The Changemakers Program (CMP) is a youth leadership and innovation initiative of the Wyss Academy for Nature, co-designed with young people and developed in collaboration with Emzingo and Goodwall, to empower emerging leaders from the Academy’s regional hubs to drive positive environmental and social change. Launched in 2023 and continuing with second and final cohort, the program brings together young entrepreneurs, policy advocates, and community innovators from regions including Switzerland, Peru, Kenya, and Madagascar, offering mentorship, project development support, and a blended focus on entrepreneurship and policy advocacy. While the CMP itself concludes with this second cohort, youth stewardship, local leadership development, and entrepreneurship will remain core priorities in the Wyss Academy’s next strategic phase. Through a tailored curriculum, strong local and international partnerships, and a global peer network, the CMP equips participants with the skills, tools, and connections needed to design and lead community driven solutions, while fostering longterm engagement between Changemakers and the Wyss Academy’s broader innovation and impact portfolio.

The 2025 edition kept the six-month arc and strengthened entrepreneurship and policy engagement. This cohort was deliberately rooted in our landscapes, building from place-based insights and partnerships to trigger a ripple effect within local youth communities and ecosystem partners. Local welcome days in all three countries set the tone with cultural exchange and partner briefings (with Impact Kenya, Nature Explorers Peru, and Youth First Madagascar). The learning journey began with community immersions, interviews, and observation, tools to understand problems before proposing solutions. Participants then moved into ideation and early prototyping, supported by small group coaching and one-to-one mentoring. At key milestones, they presented work-in-progress to peers and experts, received structured feedback, and refined both their concepts and how they explain them.

Mid-year, training shifted to strategy and financing—fundraising options, theory of change, investor relations, and stakeholder collaboration— paired with field experiences through local Hubs, such as a rangelands and pastoralism immersion in Kenya and a skills and reflection workshop in Peru. Storytelling remained central: a participantled series highlighted projects from Madagascar, showing how narratives can mobilize partners and communities. The cohort closed the cycle with advocacy frameworks, presentation craft, and regionspecific showcases. In parallel, the Changemakers Program engaged in a strategic collaboration with Aiducation through the Jumpstart Academy in Kenya, a one-week capacity training designed to strengthen entrepreneurship skills among both the current cohort and Changemakers alumni as well as Aiducation alumni, reinforcing cross-cohort and inter-organizational peer learning that can continue beyond the CMP’s formal conclusion.

The final in-person summit of the Changemakers Program brought together participants from regional hubs, creating a shared space for exchange, reflection, and connection at the close of the sixmonth journey. By convening Changemakers from different geographic and thematic contexts, the summit enabled participants to share the challenges youth are facing across regions, recognize one another as collaborators rather than isolated actors, and deepen their mutual understanding of the people– nature dynamics shaping each other’s landscapes. As the CMP concludes after its second cohort, this collective moment served as a bridge toward the Wyss Academy’s future youth engagement pathways, ensuring continuity in relationships, learning, and leadership despite the program’s closure.

The 2025 cohort leaves with community insights, workable drafts of solutions, and the confidence to communicate their ideas to different audiences, built over a year of varied methods and placebased learning. Their work embodies the program’s intention to seed change locally and catalyze a broader ripple effect across landscapes and youth networks. It reflects a way of working that starts with what people share and see on the ground, improves ideas in the open, and then carries them into the rooms where choices are made.