Master

NASSER JABER

founder & CEO, The Migrant Kitchen & The Migrant Kitchen Initiative

“The Migrant Kitchen was a catering company that started in the ruins of a food tech company that had this very big buzz,” Nasser Jaber says. “The food tech company launched at SXSW and all these things. But it didn’t make it. And eventually financial ruin happened, a relationship ended, and I ended up homeless on the street.” In the first quarter of 2020, Jaber was sleeping at different shelters and sometimes at the back of a hookah bar. He was waiting tables at night and working on the catering company at dawn in a bar kitchen. And things eventually began to pick up. Suddenly, he had a big order. But then came COVID-19. “Everything gets canceled,” he says. “But now I have all this food that I don’t have refrigerator and freezer space for.”

He donated some food to shelters, and when he got a call from a friend working at Memorial Sloan Kettering, he donated to the healthcare workers there. That friend told someone at Mount Sinai, so he donated even more food to offload his giant supply. But then MSNBC called. And from that press and the GoFundMe Jaber started, he raised over $100K. What began as 100 meals served a day to New York City hospitals and shelters, quickly grew to 10,000 meals a day served to more than 12 hospitals, 4 food pantries, 3 homeless shelters, 3 senior centers, public housing complexes in the Bronx and Queens, a Queens mosque, and dozens of COVID-19 infected families. All total, The Migrant Kitchen served 2 million meals from March to October. The events served as the catalyst for The Migrant Kitchen Initiative (TMKI). After a deadly explosion in Beirut, Lebanon in August, TMKI partnered with local organizations and food pantries to feed over 15,000 people displaced by the disaster there.

NIVI ACHANTA

founder & CEO, Soapbox Project

Before the pandemic hit, Nivi Achanta was working as a tech consultant at a corporate gig. At the same time, like many millennials, she was working a side hustle that meant more to her heart. And she was hoping to convert that to her full-time job. When she was laid off in August of 2020, she made the pivot to putting all her efforts into Soapbox Project, a tech platform that makes social change a little easier and more accessible. Achanta says she built the platform for likeminded people who want to do something about a social issue but who get overwhelmed and therefore stuck.

A bite-size newsletter, which takes 3 minutes to read, tackles just one climate-change topic a month, like fast-fashion. The weekly newsletter rolls out the focus in a read-listen-act-reflect format over the course of the month. As the platform evolves, Achanta says it will add more social issues that require activism and home in on topics. “My take is that we’re done being complacent with the issues that we see,” Achanta says of her generation. “And I think we should normalize asking for more. A lot of the bad rap stuff about millennials comes from this idea that we should be happy with the bare minimum from the people in power and from our social and economic system. And I disagree with that. And millennials around me disagree with that.”

“I noticed that, not just me but, all the people around me,” she says, “we would have these conversations, every week or every month, about how we wanted to do something about things like climate change or homelessness or education. And we would meet again the next week or the next month. And we would still talk about the same stuff. There was no action behind our good intentions.” Right now Soapbox is focusing on climate change and how the pandemic has impacted the issue. For example, plastic consumption has in some cases ramped up with less dine-in and more takeout and delivery orders. “We’ve been able to cover a lot of the issues where COVID has tangibly made them worse,” Achanta says. But Soapbox doesn’t just spew about issues, adding to overwhelm. Instead, Achanta says she wanted to approach it in a way that offers enough facts and then actionable tips based on those facts in a clear and concise way.

TIFFANY SORYA

founder, NOVEL EDUCATION

In 2014, Tiffany Sorya started Novel Education, a K-12 white-glove homeschooling program. “I started it on the foundation and premise of bridging the gap between personal passions and academic excellence,” she says. Initially Sorya was homeschooling students in the entertainment industry who were working or pursuing a passion. So when schools shut down as a result of the pandemic, Sorya was ready to help families find solutions. “We’ve actually been doing distance learning and remote learning since day one,” Sorya says. “That was the landscape that we were already really familiar with in terms of how to pace online schooling, how to work with someone virtually, how to let students have a little bit more control over what they were doing.”

Parents haven’t had to pull their kids from the school system. Yet families can enjoy more flexibility, and students can explore their passions. And Sorya says that’s the way education should be. “Rather than saying, ‘Hey, put down that drawing pen and get back to your books,’” she says, “What if that drawing pen is a really big part of their learning and a really big part of what they’re going to do as adults?” Instead of the drawing pen being a reward for finishing their chemistry homework, for example, Sorya wants to make it a more structured part of the learning process. When it comes to the millennial generation, Sorya says she recognizes that older generations say millennials have it easier in terms of access to information. “The wrong move is to label that as lazy,” she says. As an educator, she believes in taking advantage of access to information, and that’s what she wants for the next generation.

Novel Education does private tutoring and academic enrichment programs. “We have an in-house curriculum design team,” Sorya says, “and we can create curriculum based around pretty much anything.” She mentions filmmaking, photography, architecture, oil painting, and acting, to name a few. “We just thought,” Sorya says, “What a cool thing to be able to develop kids’ hobbies at a really young age with a clear, concise curriculum, with benchmarks and ways to measure progress and then make that be a part of their school. So that’s what we specialize in.” Schools pivoted to distance learning curriculums at the start of the pandemic, and some have remained that way. But Sorya says she recognized the duplication of the regular school day to a Zoom school day as problematic and inefficient. So she offered a solution. “We could still follow their school’s curriculum, but we just shortened their Zoom time,” she says. “So our tutors pretty much took over the teaching, and we were able to shorten their school days from 6 hours of Zooming to just a short 2 to 3 hours.”

In November 2020, Mali Jeffers and Alan Bacon launched GANGGANG, a cultural development startup that produces, promotes, and preserves culture in cities, with equity at the forefront. They’ve started in their hometown of Indianapolis, with the intention of expanding to more cities in the future. “For us, this is an equity play,” Jeffers says. “Because people of color, and Black people specifically, have contributed so much to American culture.” And they’ve given more than they’ve received, she adds.

Jeffers and Bacon hope that art and culture can help drive awareness about inequality and spur action for equality. “One of the things that is refreshing about GANGGANG is that we are talking about equity,” Jeffers says, “and we are talking about ending racism in a very cool way and a very bright way.” She explains that discussions around equity can be heavy and feel impossible. But when presented in “a way that is bright, and a way that is welcoming,” she adds, “we’re finding that more people want to join the gang.” The conversation has always been needed, but even more so in the face of a pandemic that has disproportionately affected Black Americans. “It also generated a new awareness for the difficulties that Black-owned businesses, specifically, Black-owned cultural businesses, have suffered for a long time,” Jeffers says. Bacon shares his hope that younger generations can be the catalyst to realizing change in America for issues that have plagued the country for 400 years. “Generation Z and millennials have said, ‘Enough is enough,’” he says.

Bacon says GANGGANG takes a reparational approach by paying back the producers of “so many cultural aspects that improve the quality of life for the city” so that those producers can also be “benefactors of what’s produced.” As an example of how GANGGANG promotes Black artists and entrepreneurs, Jeffers and Bacon curated Indy’s #BlackLivesMatter street mural on historic Indiana Avenue. They commissioned 18 Indianapolis-based Black artists to take 1 letter or character each to make the collective piece. “That project,” Jeffers says, “has given the artists so many additional legs and so many more opportunities to have more conversations around race and art.” But then Newfield reached out, wanting to find a way to highlight the mural. Now the letters will be showcased on gallery walls as individual pieces of art in an exhibit called DRIP: Indy’s #BlackLivesMatter Street Mural, which will open in April. “We have brokered a relationship with one of the largest art institutions in the country and 18 Black artists,” Jeffers adds, “which is rare.”

MALI JEFFERS

& ALAN BACON

founders of GANGGANG

Jamie Sgarro, co-founded AsylumConnect, the first tech platform designed to provide resources to those fleeing persecution as a result of their gender identity or sexual orientation. When the pandemic hit, Sgarro then led AsylumConnect’s COVID-19 response. And the platform matched thousands of LGBTQ+ people who needed verified, safe and affirming legal, medical, mental health and social services. The free platform can currently help persecuted LGBTQ+ people in 35 U.S. states, Canada, and Mexico. In addition to helping those seeking asylum, AsylumConnect also helps homeless or isolated LGBTQ youth. “LGBTQ youth have to sometimes go live back home or have to go back in the closet,” Sgarro says of challenges faced during the pandemic. “[Some] LGBTQ youth can’t even go home because they know it’s too dangerous and are now facing homelessness or lack of access to their support networks.”

Sgarro expresses optimism that the future will bring more trans-affirming and culturally competent services. “The hope is that under the Biden-Harris administration,” he says, “all LGBTQ people — regardless of immigration status or race or income level — will have access to these services.” At the age of 21, Sgarro co-founded AsylumConnect to be part of the solution to a global problem. “I do think there’s an innovation with the millennial generation,” he says. “I think a lot of us are entrepreneurial, and I think that can be in social change and that can be in business. Creativity is definitely necessary. And challenging the status quo is how I think we’ll get through things like the coronavirus.” Need resources? Click here. The site has a safety exit button.

A little backstory: At the University of Pennsylvania, Sgarro met his co-founder Sy, who was seeking LGBTQ asylum at the time. “AsylumConnect was [born] really out of his own personal experience coming to America as a young gay man and really struggling to know where it was safe to go for help for pro bono legal representation for his asylum claim,” Sgarro explains, “but also for critical LGBTQ-affirming medical, mental health, and social services that anyone would need to devise the filing process in a new country.” As a member of the LGBTQ community, Sgarro says the cause really resonated with him. AsylumConnect was completely volunteer-run until 2019 when it received enough funding from its support network to hire a full-time staff. (However, the platform still welcomes and needs volunteers.)

Jamie Sgarro

co-founder & executive director, AsylumConnect

Whiting

Michele Avissar-

editor in chief, Research Square

When a novel virus is spreading rapidly around the globe, taking lives and causing severe illness, research must also spread at a swifter pace. Michele Avissar-Whiting, PhD, is the editor and chief of Research Square, a leading preprint publishing platform. “Preprints are getting a lot more mainstream attention now,” says Avissar-Whiting. “And of course it’s entirely to do with the pandemic and how important it became for researchers to just share their work as quickly as possible.” When research is published in scientific and medical journals, it must undergo a lengthy process of submission, editorial consideration, peer review by other researchers, revision, etc. “It’s a very well-known, tedious, tiresome process,” Avissar-Whiting explains, “just so that you can get your work published, start getting cited, and start building your career.”

“It’s not just that it’s faster to get the publications out,” she says, “but the fact that it’s open for everybody to read and comment on and scrutinize actually makes it better because suddenly you’ve just exposed it to all of the world’s experts to look at, and you’re going to pick it apart and find all the problems with it.” Avissar-Whiting, an older millennial, who remembers the struggle of the dial-up internet connection, says she has a huge appreciation for the digital world that keeps us connected and now helps us quickly disseminate research through avenues like preprints. “I feel very grateful for the advances in technology that brought us here,” she says. “I guess my biggest hope is that millennials, and their hard work, and the generation that has followed us will get us out of some of the bigger existential kind of crises that we’re all facing — not just the proximal one of the pandemic and future pandemics, but also obviously climate change and nuclear proliferation and these sorts of problems that are huge and difficult.”

Preprints help circumvent all of that, at least in the short term, so that research can be shared with others quickly and expanded on, which is especially important amidst a global health crisis. Preprints are the reason we have vaccines for COVID-19 and some of the treatments that, although not a cure, have helped mitigate severe complications, Avissar-Whiting says. “There have just been thousands of publications on pre-print platforms,” she adds. “You never would have seen that if authors had been forced to adhere to the standard norms in scientific publishing. So what this has done is opened a new door. It just feels like we could be moving faster on everything, on cancer, on rare diseases and disorders.” One drawback of preprints is the lack of peer reviewing, which Avissar-Whiting says, although not imperfect, is a good gatekeeper for reliable information. That means a platform like Research Square has to incorporate some screening mechanisms. But Avissar-Whiting points out that circumventing some of the formality around research publishing through preprints also creates the potential for us to “do science better.”

Nabeel Alamgir

founder & CEO, Lunchbox

Nabeel Alamgir worked his way up from bussing tables at Bareburger, his first job after arriving in the U.S. from Bangladesh as a teen, to being the company’s CMO. His years at Bareburger gave him the inspiration for Lunchbox, his tech startup. “I decided it’s time to go and build something for restaurateurs by a restaurateur,” he says, “that we think can really answer the age-old question, which is, ‘Who’s going to Grubhub and who will come to our website directly?’ Lunchbox helps restaurants have their own online ordering system, so you can place the order from them.” So what’s the problem with third-party ordering systems, especially right now? “On a $100 order, the restaurant makes $5,” Alamgir says as an example. “It’s not a great revenue channel. It is a revenue channel, but there’s no point if you don’t convert them into direct sales or convert them to dine-in sales. And guess what? Dine-in is closed. So there’s no converting happening at all.”

Alamgir and Lunchbox created Help Main Street. “It’s a website with over 120,000 merchants, their online ordering, and their gift card information.” Lunchbox then grew its clientele by more than 700 percent in the last 12 months. “It’s your responsibility to do more, contribute more to society, lean on everything that the previous generation helped build,” Alamgir says. But he gets why people poke fun at the millennial generation. “It’s your job to complain about the next generation, and the one before you,” he explains with a laugh. “It’s your inherent right. I think it’s very harmless, and it’s my job to make fun of my brother who’s 20…”

The pandemic has put a dire strain on the restaurant industry. Alamgir puts it into perspective. “There are 650,000 restaurants in the country,” he says. “And 100,000 of them have already shut their doors. Forever. They’re gone.” That’s why Alamgir says he’s committed to empowering restaurants to be free of third-party apps. In a nutshell, he describes Lunchbox as “the Shopify of the restaurant industry.” The platform allows restaurants to customize a digital storefront and also incorporate customer loyalty programs among other things, he explains. Lunchbox went live right before the pandemic after raising a $2 million seed round. “If we did not raise that money,” Alamgir says, “we would be gone right now. We raised the money days before the pandemic. And when the pandemic hit, we doubled down, and we said, ‘Let’s see what we can do to help very quickly.’”

Bri Noble rode Dapper Dan, her 17.1-hand horse at a downtown Oakland, California, Black Lives Matter peaceful protest after the killing of George Floyd in the summer of 2020. Images of Noble and Dapper Dan went viral and sparked peaceful demonstration rides in solidarity for social change amongst equestrian communities. “Heels Down Fists Up” rides were then born, with Noble leading the first in Oakland. “I was angry that in the 10 years that had passed since I was on the ground protesting for Oscar Grant,” Noble says, “nothing had changed. The same thing was happening. Nothing that I did seemed to make a difference. I thought maybe I could help change the narrative.”

At 15, Noble received and rehabilitated her first horse, an off-the-track thoroughbred she called Midnight Affair. She knows from personal experience the two-way therapeutic power of the human-horse friendship. “This program, I hope,” she says, “will positively impact our future generation of not just riders — but doctors, lawyers, changemakers — that will change the face of the world for us all.” Noble, working to help solve issues for youth so that they can have better days ahead, has this to say when people talk negatively about her generation: “Education, healthcare, housing, are more expensive than for our parents. Steady jobs are harder to find. And wages have not risen to meet the occasion. Still, people are working their butts off to simply be able to afford having a small family and roof above their heads. I am a millennial, and I think our generation is doing the best we can given the circumstances.”

Noble is the founder and owner of Mulatto Meadows, a business with a mission to increase accessibility to communities historically excluded from the equestrian world. Humble is a nonprofit project under Mulatto Meadows dedicated to empowering and inspiring youth from underserved communities through horsemanship and riding. “The interspecies bonds formed with horses allow us to teach skills that impact many different avenues of life,” Noble says. “We all have something we can learn, and these experiences tend to be ones that people remember for life.” The programming, hosted after school and on weekends, has served a dire need for connection and activity during the pandemic. “We are actually one of the few activities that was deemed safe,” Noble says, “because our sessions are generally one-on-one or contained to a family unit and only outdoors.”

Brianna Noble

founder & owner, Humble

Christie Catan

co-founder, Tails of Connection

Dog adoption surged during the pandemic, with people suddenly stuck at home during shelter-in-place orders. But that left people wondering how they were going to teach their new furry pals everything from potty policies to fetching fun. Thankfully, Christie Catan, with her pal Jessica Yergin, had just launched Tails of Connection (TOC), an online dog-training community. Catan says that when they launched that January, before the pandemic was in full force, connection was front of their minds. “Even though we often feel so digitally connected,” she explains, “there’s often just so much going on, and life can be so hard. There’s just such a gift that can come from the connection that you’ve got with your dog.”

That’s why TOC, while providing foundational training concepts, is built around giving people a chance to connect with their dogs — and each other. When the pandemic hit, TOC started offering digital training parties, virtual doggie summer camps, and other fun programming. “We have a free community,” Catan says, “where people can get information, share resources, bounce ideas off of each other.” One tip she offers dog owners is to take their pup on a decompression walk. “You can kind of think of it as a nature walk,” she explains. “There are certain components that make it decompressing for dogs. They’re able to have kind of this freedom of movement and really sniff. It has a way of bringing them back to baseline. And that can solve a lot of behavioral problems.” As for millennial behavioral problems? Catan’s not having it. “I’m just not a huge fan of labels like that,” she says. “I just don’t think it’s even relevant.”

But Catan says dogs can also foster connection with other people. And more than that, dogs can just help you slow life down for a bit and catch your breath. She noticed this first hand from training one of her own dogs Otis, a Sheepadoodle who has nearly 200K followers. But training wasn’t initially easy-breezy. First, Catan spent a lot of money with professional trainers and found that nothing was working. Then, when she tried to train Otis on her own, she says she was frustrated with the lack of useful information online. That’s when she decided to dial back on the perfection of it all. She made a simple commitment to work with Otis for 5 minutes a day. And in that time, Catan, who says she battles crushing anxiety, recognized a benefit to her mental health. “What I started to notice was after those 5 minutes of training him,” she says, “I could breathe. My chest totally let go.” And she recognized changes in Otis too.

Fast forward to the 2020 U.S. presidential election, and TMKI was asked to Feed the Polls. And Jaber said yes without hesitation. “Of course I had no idea how to feed the voters,” he says with a laugh. “I go back to the team, and I say, ‘Hey guys, I just committed to feeding the entire nation.’ My partner, Dan, didn’t believe me and just walked out.” But Jaber teamed up with the right folks who helped him mobilize, and the mission was a success. “It allowed a lot of restaurant workers that were already unemployed for a long time, especially in hard-hit states, to come out and make a living,” Jaber says. And another idea was born. He wanted to keep those folks employed if possible. So he began developing a plan for The Migrant Kitchen to go permanently national.

“So all of a sudden, this company,” he says, “which was on paper just a catering company, ended up becoming catering, production, disaster relief, and brick and mortar.” When it comes to millennials and claims that they’re entitled, here’s what Jaber has to say: “This generation is a great generation,” he says. “It’s an innovative generation. It’s a generation that wants to change the world. It’s the generation that believes in the others.”

Millennial Change Makers

Photographs by Gabriela Hasbun

Photographs by Tayler Smith

Photographs by Chona Kasinger

Photographs by Naohmi Monroe

Photographs by Charlee Black

The thing is, millennials did not sit on their hands and wait for someone else to come up with solutions. Instead, they stepped up. These nine remarkable change makers found ways to feed the exhausted and the hungry, elevate the voices of their hurting communities, provide resources and safe havens where needed, help struggling small businesses, speed up the wheels of research and science, and even bring a little joy to those isolated in their homes. Before we introduce them to you, let’s look at a few quick facts. Many millennials are well into middle age. The very oldest of them will turn 40 this year. (Lordy, Lordy!) And the youngest are in their mid-20s. The generation has long gotten a bad rap, but don’t all generations get that as they come of age? Let’s end the trend of calling millennials entitled. The only thing these nine millennials want is a better world for us all. And that E-word, my friends, is actually empathetic.

—Signed someone who barely squeaked by as a Gen Xer

Written by Jennifer Chesak. Medically reviewed by Alana Biggers, M.D., MPH

NIVI ACHANTA

founder & CEO, Soapbox Project

Photographs by Chona Kasinger

TIFFANY SORYA

founder, NOVEL EDUCATION

Novel Education does private tutoring and academic enrichment programs. “We have an in-house curriculum design team,” Sorya says, “and we can create curriculum based around pretty much anything.” She mentions filmmaking, photography, architecture, oil painting, and acting, to name a few. “We just thought,” Sorya says,“What a cool thing to be able to develop kids’ hobbies at a really young age with a clear, concise curriculum, with benchmarks and ways to measure progress and then make that be a part of their school. So that’s what we specialize in.” Schools pivoted to distance learning curriculums at the start of the pandemic, and some have remained that way. But Sorya says she recognized the duplication of the regular school day to a Zoom school day as problematic and inefficient. So she offered a solution. “We could still follow their school’s curriculum, but we just shortened their Zoom time,” she says. “So our tutors pretty much took over the teaching, and we were able to shorten their school days from 6 hours of Zooming to just a short 2 to 3 hours.”

Parents haven’t had to pull their kids from the school system. Yet families can enjoy more flexibility, and students can explore their passions. And Sorya says that’s the way education should be. “Rather than saying, ‘Hey, put down that drawing pen and get back to your books," she says, “What if that drawing pen is a really big part of their learning and a really big part of what they’re going to do as adults?” Instead of the drawing pen being a reward for finishing their chemistry homework, for example, Sorya wants to make it a more structured part of the learning process. When it comes to the millennial generation, Sorya says she recognizes that older generations say millennials have it easier in terms of access to information. “The wrong move is to label that as lazy,” she says. As an educator, she believes in taking advantage of access to information, and that’s what she wants for the next generation.

Photographs by Naohmi Monroe

Photographs by Charlee Black

Jeffers and Bacon hope that art and culture can help drive awareness about inequality and spur action for equality. “One of the things that is refreshing about GANGGANG is that we are talking about equity,” Jeffers says, “and we are talking about ending racism in a very cool way and a very bright way.” She explains that discussions around equity can be heavy and feel impossible. But when presented in “a way that is bright, and a way that is welcoming,” she adds, “we’re finding that more people want to join the gang.” The conversation has always been needed, but even more so in the face of a pandemic that has disproportionately affected Black Americans. “It also generated a new awareness for the difficulties that Black-owned businesses, specifically, Black- owned cultural businesses, have suffered for a long time,” Jeffers says. Bacon shares his hope that younger generations can be the catalyst to realizing change in America for issues that have plagued the country for 400 years. “Generation Z and millennials have said, ‘Enough is enough,’” he says.

MALI JEFFERS

& ALAN BACON

founders of GANGGANG

Photographs by Charlee Black

Millennial Change Makers

—Signed someone who barely squeaked by as a Gen Xer

Written by Jennifer Chesak. Medically reviewed by Alana Biggers, M.D., MPH

Oh those darn millennials. They just want to eat their expensive avocado toast and… oh wait. Millennials are actually really badass. Also, they can totally eat whatever theheck they want because they’re busy finding solutions to major problems having to do with the pandemic. So STFU. At Greatist, we put a call out to find millennial changemakers — innovators, advocates, and educators who are creating change in the face of COVID-19. And the response was overwhelming. We had a hard time narrowing our picks down to these nine go-getters. Last year about this time — yes, it’s been a whole year — the pandemic stopped the world as we knew it. Lockdowns went into place, shuttering businesses and sending kiddos home from school to be cared for by working, juggling parents. People lost their livelihoods. And many lost their lives to a virus we knew little about. People had trouble feeding their families let alone paying their rent. Amidst it all, the pandemic and other events of 2020 shined a light on the longstanding health disparities and other injustices that Black Americans face. This past year has been brutal, to say the least. The thing is, millennials did not sit on their hands and wait for someone else to come up with solutions. Instead, they stepped up. These nine remarkable changemakers found ways to feed the exhausted and the hungry, elevate the voices of their hurting communities, provide resources and safe havens where needed, help struggling small businesses, speed up the wheels of research and science, and even bring a little joy to those isolated in their homes. Before we introduce them to you, let’s look at a few quick facts. Many millennials are well into middle age. The very oldest of them will turn 40 this year. (Lordy, Lordy!) And the youngest are in their mid-20s. The generation has long gotten a bad rap, but don’t all generations get that as they come of age? Let’s end the trend of calling millennials entitled. The only thing these nine millennials want is a better world for us all. And that E-word, my friends, is actually empathetic.

Whiting

Michele Avissar-

Photographs by Tayler Smith

editor in chief, Research Square

When a novel virus is spreading rapidly around the globe, taking lives and causing severe illness, research must also spread at a swifter pace. Michelle Avissar-Whiting, PhD, is the editor and chief of Research Square, a leading preprint publishing platform. “Preprints are getting a lot more mainstream attention now,” says Avissar-Whiting. “And of course it’s entirely to do with the pandemic and how important it became for researchers to just share their work as quickly as possible.” When research is published in scientificand medical journals, it must undergo a lengthy process of submission, editorial consideration, peer review by other researchers, revision, etc. “It’s a very well-known, tedious, tiresome process,” Avissar-Whiting explains, “just so that you can get your work published, start getting cited, and start building your career.”

Preprints help circumvent all of that, at least in the short term, so that research can be shared with others quickly and expanded on, which is especially important amidst a global health crisis. Preprints are the reason we have vaccines for COVID-19 and some of the treatments that, although not a cure, have helped mitigate severe complications, Avissar-Whiting says. “There have just been thousands of publications on pre-print platforms,” she adds. “You never would have seen that if authors had been forced to adhere to the standard norms in scientific publishing. So what this has done is opened a new door. It just feels like we could be moving faster on everything, on cancer, on rare diseases and disorders.” One drawback of preprints is the lack of peer reviewing, which Avissar-Whiting says, although not imperfect, is a good gatekeeper for reliable information. That means aplatform like Research Square has to incorporate some screening mechanisms. But Avissar-Whiting points out that circumventing some of the formality around research publishing through preprints also creates the potential for us to “do science better.”

“It’s not just that it’s faster to get the publications out,” she says, “but the fact that it’s open for everybody to read and comment on and scrutinize actually makes it better because suddenly you’ve just exposed it to all of the world’s experts to look at, and you’re going to pick it apart and find all the problems with it.” Avissar-Whiting, an older millennial, who remembers the struggle of the dial-up internet connection, says she has a huge appreciation for the digital world that keeps us connected and now helps us quickly disseminate research through avenues like preprints. “I feel very grateful for the advances in technology that brought us here,” she says. “I guess my biggest hope is that the middle of millennials, and their hard work, and the generation that has followed us will get us out of some of the bigger existential kind of crises that we’re all facing — not just the proximal one of the pandemic and future pandemics, but also obviously climate change and nuclear proliferation and these sorts of problems that are huge and difficult.”

Nabeel Alamgir

founder & CEO, Lunchbox

NASSER JABER

founder & CEO, The Migrant Kitchen & The Migrant Kitchen Initiative

Photographs by Tayler Smith

Brianna Noble

founder & owner, Humble

Christie Catan

co-founder, Tails of Connection

Dog adoption surged during the pandemic, with people suddenly stuck at home during shelter-in-place orders. But that left people wondering how they were going to teach each their new furry pals everything from potty policies to fetching fun. Thankfully, Christie Catan, with her pal Jessica Yergin, had just launched Tails of Connection (TOC), an online dog-training community. Catan says that when they launched that January, before the pandemic was in full force, connection was front of their minds. “Even though we often feel so digitally connected,” she explains, “there’s often just so much going on, and life can be so hard. There’s just such a gift that can come from the connection that you’ve got with your dog.”

But Catan says dogs can also foster connection with other people. And more than that, dogs can just help you slow life down for a bit and catch your breath. She noticed this first hand from training one of her own dogs Otis, a Sheepadoodle who has nearly 200K followers. But training wasn’t initially easy-breezy. First, Catan spent a lot of money with professional trainers and found that nothing was working. Then, when she tried to train Otis on her own, she says she was frustrated with the lack of useful information online. That’s when she decided to dial back on the perfection of it all. She made a simple commitment to work with Otis for 5 minutes a day. And in that time, Catan, who says she battles crushing anxiety, recognized a benefit to her mental health. “What I started to no tice was after those 5 minutes of training him,” she says, “I could breathe. My chest totally let go.” And she recognized changes in Otis too.

Jamie Sgarro

co-founder & executive director, AsylumConnect

Photographs by Tayler Smith