European Young Leaders (#EYL40)

Ahmed Abdirahman is the founder and CEO of the Järvaveckan Foundation, a non-profit organization dedicated to promoting inclusivity across social, economic, and political spheres. His foundation organizes Järvaveckan, a major democracy and political festival in Sweden’s political calendar that brings together over 300 organizations and attracts more than 60,000 attendees each summer. The event fosters connections among citizens, politicians, civil society, business leaders, and public authorities. Somali-born, Abdirahman previously served as a policy expert on social sustainability at the Stockholm Chamber of Commerce, focusing on advancing integration initiatives.

Madeleine Darya Alizadeh, known as dariadaria, is an Austrian content creator and entrepreneur.  She founded dariadéh, a fashion label trying to be more size-inclusive and sustainable. The company also hosts a second-hand platform for customers to resell their ‘preloved’ purchases. She wrote a green lifestyle column for Wienerin magazine and produced and hosted a mindful mess podcast, which discussed personal development and sustainable living. She authored the book, “Starkes weiches Herz” (“Strong soft heart”), which ranked on a Literatur-Spiegel bestseller list, among others. Now with over 335k followers on Instagram, Alizadeh became a leading voice in the world of sustainable fashion through her popular fashion blog, dariadaria.

Ryyan Alshebl is the Mayor of the village of Ostelsheim and the first mayor of Syrian origin in Germany. Having left his home country of Syria and sought asylum in Germany, Alshebl’s pursuit of a career in politics has challenged traditional notions of integration. As mayor, the progressive, independent local politician prioritises digital access to public administration services, as well as early childhood, public transport and environmental protection. Upon his arrival in Germany, Alshebl completed a vocational programme on government administration and an internship at the Althengstett town council, in which role he was responsible for day care management and digitalisation.

A Greek social entrepreneur, Lefteris Arapakis founded Enaleia to improve the sustainability of the marine ecosystem and fishing industry. Enaleia is at the helm of Greece’s first-ever fishing school, which aims to strengthen the fishing sector and empower fishers through the provision of eco-friendly, ethical training and education. Enaleia’s Mediterranean CleanUp collects and facilitates the upcycling of plastic bycatches from fishers in return for compensation, incentivizing sustainable fishing and supporting local economies, while also preventing further pollution through collecting their used fishing gear. Working with over 3,000 fishers in the Mediterranean, the programme has collected over 1M kilogrammes of marine plastic. Arapakis is a UNEP Young Champion of the Earth and Ambassador for the Mediterranean Coast.

A British sociologist and scholar of race, inequality and education, Jason Arday is a Professor of Sociology of Education at the University of Cambridge. He is one of the youngest people ever appointed to a professorship at the prestigious institution. Growing up unable to speak, read and write, Arday is committed to tackling the systemic inequalities that Black, Asian and minority ethnic students often face in education. Acclaimed for his research on race and structural racism, Arday’s work aims to overcome the underrepresentation of people from disadvantaged backgrounds in higher education. He is also a longstanding Trustee of the Runnymede Trust, a leading race equality think tank. Outside of academia, Arday has raised over £5 million pounds for charity over a 20-year period.

Currently serving as the Vice-President of the Italian Chamber of Deputies, Anna Ascani is an Italian politician whose career is best defined by her successes in European affairs, education and youth policies. The former Democratic Party vice-president has also served as the state secretary for economic development and the deputy education minister, in which role she tackled inequality between schools in different regions through peer-to-peer exchange and through building and digital infrastructure investments. When first elected to the national parliament, Ascani was among its youngest members and served on the Parliamentary Assembly of the Council of Europe.

Marcos Baghdatis is a sporting legend from Cyprus. The former top 10 tennis star was runner-up at the 2006 Australian Open and semi-finalist at the Wimbledon Championship that same year. In the 2010 season, he was the only player to score victories over both Roger Federer and Rafael Nadal when they were World No. 1. Baghdatis won four ATP singles tournaments before injury forced him into retirement in 2019. Since then, he has worked to help promising young players. In August 2023, he was appointed Ambassador for the Professional Tennis Players Association (PTPA) with the goal of empowering new generations of players.

A childhood fascination with the cult movie ‘Hackers’ led Marijus Briedis into a cybersecurity career with a global mission to shape a trusted and peaceful online future for people everywhere. He helped design the innovative NordLynx virtual private network (VPN) technology. As chief technical officer at NordVPN Briedis leads a team exploring technology that aims to detect malware before it lands on devices, block third-party trackers, and offer a single application to cover all essential areas of consumer security. Claiming to be the fastest VPN on the planet, NordVPN confidently assures customers “It would take the world’s most powerful computer billions of years to unencrypt your data.”

A multi-award social entrepreneur passionate about impact-entrepreneurship equality and diversity, Zarah Bruhn is the Commissioner for Social Innovation at the German Federal Ministry of Education and Research. To address the systemic barriers to job market integration and develop sustainable pathways to employment for refugees, Bruhn founded socialbee, a non-profit that supports companies in hiring refugees and migrants, as well as further qualifying them for the primary labour market. Bruhn seeks to shift mindsets by demonstrating the social value of long-term labour market integration and reimagining industry norms for temporary employment. She is also a member of the German Council for sustainable development and an Ashoka Fellow.

Ella Dvornik is an award-winning luxury travel, fashion and lifestyle blogger from Croatia. Her blog, I Am Ella, was voted among the top three blogs at the UK Blog Awards. She is also the Founder of Manijak, a digital media service for influencers. She has worked with over 400 brands worldwide to create creative content and has featured in nearly all media outlets in Croatia and the Western Balkan region. Since she first created her Facebook profile over a decade ago, her online audience has grown from strength to strength and now includes more than 370k Facebook followers and over half a million Instagram followers.

Since 2021, Megi Fino has been Albania’s Deputy Minister for Europe and Foreign Affairs. She is at the forefront of advancing her country’s European Union membership process as a negotiator for the acquis Chapter 31. Fino has been engaged at the UN and regional bodies to promote support for Ukraine and regional cooperation. She was previously an Integrity Consultant for the United Nations Development Programme (UNDP) focused on local governance reform and worked as a regulatory expert at Vodafone Albania. A lawyer by training, she includes Chinese among her many languages.

Rodrigo García González is an inventor, designer, architect and engineer. His London-based startup Notpla has a simple goal: making packaging disappear. Among its biodegradable products are home-compostable containers made from seaweed. Notpla’s mass-produced packaging have replaced over 6.5 million units of plastic food containers. That number rises every minute, and the aim is to reach 500 billion by 2030. Notpla’s list of seaweed-based products keeps growing, moving into paper, cutlery and toothpaste. In 2022, Notpla scooped the £1 million Earthshot Prize for its efforts to free the world from waste-free.

Tanguy Goretti was co-founder in 2017 of COWBOY, a Brussels-based start-up making the world’s most-connected electric bikes. With the goal of revolutionising urban micro-mobility, it has sold over 60,000 e-bikes in Europe and the United States, saving over 15 million tons of CO2. COWBOY bikes’ smart look, easy usability and heaps of integrated software have earned an ‘Apple of e-bikes’ tag and scooped armfuls of innovation and design awards. Navigating an e-bike market expected to be nudging US$120 billion by the turn of the decade, COWBOY is on track to hit profitability in 2024 in line with its mission to ‘build a better bike, create a better self and leave a better world’.

Sally Hayden is an award-winning Irish journalist and photographer, whose work focuses on migration, conflict and humanitarian crises. Reporting from across Africa, the Middle East and Europe, there are few major outlets in which Hayden’s work has not featured. In 2023, she was named Journalist of the Year by the Irish Journalism Awards. Her first book “My Fourth Time, We Drowned: Seeking Refuge on the World’s Deadliest Migration Route”, focuses on human rights abuses fuelled by European anti-migration policies, particularly in Libya. It was awarded the Orwell Prize for Political Writing, the Michel Déon Prize and the Irish Book Awards’ Overall Book of the Year. It has also been published in Italian and Dutch, and is forthcoming in Spanish, French and Polish.

Valeriya Ionan is the Deputy Minister for Eurointegration at the Ukrainian Ministry of Digital Transformation, where she oversees European integration and international relations, the national digital literacy programme, regional digital transformation, as well as the development and growth of SMEs. Her top projects at the ministry include Diia.Education, a national edutainment platform for reskilling and digital literacy; award-winning Diia.Business, a national project on the development of SMEs; WinWin platform for growing global Ukrainian innovation vision; Future Perfect, a national language programme; CDTO Campus, an education project for digital leaders, and many others. Her efforts focus on launching Ukrainian digital products to speed the process of national digitalisation and to help solve complex challenges.