The giving Back Awards: 15 People Who Make America Great

1 - Under 25

Benita Singh and Ruth Degolia
Mercado Global

Their company will raise $600,000 this year to send Guatemalan kids to school.

Benita Singh and Ruth DeGolia were still undergraduates in the summer of 2003 when they found their destiny in the village of San Alfonso, on the Pacific coast of Guatemala. Singh and DeGolia, international-studies majors at Yale, were working on their senior theses when they visited the village, which was filled with women who had fled Guatemala during that country's brutal civil war in the 1980s. After two years in refugee camps in Mexico, the women, many of them widowed by the fighting, had been repatriated here, where there was no work and no market for the exquisite woven and beaded handicrafts they produced. "There are only so many tourists, and each one can only buy so much," says DeGolia ruefully. But the women weren't beggars; it was, says Singh, "the first time I'd ever walked into an impoverished [Third World] community where people weren't asking me for money."

So the two young women filled their suitcases with beaded bags and necklaces and took them back to Yale that fall, where they quickly sold out at a 300 percent markup. By Christmas they were back in Guatemala, laying the groundwork for a nonprofit they named Mercado ("market") Global, which seeks to bring the benefits of globalization to poor communities that until now have seen only the downside, in the collapse of prices for their locally grown crops. With a start-up grant from Echoing Green, a "social entrepreneurship" foundation, Singh and DeGolia organized 15 to 18 cooperatives in villages so remote that many inhabitants don't even speak Spanish, let alone English. The members produce textiles on backstrap looms, hand-painted ceramics and jewelry for the export market. They grossed about $75,000 last year in retail, online and catalog sales; this year, their second, Singh and DeGolia project sales of $600,000, and they are in talks with a major chain about carrying their hand-painted coffee mugs. The money will be used to fund scholarships for children whose parents could not afford the $50 or $60 it costs to send a child to elementary school in rural Guatemala. This year they're sending a computer to each of the cooperatives so the women can keep their books (although only a few can read or write). "We have a very special place in our heart," says Lara Galinsky, a vice president of Echoing Green, "for young people with the audacity, the vision and the energy to see things through." Even in places like San Alfonso.

—Jerry Adler