Impact is often described through what is most visible: funds deployed, projects launched, people reached. These measures matter. But they rarely reflect the deeper work required to make lasting change.
For RIVET, 2025 was a year defined by that deeper work.
Throughout 2025, RIVET operated as connective tissue among youth leadership, institutions, and brands. We partnered with youth-serving organizations that bring credibility and reach within their communities. We worked with brands to unlock financial resources and non-cash support, including visibility, validation, and platforms that help young leaders be seen and taken seriously. And we listened closely to the innovators themselves, adapting our models based on what genuinely helped them move forward.
Impact is too often framed in quantitative terms that are easy to measure but difficult to feel, a proxy for the work that can obscure the human story behind grassroots change. In 2025, RIVET prioritized a more grounded understanding of impact: working to front-and-center the heart, the vision, and the drive that powers the projects we support. The people behind the project.
Our priorities have not changed. We are still building the systems and relationships that allow, grow, and hold up youth-led change. We are still working to make those systems more equitable and more accessible for those closest to the world's most urgent challenges. And we are making sure that, while we do so, it is our innovators, and their families and their communities, who guide our choices.
Youth-led innovation is already happening. Our responsibility is to ensure the systems around it are built to support it well.
Solutions to many of the world's most urgent social, political, and environmental challenges are being formulated right now by young people who stand to be most seriously affected by them. But these solutions are embryonic and diffuse, and the route from idea to deployment has never been more obstructed.
RIVET is a youth innovation platform built to provide catalytic microgrants and ecosystem support to project leaders under 30 working to tackle critical global challenges. We identify leaders with real vision and help them transform early-stage ideas into scalable solutions, supported by brands, foundations, and institutions who recognise that the future depends on this generation of problem solvers.
We don't just fund youth-led work. We redesign how youth-led work becomes fundable, visible, and sustainable.
Since 2021, RIVET has funded 1,208 youth-led projects, supporting innovators across 79 countries. We have partnered with eight consumer brands, including Adobe, Crocs, Funko, eos and Fossil, and built an advisory network drawing from Apple, Google, Nike, adidas, and Meta.
And we have done all of this under the active governance of our RIVET Assembly: young decision makers with the power to approve our partnerships and shape our future direction. RIVET is not built for youth. It is built with them.
Existing funding systems were not designed with youth innovation in mind. They are too slow for moments that require rapid response, too risk-averse for early experimentation, too centralized to recognise local insight, and too focused on institutions rather than individuals closest to the issue. As a result, promising ideas fail before they can build the evidence base required to attract further support.
RIVET provides a toolkit of funding, support, and visibility that addresses these infrastructural gaps, giving early-stage innovators room to breathe, to build, and, where successful, to grow.
RIVET connects three forces that rarely align on their own:
RIVET's job is to build the infrastructure around youth-led innovation so it can survive, scale, and stay youth-owned.
Our model is designed to generate and compound three forms of capital that young innovators need to succeed:
Together, these forms of capital create the conditions for youth-led ideas to grow into durable solutions.
RIVET works with youth-serving organisations to radically increase access to capital and resources for young people who are least likely to be served through traditional channels, especially those in underserved communities.
RIVET provides financial capital, mentorship, networking, and ongoing support, genuinely invested in each innovator's growth, not just their first grant.
We leverage the power of media, brand platforms, and influencers to amplify the stories of young innovators in a way that inspires new projects and further investment in youth-led change.
RIVET is designed by youth, for youth. Young people co-design our strategy, sign off on brand and impact partners, vote on our board, and occupy executive leadership roles.
RIVET's model operates as a virtuous cycle, where each stage reinforces the next, generating network effects for young innovators, partners, and funders:
RIVET structures funding across three tiers that reflect how youth-led innovation actually grows:
Small, fast, and flexible. Designed for youth who have proximity to a problem and a clear idea of what to try, but lack the early capital to act. This tier reduces the gap between idea and first implementation.
For growing, deepening, and stabilising. Boost grants support youth innovators who have demonstrated traction and are ready to expand their reach, formalise operations, or strengthen sustainability.
For expanding and institutionalising. Designed for youth-led initiatives ready to grow significantly, through geographic expansion, system integration, or long-term infrastructure building.
Access enables action. Boost strengthens proof. Scale accelerates durability.
Together, they create a pathway where youth can move from early experimentation to sustained growth, without being forced into premature scale or extractive models. RIVET turns youth ideas into initiatives that are fundable, trackable, and positioned to grow, while preserving youth ownership and contextual integrity.
"RIVET came in at the right moment, helping me shape my idea into something tangible. Through their support, I was able to test my concept, refine it, and significantly improve my pitching skills through the Rivet Brain Trust.
Beyond that, RIVET has provided me with a strong community of like-minded innovators who continuously inspire growth and collaboration. Today, my idea is no longer just a dream, it is up and running, evolving, and creating real impact."
Razak Abudi, RIVET Grantee
Founder of Climatepreneurship
Together, RIVET's partnerships have mobilised over 400,000 dollars in catalytic funding, engaged corporate teams in our impact efforts, and supported some of this generation's most innovative and inspirational youth leaders. These outputs demonstrate what is possible when the private sector engages directly with youth-led innovation in a way that is both commercially grounded and impact-oriented.
RIVET's brand partnerships are a way to unlock early capital, visibility, and legitimacy for youth-led solutions, while ensuring youth ownership and integrity remain central.
Consumer research shows that 84% of young consumers screen products based on social impact, and around 62% want brands to offer social change initiatives with which they can become involved. This shift is shaping how companies approach social and environmental impact, and for many, encouraging them to seek out next-gen leaders with whom they can work. RIVET's brand partners include Adobe, GoDaddy, Crocs™, eos, Funko, Fossil, and Land O'Lakes, among others.
Beyond direct funding, brand partners play a critical role in platforming the stories of young innovators, amplifying their work through co-produced content, editorial features, social storytelling, and access to brand events and networks. The Crocs x RIVET partnership is a strong example: in addition to direct grants, five youth innovators were able to participate in the product development process through Jibbitz™ for Good, and saw their stories amplified through content production, brand visibility and experiential programs. For early-stage changemakers, that kind of platform can be as transformative as the funding itself.
"Crocs is proud to partner with RIVET as part of our global commitment to help young people step up to their greatest potential. With RIVET, we're contributing to an ecosystem that funds the next generation's big ideas early and amplifies their voices authentically. This is what aligning our resources with real impact looks like."Deanna Bratter, Chief Sustainability & Compliance Officer, Crocs, Inc.
Our Impact Partners are our frontline teams. Deeply embedded in the communities they serve, these youth-serving organisations boast the unique capacity to identify promising initiatives and act on our behalf to deliver resources and support locally, and to track project progress on the ground. Their involvement means we can scale without centralising decision making or stripping away local ownership.
Our Impact Partner network reaches over 65 million young people annually across 190 countries, and includes City Year, the International Federation of Red Cross and Red Crescent Societies (IFRC), Peace First, the School of International Futures, UNLEASH, the We Are Family Foundation, and Young Change Agents, and many more!
"RIVET demonstrates a strong understanding of the complexities of engaging young people in today's rapidly evolving context. Their approach to youth-led work is thoughtful, context-sensitive, and designed to strengthen existing systems rather than replace them. By enabling meaningful connections, supporting youth leadership, and fostering inclusive spaces for action, RIVET contributes to building more effective and sustainable approaches to working with young people across our network."Henry Caceres Pilco, Global Coordinator Innovation Initiatives, IFRC
At RIVET, partnerships are not one-off collaborations. They are long-term relationships built around shared responsibility for outcomes. For youth innovators, this means access to a network, not just a grant. For brands and institutions, it means participation in a credible, learning-oriented system.
In four years, RIVET has deployed 1,208 microgrants to youth-led initiatives around the world, supporting nearly 2,900 individual youth innovators.
(Self-reported)
No single issue dominates, a signal that youth-led solutions are diverse, locally defined, and inherently intersectional.
RIVET funds where ideas emerge, not where capital is easiest to deploy.
RIVET's catalytic funding model is already demonstrating strong early results. Two RIVET-supported innovators have gone on to secure more than $1 million in follow-on investment combined after receiving initial support. These early successes illustrate the multiplier effect that trust-based, early-stage capital can generate, helping promising innovators unlock significantly larger funding opportunities and accelerate their impact.
When youth are trusted early: ideas launch, leaders grow, capital compounds, systems begin to shift.
Footnote: Unless otherwise noted, demographic and beneficiary reach figures are based on available self-reported and evaluation data from representative samples of RIVET-supported projects and grantees. Where complete portfolio-wide data is unavailable, estimates are derived using sample-based analysis and extrapolation methodologies. RIVET continues to strengthen its data collection and impact measurement systems to improve the completeness and precision of future reporting.
Youth do not work in silos. Neither does impact.
Impact areas help us organize data. They do not define how young people build.
In practice, youth-led solutions rarely sit within a single category. A water project improves health and livelihoods. A mental health initiative strengthens education outcomes. Renewable energy access expands economic participation. Inclusion reshapes who gets to lead across every sector.
Young innovators do not separate climate from poverty, or education from identity. They respond to problems as they experience them, layered, interconnected, and urgent.
Each founder featured here is not addressing one issue. They are intervening at leverage points, shifting conditions that ripple outward.
This is what youth-led systems change looks like: local in origin, interconnected in effect, compounding over time.
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Refining the system. Growing the capital. Preparing to scale.
If 2025 was a year of foundation-building, 2026 is the year we enable smart, sustainable growth. RIVET's priority is responsible scale: building a funding and support system that can move faster, reach further, and stay credible without losing what makes it work, youth governance, local trust, and catalytic capital that actually unlocks action.
We will continue strengthening RIVET's operating system so our grantmaking is more consistent, more comparable, and easier to run across partners and regions. That means tightening grant operations with clearer milestones and stronger partner workflows; improving measurement instruments so they are simpler for youth and stronger for learning; upgrading our data architecture to track portfolio health and catalytic multipliers with greater integrity; and deepening youth governance so the Youth Assembly continues to be a strong decision-making body.
RIVET works because small amounts of early trust create outsized results. In 2026, we will grow the pool of catalytic funding available to youth innovators, especially those in communities most excluded from traditional capital. This includes expanding brand, foundation, and institutional partnerships; increasing non-cash capital pathways, visibility, storytelling, creative support, networks, that help youth unlock next-stage opportunities; and building stronger multi-year commitments so our support is compounding, not episodic.
As demand grows, our responsibility is to scale in a way that protects youth ownership and preserves contextual relevance. In 2026, we will invest in stronger partner enablement through toolkits, training, and clearer expectations; more defined portfolio pathways from Access to Boost to Scale, so youth aren't left behind after a first grant; more durable learning loops so what we fund today improves how we fund tomorrow; and a bigger visibility engine that turns results into legitimacy beyond RIVET.
Youth-led innovation isn't the experiment. The real experiment is whether institutions can redesign themselves fast enough to support it.
The future is already being built by young people solving real problems with limited resources and relentless creativity.
What's missing is not talent. It's not ambition. It's not readiness.
What's missing is infrastructure: capital that moves early, trust that comes faster, systems that stop treating youth leadership like a side project.
RIVET exists to change that. If you're reading this, you're already part of the ecosystem that decides what happens next.
Partner with RIVET to deploy catalytic grants, amplify youth-led stories with integrity, and put real resources behind values.
Invest in the infrastructure that discovers, funds, and strengthens youth-led solutions before they get filtered out by traditional gatekeeping.
Become an Impact Partner and help move capital with trust, context, and care, so young leaders in your community get supported without waiting for permission.
The smallest action, a warm intro, a platform, can become the turning point for a young innovator.
Because this is the truth:
When youth are trusted early, everything changes.
Ideas launch. Leaders grow. Capital compounds. Systems start to shift.
2026 is the year we take what works and scale it.
Not quietly. Not cautiously. Not someday.
Now.
I have spent over thirty years working alongside young people who are solving problems the rest of us are still debating. What I have learned, first as a youth organizer in Ohio, then through three decades building Peace First across 160 countries, is an uncomfortable truth:
The barrier to youth-led change has never been talent. It has never been ambition. It has never been readiness.
It has been access.
Most of the world's young people live in capital deserts; places where brilliant ideas die quietly because there is no early funding, no institutional trust, and no pathway to legitimacy. That is not a talent gap. That is an infrastructure failure. And it is one of the most consequential failures in our impact ecosystem.
RIVET exists to fix that.
We did not build RIVET because the world needed another nonprofit. We built it because current funding structures are built around the needs of institutions, not individuals. Around gatekeepers, not the people closest to the problems. Around slow, risk-averse processes in a world where urgency does not wait for a grant cycle.
Young people are the only group of humans talked about almost exclusively in terms of potential. We say they are the future of leadership. The future of innovation. But that framing is wrong.
Young people are not the future of anything. They are already building the present.
A young man in rural Uganda is changing the culture of masculinity in his village with four pedal sewing machines and a $250 grant. A young woman in Gilgit-Baltistan is restoring degraded land by rethinking what a tree means for an entire community. A young engineer in Nigeria is deploying AI-powered water monitoring systems in conflict zones. These are not experiments. These are solutions. And they exist because someone believed in them early.
That early belief is what RIVET provides. We call it catalytic capital, not because the amounts are large, but because they are first. For many of the young innovators in this report, a RIVET microgrant represents the first time their work has been formally recognized by anyone outside their own community. Our data bears this out: initial microgrants have unlocked twenty to five hundred times their value in follow-on funding. When you trust youth early, capital compounds.
These words have shaped how RIVET operates. We are not perfect. We will never fund everything that deserves to be funded. But we will always be transparent about the choices we are making and why. Young people do not need us to pretend the world is simple. They need us to be honest about its complexity and to show up anyway.
This report documents what RIVET made possible. 2025 has not been a year defined by a single breakthrough, but a year of deeper, harder work: strengthening how we grant, how we partner, how we learn from data, and how we support young innovators beyond a single moment of funding. Rather than prioritizing scale, we invested in the foundations that make scale responsible.
Every young innovator in this report carries the same conviction: that those closest to the problems are also closest to the solutions. They are not waiting for permission. They are not asking the world to be ready for them. They are already doing the work.
RIVET's job is to make sure the systems around them are built to support what they are already building. We need small change at scale, not a single leader, not a single moment, but thousands of young people in every community deciding they are going to act, supported by trusted institutions ready for the journey.
RIVET is how we turn on the spigot.
