Yesterday I met 16-year-old Akbar Khan outside of the Goldman Sachs offices trying to raise money for his new nonprofit BagsToRiches which collects conference bags from around the country and donates them to refugees and the homeless, keeping them out of landfills and preventing the use of countless plastic bags.
Akbar and I followed up today and he told me how he launched the organization a year ago, just after his 15th birthday. He’d been visiting his uncle in the Bay Area to visit universities there (he hopes to attend Stanford). He’d collected a bunch of material and asked his uncle if he had a bag. His uncle produced a large garbage bag full of conference bags and told him to take his pick. The discovery inspired his effort to collect bags for the use by the needy.
Akbar is raising money using Indigogo (see my article about crowdfuding in Forbes). You can donate as little as $2 to the campaign to cover the cost of collecting and distributing one bag. The homeless and refugees who receive the bags would appreciate it!
This is Akbar’s first real mark on the world. I imagine there will be more. Where’s your mark on the world?
