning undergraduate social entrepreneurs with the tools they need to succeed and scale their ventures. We have also partnered with Dalberg Group to launch our Global Innovation Hubs in Rwanda and Kenya by sharing their office space and resources, and we seek similar partnerships with socially minded organizations to expand our Hubs elsewhere.

We have recently leveraged our partnerships to help Resolution Fellows’ mobilize their ventures in response to the coronavirus pandemic.  This includes our partnership with The Roddenberry Foundation.

As a nonprofit organization, Resolution has a philanthropic model at its core, reliant on individual, corporate, and foundation donors. All revenue goes towards the implementation of our programming to support young entrepreneurs.  Our programs are largely reliant on the breadth of human capital that Resolution has with their staff, volunteers, and partners. However, our model is evolving, and we are exploring additional revenue streams. Resolution is now expanding its offerings to work with partner organizations to take our model and experience of 12 years and use it so that partners can build their own communities of changemakers.

Resolution is a nonprofit organization that receives funding from a diversity of sources, namely individual donors, foundations and corporate philanthropy, and events.

We are also in the early stages of exploring monetizing our proven model to expand opportunities for young people through other pipelines, including universities and scholar programs.

Large Foundations - $800,000

Corporate Foundations and Sponsors - $150,000

Individual Giving - $350,000

Added detail is available upon request.

We continue to pursue approximately $800,000 this year to meet our programmatic needs, while seeking additional funding to accelerate our strategic vision. This would mean strategic investments in partnerships that help us reach more marginalized communities and continued deployment of local and regional resources, while also keeping an eye towards maintaining an appropriate cash cushion, especially in a time of pandemic.

Social Venture Challenges and Fellowships - $402,395

Fellow Resources - $59,200

Emergency Relief Fund - $65,000

Personnel, Office, Audit, Legal & Insurance - $1,650,943

Professional and Community Costs - $84,200

Finance - $14,110

Development and Communications - $82,540

The Elevate Prize would be transformative in helping Resolution reach the next level with regard to our ability to identify, activate, and resource inspiring young changemakers across the globe. A stable source of multi-year revenue will be very helpful as we brace for the long-term financial shocks of COVID-19 and will give our team the space to continue the hard work of innovation with delivering the Resolution Fellowship to meet current challenges in lower resourced settings, while also providing unprecedented support to Fellows operating front-line interventions in vulnerable communities. 

As Resolution scales geographically (through the expansion of Innovation Hubs) as well as programmatically (through the launch of the Resolution Studio to provide follow-on investment and expert advisory services to Resolution Fellows reaching escape velocity), we would also benefit deeply from the professional services, coaching, and capacity building services provided by the Elevate Prize. I would highly value advisory support around how Resolution, an organization with a community of expertise deeply rooted in New York City, can decentralize its model in order to provide more localized support to Fellows working in diverse geographies, predominantly in the Global South. Experts in impact investment would also be invaluable in helping us to design and implement the Resolution Studio. 

Cooperation and collaboration with peer social sector organizations is core to Resolution’s ethos. Similarly, we are keen to connect with Elevate Global Heroes and partners, and particularly those with local understandings of the cultural contexts and geographies in which our Fellows work.

Legal support will be a great asset as Resolution expands through international Innovation Hubs and the Resolution Studio, the latter of which will likely require sophisticated changes to Resolution’s revenue model. Resolution is also deeply committed to learning and iterating, and we would be thrilled for mentorship and coaching in both operational and mission-driving matters. As Resolution remains a relatively small organization, media exposure would also be an important asset to amplify the voices of our young leaders. Youth growing up in economically disadvantaged settings are often told that their community is the problem, and the best thing they can do is “get out” and “never look back.” Resolution’s opportunity is the opportunity for youth to go home and fight a problem they lived with and know—it is these stories of Resolution Fellows shining as powerful beacons of change that we hope Elevate will tell to inspire even more youth. 

Active collaboration has always been central to Resolution’s model. We are interested in partnerships with Solve Members committed to supporting youth leadership development, international development, and social entrepreneurship, particularly in the Global South. We would be eager to partner with aligned organizations as either hosting partners for Resolution’s Innovation Hubs (thereby creating loci of learning, innovation, and community for Resolution Fellows where they work) or as Pathway Partners to market the Resolution Fellowship opportunity to more students or path existing Fellows to further funding, educational, and advisory opportunities to support their ventures and leadership development. We would also be eager to partner with organizations and social enterprises that are operating in more marginalized communities to explore how to make this opportunity available and attractive to the communities they work with.