Nanette Medved-Po, founder and chairperson of social enterprise company HOPE and Plastic Credit Exchange, will be honored at the Asia Society Game Changers Awards.
The award-giving body recognizes individuals, organizations, and movements that have inspired, enlightened, and shown true leadership in areas that reflect Asia Society’s core pillars of policy and business, arts and culture, and education.
The award will be given to Medved-Po to acknowledge her initiatives that improve public school education, provide agriculture interventions for smallholder farmers, and create environmental programs that address the problems of plastic waste and carbon sequestration.
Previous honorees included His Highness the Aga Khan; Alibaba founder Jack Ma; Nobel Peace Prize laureate Malala Yousafzai; tennis champion Naomi Osaka; award-winning architect I.M. Pei; and world-renowned cellist Yo-Yo Ma.
The 2022 Asia Society Game Changers Awards and Gala, to be held on 27 October at Cipriani 25 Broadway in New York, will honor a powerful group of climate change and sustainability leaders.
Other awardees are former New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg and COP26 president Alok Sharma.
“It is an incredible honor to be one of the recipients of this year’s Asia Society Game Changer Awards. I hope that any work we have done inspires others to be unafraid to try and be the change they want to see in the world,” said Medved-Po.
The former movie star launched HOPE in 2012 with a mission to demonstrate that businesses that invest in social good would be rewarded by the market.
The Asia Society Game Changers Award will be given to Medved-Po to acknowledge her initiatives that improve public school education, provide agriculture interventions for smallholder farmers, and create environmental programs that address the problems of plastic waste and carbon sequestration.
HOPE in a Bottle product commits 100 percent of profits to building public school classrooms in partnership in the Department of Education. In 2014 the organization expanded into agriculture interventions to improve the livelihood of smallholder farmers.
This led to the “Million Tree” program that provides free high-quality coconut seedlings and market access to farmers and builds 100-percent additional carbon sequestration capacity in the Philippines, which is in one of the areas worst-hit by the climate crisis.
In 2018, another environmental program was introduced through “Aling Tindera” which engages women microentrepreneurs to purchase plastic waste from their communities so that these do not leak into nature but can be fed back into the circular economy.
This market-based mechanism has allowed companies around the world to voluntarily take responsibility for their plastic footprints while providing economic benefits that lead to behavior change.
Many local governments have partnered with HOPE and PCX to help ease their heavily-taxed waste systems.
In 2020, PCX published the first Plastic Pollution Reduction Standard which provides a framework for the implementation of a credible and verifiable plastic offsetting program.