The teenagers collecting the grown-ups' trophies
Four major prizes, one pattern: some of the most closely watched founders in the world are still doing homework.
Somewhere right now, a 16-year-old is being asked to give a thank-you speech to a room full of people with mortgages.
That is the quiet side effect of the youth prize circuit. A handful of awards, run by charities, insurers, a magazine and a Swedish foundation, have spent the last few years handing medals and checks to teenagers who started things before they could rent a car. We went through four of them and read the fine print. Here is who is on the stage, and what they actually built.
The Diana Award: a Legacy, and a landfill
The Diana Award’s Legacy Award is held every two years in memory of Diana, Princess of Wales. At the 2024 ceremony, on March 14, it honored 20 young people, with the awards presented by the Prince of Wales and Prince Harry. The ages listed on the Diana Award’s page run from 16 to 27, so the teenage contingent is a minority, and a loud one.
Netra Venkatesh, listed at 17, founded SpunkGo in 2020 from the United Arab Emirates. According to the Diana Award, it now brings more than 5,000 girls from over 20 countries into one online community and runs free life-skills webinars with women speakers.
Chiara Riyanti Hutapea Zhang, listed at 18, started Cases 4 Care Indonesia at age 11, after learning about rights violations at what the Diana Award calls Southeast Asia’s largest landfill. The group has given informal education to 1,000 children there and furnished five libraries with 1,500 books. In 2023 it began expanding to refugee communities.
Gabrielle Wong, listed at 18, runs the Discimus Foundation in England. It sets up computer labs and technology classes in rural communities, and the Diana Award says it has reached more than 9,000 students with the help of 30-plus volunteer teachers and has raised over £30,000.
Uday Bhatia, listed at 18, built Uday Electric in Delhi around a low-cost bulb called the Outage Guard, which the Diana Award says gives up to ten hours of light during a power cut. The page credits it with giving 950 families stable power.
Hailey Richman, listed at 16, founded KidCaregivers in New York for young people caring for relatives with Alzheimer’s. Her puzzle-pairing program matches young volunteers with people with Alzheimer’s, and the Diana Award says it has sent more than 136,000 jigsaw puzzles to over 5,000 care homes. That is a lot of corner pieces.
Prudential Emerging Visionaries: $5,000 and a trip to Newark
Prudential’s program, run with Ashoka, is the most American of the four. For its 2024 class, announced February 13, Prudential named 25 students between 14 and 18, each of whom received $5,000 and a three-day summit at the company’s Newark headquarters. Five were chosen for financial solutions and 20 for societal ones. Every hometown on the list is in the United States.
Marie Dillard, 18, of Englewood, New Jersey, founded The Crescendo Lab, which NJBIZ describes as a classical music mentoring program working with youth of color to expand access to music education. Anika Dugal, 17, of Matawan, New Jersey, founded Girls for Algorithmic Justice, which NJBIZ calls a global grassroots coalition of young women working to address gender and racial disparities in artificial intelligence.
The rest of the roster reads like a very well-organized group chat. Caden Harris, 14, of Stonecrest, Georgia, founded Financial Literacy for All. Michael Brode, 17, of Winterville, North Carolina, runs Crypto Debunked. Genshu Price, 16, of Hauula, Hawaii, founded Bottles4College. Prudential’s release lists the founders and project names; it does not go deeper on the rest, and neither will we.
TIME Kid of the Year: the soap and the bikes
TIME’s honor is the one with the biggest megaphone and the narrowest door. For 2024, TIME says its editors and researchers looked for kids in the United States, and the winner was Heman Bekele, 15, of Virginia, who developed an affordable soap that could offer a new, more accessible way to deliver cancer medication. TIME says it saw him working in a lab.
Another honoree that year, Dom Pecora, 15, of Pennsylvania, runs a bike-repair business that gives back to others, which is a sentence that makes a spreadsheet look lazy.
The Children’s Climate Prize: SEK 100,000 and a November ceremony
The Children’s Climate Prize is where the circuit goes most international. The 2021 winner was Reshma Kosaraju, 15, of the United States, who uses AI to predict where and when forest fires are most likely to occur. The prize comes with a diploma, a medal and SEK 100,000 to keep developing the project, and the winners are celebrated at a ceremony each November.
The finalists that year were an international bunch. Lesein Mutunkei, 17, of Kenya, tackles the climate crisis through soccer. Yash Narayan, 17, of the United States, developed an app to improve waste management.
What the trophies tell you
Counting only the people named here, about a third are outside the United States, and the projects range from lighting to libraries to forest fires. The common thread is not genius. It is that each of them picked a problem and kept showing up for it long enough that someone with a stage noticed.
The prizes have a way of making the founder the headline. The better read is the work: puzzles in care homes, bulbs in Delhi, books at a landfill. The ceremony is one night. The work is the part with a track record.
