The World's 50 Greatest Leaders

the world's 50 greatest leaders

Fortune Editors

Maria Aspan, Eamon Barrett, Lydia Belanger, Clay Chandler, Scott Decarlo, Katherine Dunn, Erika Fry, Robert Hackett, Matt Heimer, Emma Hinchliffe, Jeremy Kahn, Beth Kowitt, Clifton Leaf, Rey Mashayekhi, Grady McGregor, David Meyer, McKenna Moore, Sy Mukherjee, Brian O'Keefe, Rachel Schallom, Alex Scimecca, Anne Sraders, Jonathan Vanian, Phil Wahba, and Claire Zillman.

Contributors

Some were already extraordinary achievers in business, government, philanthropy, athletics, and the arts. Others were ordinary citizens. In truly unprecedented times, each stepped up to make the world better, and inspired others to do the same. <a href="https://fortune.com/2021/05/12/worlds-greatest-leaders-2021-crisis-response-covid">Read more about our eighth annual list here</a>.

Jacinda Ardern had already sealed her position as a great leader early in her premiership of New Zealand, by empathetically steering her country through the aftermath of a terror attack and the deadly eruption of a volcano. Then the COVID-19 pandemic struck, and Ardern targeted not just suppression of the virus, but its complete elimination. Though there have been a few scares, her strategy largely proved successful; New Zealand, a nation of nearly 5 million people, has seen fewer than 2,700 cases and only 26 deaths. Ardern and her cabinet ministers took a six-month, 20% pay cut in 2020 to show solidarity with people who had lost their livelihoods owing to the pandemic. 
 
Ardern’s party won landslide reelection in October, fueled by her star power, her straight talk, and the fact that her government’s heavy restrictions on international travel made it possible for life to continue with relative normality within New Zealand’s borders. She has also adopted world-leading climate and gender-equity policies. In March, New Zealand became the first country to require that banks, investment managers, and insurers disclose the effects of climate change on their businesses. And last year, Ardern’s administration made it easier for women to negotiate with their employers for more equitable pay.

Jacinda Ardern

At the beginning of 2020, no vaccine or therapy involving the delivery system known as messenger RNA (mRNA) had ever been approved by regulators for widespread use. Today, two of the world’s most effective and widely used COVID-19 vaccines—developed by Pfizer/BioNTech and Moderna—rely on mRNA, and some 250 million doses have been administered in the U.S. alone, with hundreds of millions more in arms worldwide. But those vaccines might still be stuck on the drawing board if a handful of farsighted leaders hadn’t been ready to bet on mRNA when the odds were long. 
 
mRNA molecules were discovered in the early 1960s, but it wasn’t until the mid-2000s that researchers figured out how to modify the building blocks of those molecules for therapeutic purposes so that mRNA strands could safely interact with the body. Moderna, based in Cambridge, Mass., and BioNTech, based in Mainz, Germany, saw the potential in the breakthrough, and licensed the relevant discoveries. 
 
Each company then spent years in the biotech wilderness, each building up a body of research in which mRNA came up short in treating some diseases but showed promise for others. Both companies frequently encountered a similar problem: mRNA therapies provoked dangerously strong immune reactions when administered in frequent or regular doses. But such results suggested that mRNA might be well suited for vaccines, where just one or two doses are called for. 
 
That long experience meant that both companies were ready to leap into action in early 2020, when news of a terrifying new pandemic began emerging from China. Each company had experimental vaccines ready to test in the early weeks of the pandemic, and each had reached late-stage clinical trials within six months—unprecedented speed in the drug-development world. But as Moderna CEO <a href="https://fortune.com/2020/07/07/covid-vaccine-moderna-coronavirus-pandemic-stephane-bancel/">Stéphane Bancel told Fortune’s Brainstorm Health virtual conference</a> in 2020, its COVID vaccine is “not our first vaccine, it’s our 10th.” 
 
At BioNTech, meanwhile, cofounders Ugur Sahin and Özlem Türeci had begun collaborating in 2018 with multinational pharma giant Pfizer, working together on an experimental mRNA flu vaccine. That meant Pfizer CEO Albert Bourla had the confidence to quickly commit to a partnership with BioNTech on a COVID inoculation. Pfizer also had the deep pockets to put $2 billion into development of that vaccine without having to accept research funding from governments. Bourla wanted to be able to move fast without having to seek approval on every decision from an outside stakeholder, <a href="https://fortune.com/longform/covid-vaccine-resistant-variant-pfizer-ceo-albert-bourla/">he told Fortune recently</a>: “I couldn’t do that if I was taking government money.” 
 
While it’s already paying off in the fight against COVID, mRNA has only begun to show its potential. Compared with traditional vaccines, mRNA vaccines are both easy to tweak—to react, for example, to variants of a global virus like SARS-CoV-2—and relatively easy to scale up. But wherever its deployment ultimately leads, what may seem like overnight success was the product of years of hard work and calculated risk-taking, by leaders whose place in the pharma pantheon now seems assured.

mRNA Pioneers

PayPal has thrived during the pandemic—and Dan Schulman has tried to make sure that its customers and employees thrived, too. When COVID brought the U.S. economy to a halt, <a href="https://fortune.com/2020/04/20/paypal-ceo-dan-schulman-coronavirus-digital-payments-venmo-money/">PayPal was in the thick of the financial relief effort</a>: issuing small-business loans; serving as a funnel for charitable fundraising; and helping customers get faster access to stimulus payments by waiving the fees it usually charges to cash government checks. In response to the resurgence in activism over racial justice after the murder of George Floyd, the company says it has deployed more than $300 million in grants to Black-owned businesses, grants to nonprofits that support those businesses, and investments in Black- and Latinx-owned banks. 
 
Schulman’s investment in PayPal’s own employees has been just as groundbreaking. In 2019, PayPal’s leadership realized that many employees were barely getting by, even though they were being paid what the company believed were fair market rates. Schulman <a href="https://fortune.com/2020/09/09/paypal-dan-schulman-stakeholder-capitalism-ceo-daily/">set a new goal</a>: Every employee should have “net disposable income”—money left over after taxes, insurance premiums, and essential living expenses—of at least 20% of total pay. For most call center and entry-level workers, that figure at the time was well below 10%; by the end of 2020, after PayPal boosted wages and picked up a larger share of health premiums, the figure was 16% and climbing. Generosity hasn’t hurt the bottom line, either: In the first quarter of 2021, its earnings hit a record $1.1 billion, while revenue was up 31% year over year.

Dan Schulman

Dr. John Nkengasong heads the Ethiopia-based Africa Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), which is a specialized technical branch of the African Union. In that role, he helped to steer Africa’s 54 nations into an alliance that—thanks to measures that included closing country borders early on and instituting national curfews and mask mandates—has weathered the COVID crisis much more successfully than many far richer countries, including the United States. When the pandemic began, experts feared Africa would be ravaged by COVID-19, owing in large part to a relative lack of sophisticated health care infrastructure. Instead, Africa has triumphed compared with much of the rest of the world: The continent of 1.2 billion people has reported roughly 4.6 million COVID-19 cases and 123,000 deaths—far below the per capita rates in Europe, the Americas, or Asia. It’s true that those numbers likely understate the actual number of cases on a continent where public health resources are often scarce. Still, they are signs of a remarkable achievement. The Bill &amp; Melinda Gates Foundation awarded Nkengasong the 2020 Global Goalkeeper Award. Africa’s key challenge now, according to Nkengasong, is rolling out vaccinations efficiently across the continent within two years; this year’s goal is to vaccinate roughly 30% of the population.

Dr. John Nkengasong

During some of the darkest days of the pandemic, the restart of the 2019–20 NBA season inside a Disney-hosted virtual “bubble” in Orlando provided not only a beacon of hope but also a model for businesses of all types on the question of the moment: “How to reopen?” The effort was an operational feat of epic proportions, mind-bending logistics, and giant costs. It was even more remarkable given that the league pulled it off during a period of generational social-justice upheaval that profoundly affected its players and which, at more than one point, threatened to derail the season for good. (For an in-depth look, read “<a href="https://fortune.com/longform/nba-bubble-2020-orlando-florida-disney-covid-19-coronavirus-pandemic-los-angeles-lakers-lebron-james-basketball/">How the NBA kept the bubble from bursting</a>.”) 
 
As much as anything, the NBA’s triumph was a case study in leadership. And three key players in the effort stand out: NBA commissioner Adam Silver; Michele Roberts, executive director of the National Basketball Players Association (NBPA); and Chris Paul, a longtime star point guard (currently with the Phoenix Suns) and the president of the NBPA. 
 
The suspension of the NBA season on March 11, 2020, after Utah Jazz center Rudy Gobert tested positive for COVID-19, was an early milestone in the pandemic, signaling the seriousness of the public health crisis. Over the next several months, working with owners and player reps, the trio of Silver, Roberts, and Paul spent weeks constructing the bubble plan—at a cost to the league of some $180 million—to conduct the playoffs and crown a champion. A total of 172 games were played without a single player testing positive for COVID by the time the Los Angeles Lakers defeated the Miami Heat to claim the Larry O’Brien trophy in October. 
 
But the league’s carefully constructed game plan almost fell apart after the killing of George Floyd by police officers in Minneapolis in late May and the movement sparked by the tragedy. The magnitude of the moment resonated with Paul and his fellow players. “We’ve got a league full of guys who have very public lives,” Paul told Fortune. “But at the end of the day, the guys are not just basketball players. After a game, they put their regular clothes on, they go outside, and they’re just Black men.” 
 
Paul said the players were torn. Would playing take attention away from the bigger social equity issues? Roberts, a onetime public defender, advised the union on how to turn the NBA’s return to the court into a high-profile platform for social justice advocacy. And the union negotiated with Silver and the league to have certain approved messages—like “Vote” and “Say Their Names”—associated with the Black Lives Matter movement printed on the backs of players’ jerseys. 
 
In the end, the NBA was able to successfully navigate the bubble while embracing the societal moment. And according to all involved, it was constant, honest communication between the union leaders and Silver, and then between those leaders and their constituencies, that fostered an atmosphere of trust that made it work. That’s a lesson worth reinforcing for leaders of any organization.

NBA Rescuers

When COVID-19 slammed China in early 2020, private-sector tech companies played a pivotal role in cushioning the blow. And none was better positioned to help than Ping An Group, an insurance giant whose “technology plus finance” strategy reflects the vision of co-CEO Jessica Tan, an MIT alum and former McKinsey partner. As the pandemic surged, frightened patients shunned in-person medical care, but they turned in droves to Ping An Good Doctor, the company’s telehealth app. The company says Ping An’s spinoff free online consultation service received 1.11 billion visits at the peak of the pandemic, serving as a vital first line of defense. (Good Doctor itself generated more than $1 billion in revenue for the company in 2020, a 36% increase over the previous year.) 
 
Ping An’s HealthKonnect division was also one of the first companies to offer widespread COVID testing in China. And Tan’s digital strategy helped Chinese consumers in arenas outside of health care, as well: By the end of 2020, its smart-city arm had helped more than 150 municipalities in China digitize government services so that citizens could minimize in-person interactions.

Jessica Tan

In an interview in April, the Archbishop of Canterbury reflected on the past year. The U.K. has suffered a case of “national PTSD,” he remarked; it was quite natural that many who had lost loved ones were angry at God. 
 
It was a typically pragmatic response from Justin Welby, who has served as the spiritual leader of the Church of England and the worldwide Anglican Communion since 2013, and who has pushed the Church and society at large toward change on multiple fronts. In doing so, Welby has embodied a host of contradictions. A former oil executive, Welby is now outspoken on climate change and has encouraged the Church’s investment arm to push major emitters on their climate policies. Though he’s one of Britain’s most high-profile institutional leaders, Welby has hit out at the British government on welfare reform and the implementation of Brexit. And though he’s the head of a church whose roots date back over 1,400 years, he was a pioneer at the outset of the pandemic in encouraging services to be moved online. 
 
Welby’s hasn’t been an easy job. The Church of England has faced declining weekly attendance for years within the U.K. (although the majority of Anglicans are in the global South); it has been beset by a slew of damaging scandals, including allegations of racism within the Church and the trauma inflicted by generations of pedophile priests. Welby, too, has come under criticism for his outspokenness. But even for many outside his titular flock, he remains an inspirational figure. Alongside his modernizing push, it has been his own openness about mental health and grief—he lost a young daughter in 1983—that has particularly resonated in a year of loss.

Justin Welby

Stacey Abrams was not at all surprised when in November Joe Biden became the first Democratic presidential candidate to win Georgia since Bill Clinton in 1992. Nor did she bat an eye in January when two Democrats won runoffs in the state, securing party control of the Senate. These victories were no accident, but the result of the groundwork Abrams has laid for the past decade, going back to her time as Democratic minority leader in the Georgia state house. In 2018 Abrams became the first Black woman to ever win the gubernatorial nomination of a major party—in any state—and she created a template for other battleground states by increasing turnout among voters of color. Despite securing more votes than any Democrat in the state’s history at the time by doubling the youth vote and helping register some 800,000 residents, she lost to Brian Kemp, amid allegations that Kemp, then Georgia’s secretary of state, had suppressed the vote. It’s an issue Abrams has turned into a national conversation. She founded the nonpartisan nonprofit Fair Fight Action and the Democratic PAC Fair Fight to expand and protect voting rights, in part by funding and training “voter protection teams,” battling disinformation, and advocating for voting by mail. Now Abrams may very well be one of the most powerful politicians without a political office. Don’t expect that to last long. Abrams, who was floated as a possible Biden running mate and also happens to be a novelist, is widely expected to run for governor again in 2022.

Stacey Abrams

There are those who fill stomachs. There are those who feed souls. Pastor Reshorna Fitzpatrick has been doing both for years, helping to soothe a long-simmering hunger in her Chicago neighborhood with whatever sustenance she can provide. Three years ago, she helped start a community garden in a vacant lot near the North Lawndale church on the city’s West Side where she preaches every Sunday. “We were giving away all the produce to our community members,” she says, “and they’d say that they’d never tasted fresher collard greens or tomatoes.” 
 
But in many cases, she knew, her neighbors hadn’t tasted any greens or fresh produce in a while. “We have a food desert in our community—and in our city, really,” says Fitzpatrick, who counts just one supermarket nearby. And when COVID-19 hit, it got much worse, with long lines for whatever remained on the shelves and with many neighbors suddenly out of work and hungry. The pastor was approached by Urban Growers Collective, a Black-led nonprofit farmers’ group, which began to bring 300 boxes of produce to her church every week for Fitzpatrick, in turn, to give away. “So that started the whole trajectory for us,” she says, “where we kept asking, ‘What else can we do?’” 
 
What soon followed was “Soup for the Soul,” where Fitzpatrick and her flock would prepare hot meals every Monday for anyone who stopped by. “Two hundred meals and they’re gone in 45 minutes because people are coming out for it,” she marvels. A grant from the Bernard J. Tyson Impact Fund is helping her turn eight more vacant lots into gardens, as well as build a “community commercial kitchen,” where residents can take classes to become food service managers. “So you can come in, learn to cook, and get a business started,” Fitzpatrick explains. 
 
Her church shares an address with the historic Stone Temple Missionary Baptist Church, where Martin Luther King Jr. would sometimes come to preach and where today’s pastor is Reshorna Fitzpatrick’s husband, Bishop Derrick M. Fitzpatrick. Across the boulevard is the house where she lived for the first six years of her life. The elementary school she attended is still there, too. “So this whole community, I kind of think, belongs to me,” she says. “I’m responsible for making sure that we are adequately taking care of it—that there’s equity, social and economic justice, and everything else we need.”

Reshorna Fitzpatrick

Poonawalla, head of the Serum Institute of India (SII), the world’s largest vaccine manufacturer, has been tasked with no less than bringing an end to the global pandemic. The SII has pledged to deliver up to 2 billion vaccine doses in the coming years to COVAX, a global initiative to provide vaccine to lower- and middle-income countries—and it has already provided more doses to that initiative than any other vaccine maker. The SII is producing two vaccines. The first, Covishield, is one of only a few vaccines approved by the World Health Organization and is based on the COVID vaccine AstraZeneca developed. SII’s other vaccine, called Covavax, is being produced in partnership with American firm Novavax, and may provide a 1.1 billion–dose boon to global vaccine stocks starting later this year once it clears clinical trials. 
 
Poonawalla has hit some speed bumps in following through with his company’s global promises. A deadly surge in COVID-19 infections in India this spring forced Poonawalla to refocus distribution efforts at home. But in April, the CEO secured a $400 million investment from India’s government that he says will help the company produce an additional 30 million to 40 million Covishield doses per month and help India address its COVID-19 crisis. Poonawalla says that SII will resume exports once that happens, and countries around the world have reason to take him at his word: Before India’s current crisis Poonawalla demonstrated an unmatched commitment to global vaccine equity, providing low-cost vaccines to fight diseases like influenza, measles, and tetanus.

Adar Poonawalla

The charismatic singer-songwriter, country music legend, and actor is also a nearly lifelong philanthropist: Over the past four-plus decades, through her Dollywood Foundation and other charitable giving, she’s supported childhood literacy, college scholarships, wildlife preservation, and wildfire recovery in her home state of Tennessee. Parton has also helped fund local hospitals—and it was through that giving that she became a leader in the COVID fight. 
 
In April 2020, she donated $1 million to Vanderbilt University Medical Center, which steered her funds toward the development of the Moderna vaccine. Parton then shared a video of herself on social media receiving a jab, earning praise from health care leaders and her adoring fan base—including those in rural communities where public health authorities had been struggling to make headway against vaccine hesitancy and misinformation. This wasn’t your typical inoculation—Dolly also sang the chorus of her 1974 hit “Jolene,” modified with a coronavirus twist. 
 
Vaccine, vaccine, vaccine, vaccine, I’m begging of you please don’t hesitate, 
Vaccine, vaccine, vaccine, vaccine, ’cause once you’re dead then that’s a bit too late.

Dolly Parton

In March, when the American Petroleum Institute announced its support for a tax on carbon dioxide emissions, reactions ranged from outright disbelief to profound suspicion. The API is the oil and gas industry’s top lobbying group, representing tiny wildcat drillers, giant multinationals like Chevron and Exxon, and everything in between, and it has long been famous for vehement (and effective) opposition to regulations aimed at curbing climate change. But under Sommers, a former financial lobbyist and chief of staff to House Speaker John Boehner who took the reins in 2018, the API has changed course, recognizing that a hardline stance has become a liability for the industry as more investors and consumers (as well as governments) demand action to preserve the planet. Now the API is backing market-based solutions like carbon taxes and uniform, industrywide standards for reporting emissions—with the aim of giving its members a predictable set of rules to operate under as they undergo a long-term green transition. 
 
The API is also throwing its weight behind <a href="https://fortune.com/longform/big-oil-companies-carbon-capture-climate-change/">carbon capture and storage</a> (CCS), a promising but nascent technology that aims to trap CO2 at its emission sources and sequester it. It’s a transitional technology that would enable polluters to shrink their atmospheric carbon footprint as they gradually wean themselves from fossil fuels. Many oil giants are pursuing CCS, but none has gone farther than Occidental. Under Vicki Hollub’s leadership, Oxy has won federal subsidies for the technology, and is now building air-capture plants that Hollub says will help the company be a “net-zero” emitter by 2040.

Mike Sommers and Vicki Hollub

Anthony Tan and Hooi Ling Tan faced a worst-case scenario in early 2020, when the pandemic ripped through Southeast Asia. The crisis obliterated demand for the ride-hailing services of Grab, the Singapore-based superapp they founded in 2012 that serves 25 million monthly users across eight countries. The co-founders, who met at Harvard Business School (they aren’t related to each other), had to make some tough decisions: They slashed senior management pay by 20% and laid off roughly 5% of employees. But they also took steps to ensure the cuts didn’t go any deeper. They transitioned more than 237,000 ride-hailing drivers to delivery drivers in 2020, while expanding grocery delivery service GrabMart to its eight markets in three months. They also built GrabCare, a temporary on-demand service to transport medical professionals, in less than 72 hours. All told, Grab’s adjusted net revenue rose 60% in COVID-riddled 2020. The agility Grab demonstrated is no doubt one reason its upcoming SPAC merger with Altimeter Growth Corp. values the company at $40 billion, the largest black-check deal to date. Grab says it partnered with Altimeter, in part, because the firm displayed a commitment to Grab’s mission of economic empowerment; it promised to donate 10% of the shares it will receive as sponsor of the deal to Grab's driver and merchant endowment fund.

Anthony Tan and Hooi Ling Tan

“We are only safe if we are all safe,” says Dr. Seth Berkley, an American epidemiologist who has spent the past decade leading Gavi, the Vaccine Alliance—a brilliantly run collaborative effort that has saved millions of children from dying of preventable diseases. From 2000 through 2019, Gavi and its partners ensured that more than 822 million children received routine immunizations against age-old diseases such as diphtheria, rotavirus, meningitis, measles, and more. In late 2019, when Ebola re-emerged in the Democratic Republic of the Congo, it was GAVI that assured there would be enough doses of a novel vaccine to protect those at risk. That was only because Berkley and his team had helped create a market for the vaccine years in advance, ensuring that 300,000 doses of the experimental inoculation were available in the event of further outbreaks. (Now that there is a licensed product, it is being stockpiled for future use.) 
 
And now, as COVID-19 continues its global assault—finding especially vulnerable quarry in some of the poorest places on earth—it is once again Gavi that is working tirelessly to contain it. At the helm since 2011 has been Berkley, who is also the world’s most visible and eloquent champion for the COVAX Facility, an effort led jointly by Gavi, the Coalition for Epidemic Preparedness Innovations (CEPI), Unicef, and the World Health Organization, to bring vaccines against the SARS-CoV-2 virus to every corner of the planet, not just the wealthy ones. As of mid-May, the COVAX partnership had already delivered 59 million vaccines to more than 120 countries, and it has raised nearly $7 billion so far to secure some 2 billion doses. 
 
So, you might ask if Berkley is happy with the progress? The answer, as he told the audience at Fortune’s Brainstorm Health conference in late April, is absolutely not. “With just 0.2% of those in low-income countries receiving doses, we’re nowhere near to equitably covering even the most high-risk individuals,” he said. “Despite short-term supply issues, there are enough vaccines to begin to go around. It’s just they’re not going around.” As powerful as humanitarian instincts can be as a call to action, though, Berkley has been at this long enough to understand that an often-stronger motivation—particularly for the government officials who can open the coffers—is economic. So the epidemiologist knows when to put on his business hat too. “The International Monetary Fund has estimated the pandemic will cost the global economy $28 trillion in lost output by 2025,” he says. “Think of what that figure will be if it’s prolonged.”

Dr. Seth Berkley

During her residency, Hegde, a urogynecologist, witnessed too many horrors delivering babies at a government hospital in Mumbai. Worse, they were preventable: Time after time, she’d seen an infant or its mother, or both, die in childbirth, tragedies that could have been avoided with basic prenatal care or more timely dispatching of hospital resources. That’s what led her in 2008 to found <a href="https://armman.org/about-us/">Armman, an organization</a> focused on bettering outcomes through the use of low-cost technology—like targeting pregnant women and new mothers with information through their cellphones. 
 
Hegde met plenty of skeptics—it took five years to get external funding—but today, her nonprofit, which partners with the Indian government and dozens of NGOs in 17 states across the country, represents one of the largest mobile health programs in the world and a lifeline for women in India: Armman has reached more than 24 million of them and trained more than 170,000 local health workers. The model has proved powerful beyond prenatal care, too: When COVID struck, Armman’s network and virtual training platform made it a vital tool in educating women and health workers about the virus and vaccine. The organization also made a quick pivot and launched a virtual clinic to provide antenatal and pediatric care as hospitals converted to COVID centers.

Dr. Aparna Hegde

When Cedar Rapids, Iowa, was hit by a devastating, 100 mph–plus windstorm last August, Willie Ray Fairley lost electricity like everyone else in the city. But Fairley, the proprietor of Willie Ray’s Q Shack, had a refrigerator full of ribs, and within hours, amidst all the debris and downed trees, he was out grilling and serving them to his neighbors. In the following days, he loaded up his truck and started doing the same for people all over the city, delivering his free barbecue to the hardest-hit apartment complexes and neighborhoods. Even after power to the city had finally been fully restored, he didn’t stop: For another four weeks, as the city went about its slow, painful recovery, Fairley—who had felt powerless the last time Cedar Rapids experienced a major disaster, a flood in 2008—fed people for free. “I wanted to do something,” he says. “And I was in a position to help.” Fairley, who grew up in Mississippi, pitched in again and took his barbecue on the road when winter weather caused power outages that crippled much of Texas this February. 
 
Fairley’s generosity may have cut into his profits, but it has endeared him to a community where he’s now a celebrated household name. (A billboard in Cedar Rapids encourages citizens to “Be a Willie,” and he’s been recognized by Discover, the credit card company, and actor Will Smith, among others.) In Iowa, in a year defined by the pandemic, disaster, and bitter political division, Fairley, who was recognized by Gov. Kim Reynolds in her annual January address, was the rare hero who transcended all that.

Willie Ray Fairley

Nury Turkel’s mother gave birth to him in a reeducation camp during China’s Cultural Revolution—an experience that gave him an early education in systematic oppression. Since the U.S. granted him asylum in 1998, Turkel has made a name for himself as a prominent human rights leader. His work centers on the treatment of the Uighurs and other ethnic minorities in his birthplace: Xinjiang, China. He works as the chairman of the board for the Uyghur Human Rights Project (UHRP) in Washington, D.C., and House Speaker Nancy Pelosi appointed him last year as a commissioner on the United States Commission on International Religious Freedom. He has pushed Congress to ban imports of cotton, textiles, and other goods from Xinjiang until China ends what rights activists say is sweeping internment, forced labor, and cultural genocide of the indigenous population. Beijing has repeatedly denied allegations of forced labor and other human rights abuses in Xinjiang, decrying them as baseless, and authorities and state media have dismissed Turkel and the UHRP as puppets of American China-haters. But Turkel continues to make a potent case, calling on American companies, in particular, to reorganize their supply chains and cut ties with the region. "U.S. companies must step up," he wrote in a recent New York Times op-ed. “Moving beyond due diligence is the only right thing to do.”

Nury Turkel

Bingham, a longtime venture capitalist focused on biotech and health care startups, was considered a controversial choice to head the U.K.’s Vaccine Taskforce, the group charged with ensuring Britain obtained a sufficient supply of COVID-19 vaccines. Critics said her appointment was evidence of cronyism: By her own admission she knew nothing about vaccines; her husband is a minister in Prime Minister Boris Johnson’s government; and she is related to Johnson’s sister by marriage. 
 
But in the end, Bingham’s VC experience proved invaluable: From an initial list of 240 possible candidates, she assembled a “portfolio” of seven vaccines that used four different underlying technologies. The U.K. government spent money to help fund development of these seven and committed to buying hundreds of millions of doses, knowing full well that not all of them might be successful. Bingham was also comfortable making big bets on new technologies with only partial data. It was an approach few government bureaucrats would dare even imagine. It wasn’t cheap: In the end, the U.K. government spent nearly $8.6 billion to help procure doses. But it worked: While many European countries struggled to obtain enough vaccine supplies, the U.K. quickly emerged as a leader in vaccinating its population (with more than 60% of its adult population having received at least one dose by early May). That success is largely down to Bingham’s leadership.

Kate Bingham

In just two years, MacKenzie Scott has transformed charitable giving. With her fortune soaring as the Amazon stock she held on to after her divorce from Amazon founder Jeff Bezos rose throughout the pandemic, Scott gave away almost $6 billion with record speed. Her gifts come with a signature style: They’re often the largest single donation an organization has ever received; with few, if any, strings attached; and targeted in batches to a few sectors like food banks and historically Black colleges and universities. With billions left to distribute—Scott, unlike her ex-husband, has signed the Giving Pledge, promising to donate the majority of her fortune over her lifetime—the philanthropist may yet change billionaire philanthropy forever.

MacKenzie Scott

Suarez is the face of Miami, a city that captured more hearts, minds, and especially bodies than just about any other in the U.S. recently. The Republican politician is the Magic City’s chief marketer, and he brings a magic touch of his own to the job. As the pandemic chased folks out of cities like San Francisco and New York, Suarez welcomed the greener-pasture-seekers with open arms, touting lower taxes, more affordable real estate, and a more business-friendly climate, both literally and metaphorically. He embraced his ambassadorial role with the vigor of a tech CEO or startup founder, a cohort he has actively—and often successfully—wooed over from Silicon Valley. His policy proposals, while sometimes fanciful, have gotten lots of attention; he has pushed to build Miami into a cryptocurrency haven and even invited Elon Musk to explore building a Boring Company tunnel under the city to alleviate traffic. Assuming Suarez wins reelection in November, he is also slated to lead the U.S. Conference of Mayors next year.

Francis X. Suarez

In 2014, Chinese diplomat Xie Zhenhua and U.S. then–Secretary of State John Kerry conducted marathon talks that resulted in their countries—then, as now, the world’s two biggest greenhouse gas polluters—mutually committing to reducing carbon emissions. That pact paved the way for most of the world’s other nations to embrace similar goals in the Paris Agreement the following year. So green-energy activists celebrated this February when China reinstated Xie as its chief climate envoy: With Kerry holding a similar role in President Biden’s administration, it looked as if one of the most productive relationships in diplomacy would be reignited. 
 
Xie, six years Kerry’s junior at age 71, has been anything but inactive since Paris. Behind the scenes, he’s been a leader in the effort to develop strategies and economic models to enable China to meet its goal of carbon neutrality as a nation by 2060. And during the Trump presidency, when the U.S. government largely disengaged from climate negotiations, Xie worked with officials in green-leaning states like California and New York to collaborate and share ideas on clean energy projects and other climate-friendly innovations—keeping the dialogue alive even when the broader geopolitical atmosphere was hostile.

Xie Zhenhua

It’s not just about the unprecedented seventh Super Bowl title this February, or that he proved he could win one without his old coach Bill Belichick and the New England Patriots. It’s more about the mentality, determination, and leadership that Brady brought to the Tampa Bay Buccaneers organization upon his arrival last season, guiding them out of NFL purgatory and to their first championship in 18 years. Teammates spoke of his transformative impact in the locker room and the belief he instilled in them through both his words and example. They witnessed firsthand how, even at age 43, few in the game work harder. And other key offensive players were galvanized by nightly group texts from their quarterback in the week leading up to the Big Game against Kansas City that insisted “We will win.” It’s that kind of leadership that has managed to make Brady’s extraordinary accomplishments look routine after a remarkable two decades at the top of his sport. Love him or hate him—just don’t take him for granted.

Tom Brady

A pediatric surgeon in the Philadelphia suburbs, Ala Stanford spent the early days of the pandemic trying to provide COVID-19 tests to the area’s communities of color. Although Black and Latinx residents were suffering disproportionately, “the majority of the testing sites were in affluent white neighborhoods,” she recalls. “There was no testing in the communities where people were dying the most. So we created it.” With a rented van and PPE from her office, Stanford set up shop in church parking lots and started swabbing noses. That mobile operation soon turned into the nonprofit Black Doctors COVID-19 Consortium, which has drawn national attention for Stanford’s tireless efforts to treat Philadelphia’s most vulnerable and most underserved populations—and to improve the nation’s still lagging vaccine equity. This year, as Philadelphia and its home state struggled to equitably distribute its vaccine supply, Stanford’s organization held walk-up vaccination clinics in locations convenient for the city’s Black residents, who account for 44% of the population. By restricting vaccines to people who lived in specific zip codes, the consortium circumvented some of the equity problems (and vaccine-rollout red tape) plaguing Fortune 500 pharmacy chains like Rite Aid, which saw white suburbanites driving into Philadelphia to (legally) take the majority of its available vaccines. By early May, Stanford’s group had vaccinated more than 46,000 Philadelphians—more than 80% of whom are people of color—and drew praise from the Biden administration’s top health officials. “She is a perfect example of how a community member can stand up and lead during a time of crisis,” Surgeon General Vivek Murthy said during an April virtual event with Stanford, before telling her: “It’s extraordinary what you’ve been able to do.”

Dr. Ala Stanford

A well-respected researcher and one of the most prominent Black women working in artificial intelligence, Gebru has tirelessly sounded the alarm about how A.I. bias can perpetuate inequality. Last year, her warnings seemed to become inconvenient truths for her employer, Google. In December, after Gebru questioned the company’s commitment to diversity and was asked to withdraw a research paper she had coauthored about the risks of “large language models,” or A.I. trained on huge amounts of text, Google forced her out. Her departure galvanized protests from thousands of A.I. professionals, including many of her former Google colleagues, some of whom quit in solidarity. Others cited Gebru’s experience (and Google’s subsequent firing of Margaret Mitchell, another senior A.I. ethicist) as fuel for unionization efforts. Despite online harassment, Gebru has continued to speak out—amplifying a long-simmering reckoning over Big Tech companies’ lack of racial and gender diversity, and their blindness to potential biases in the enormously powerful technology they create.

Timnit Gebru

Over the four years of Donald Trump’s presidency, some GOP politicians became alarmingly comfortable expressing support for white supremacists (and vice versa). Nonetheless, Trump won a greater share of the Black and Latinx vote in 2020 than he did in 2016. Tim Scott, the GOP’s lone Black senator, helps explain why: He’s an avid and effective spokesperson for the small-government, self-reliance-driven conservatism that has helped the Republican Party make inroads among some voters of color. 
 
Since Joe Biden’s election, Scott, a former financial adviser and the owner of an insurance agency, has been a voice for compromise and for smaller “commonsense” stimulus efforts that minimize the role of government spending in fostering the recovery. Rebutting Biden’s address to Congress in April, Scott pointed out that pre-COVID, the nation’s lowest-income workers were finally seeing wages rise, without the kind of state intervention envisioned in the President’s policy goals. “The beauty of the American dream,” he said, “is that families get to define it for themselves.” Scott has also taken the lead in attempting to broker a compromise on the racially charged issue of police reform. Law enforcement experts view Scott’s Justice Act, which would fund wider use of body cameras and greater training for law officers on de-escalation of force, as a likely jumping-off point for any reform bill that could pass in a closely divided Congress.

Tim Scott

Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Corp (TSMC) lost one of its biggest customers last year when U.S. sanctions prevented the Taiwanese chipmaker from selling semiconductors to Chinese telecom manufacturer Huawei Technologies. But under CEO C.C. Wei’s leadership, TSMC shrugged off the loss. Its profits rose 50% in 2020, as the chipmaker scored new contracts from major clients, including a deal to manufacture Apple’s latest own-brand chips. (The record earnings earned Wei a nearly 30% pay bump in 2020.) With global industries now enduring a chip shortage, TSMC’s importance as the world’s largest contract chip manufacturer is more pronounced, and Wei—who has been CEO since 2018, after serving five years as co-CEO with now chairman Mark Liu—has committed the company to meeting the moment. To increase production capacity, Wei has upped TSMC’s capital expenditures to $100 billion over the next three years—averaging roughly double the amount the chipmaker spent in 2020.

C. C. Wei

In the midst of a national debate over raising the federal minimum wage to $15, Costco Wholesale CEO Craig Jelinek ratcheted up the pressure on his rivals in February by saying the bulk retailer would raise its own lowest hourly wage to $16. Jelinek told a Senate hearing that the move gives Costco “a significant competitive advantage” in the form of reduced employee turnover and a more motivated workforce. Throughout the COVID crisis, Jelinek’s company has stood out for its efforts to protect the welfare of its 185,000 U.S. employees: Earlier in the pandemic, Costco was the first major retailer to require customers to wear masks in its stores; most of its rivals waffled for several weeks before following suit.

Craig Jelinek

As society hurtles toward ecological collapse under the forces of greed and industrialization, it has been the youth of Gen Z who have dropped what they’re doing (and picked up a burden far heavier than older generations give them credit for) to lead the fight for the planet. Heading up the progressive movement for climate justice is the Sunrise Movement. Cofounders Sara Blazevic and Varshini Prakash—now training director and executive director, respectively—helped officially launch the group of youth activists (anyone that identifies as “young” is welcome; there is no age range) in 2017, and it is now one of the most effective coalitions fighting for climate action in the United States. 
 
Among Sunrise’s strategic insights is the way it has broadened its message: The movement “fights for the liberation of all people,” by recognizing that any oppression—based on race, sexuality, socioeconomics, geography, and more—amplifies the threat of climate change. Sunrise also draws activists from nearly 500 local hubs across the country—a decentralized structure that helps it stay nimble in engaging with local climate issues. 
 
By the 2020 campaign, the movement had momentum. Sunrise initially campaigned heavily for Democratic candidate Bernie Sanders, but Joe Biden actively courted it after emerging as the party’s frontrunner. Prakash was chosen by Biden to serve on the “unity task force” commissioned by both candidates to help assemble the party’s climate message. After the election, Sunrise leaders were also included in Biden’s transition. It’s not all sunshine and daisies, of course: The group (and Prakash individually) have publicly criticized some of Biden’s choices, from his support of politicians who have accepted fossil fuel donations to his shying away from supporting the Green New Deal. Still, Prakash and Blazevic, now in their mid- to late-twenties, have a seat at the table with legislators, lobbyists, and activists of all ages.

Sara Blazevic and Varshini Prakash

From the moment she came down with COVID-19 in early March 2020, Diana Berrent has been out front in America’s pandemic. Stricken with what was then an especially scary, stigmatized, and unknown disease, the Port Washington, N.Y., photographer went public with her case, penning a daily Coronavirus Diary for the New York Post in an effort to demystify and advance understanding of the disease. The same impulse led her, while still in isolation, to start Survivor Corps, a Facebook page that has since swelled into a community of more than 165,000 people who have experienced COVID. 
 
The organization, which Berrent started mainly to mobilize plasma donations, has morphed into something much broader. Part support group, part ready pool of research subjects, part nimble participant in pandemic response, Survivor Corps, which has partners across the health system, is now involved in activities as wide-ranging as connecting patients to critical antibody treatments, supporting clinical studies, and developing diagnostic standards for “long” COVID. Many companies have approached Berrent, looking to monetize the data of Survivor Corps’ members, an offer she always refuses. As she sees it, Survivor Corps is writing the playbook for a new collaborative era of “citizen science.” Key to it, she says, is transparency, equity, and empowering patients.

Diana Berrent

When Pat and Nancy Quinlan’s son Brian was being treated for leukemia at St. Jude Children’s Research Hospital in Memphis, there was one person whom they spoke about in reverent tones every evening—the man who was saving their son’s life, Dr. Ching-Hon Pui. Brian Quinlan was 4 years old when he began his grueling three-year treatment for acute lymphoblastic leukemia (also called acute lymphocytic leukemia, or ALL). Today he’s a healthy 21-year-old lifeguard in Florida. His parents, meanwhile, still offer thanks to the globally renowned oncologist, now 69, whose four-decade-plus medical career has improved outcomes for ALL patients perhaps more than any other clinician alive—and yet who remains as approachable to his pediatric patients as a birthday party magician. “You first meet this world-famous guy who seems so serious, so focused, so no-nonsense,” says Pat. “It can be pretty intimidating. Then he gets into an exam room with a 4-year-old child and is transformed: He’s making silly jokes, taking photos, and doing magic tricks.” 
 
Pui was born in Hong Kong, received his medical degree in Taiwan, and then immigrated to the U.S. at age 25. He has spent his entire career since then at St. Jude, perfecting the arduous and precise treatment that now cures more than 90% of children diagnosed with ALL. Just as importantly, he has shared that lifesaving knowledge robustly, publishing nine books and more than 1,000 medical papers, book chapters, and monographs. For the past quarter-century, he has also helped lead an international working group that is developing less expensive protocols for resource-limited countries and less toxic treatment for use everywhere. Pui has managed to get the same high cure rates at St. Jude even without using radiation therapy, for instance, which can damage young bodies. And he’s looking for alternatives to the most brutal of chemical agents, many of which can cause medical problems years after treatment. “We have to replace toxic chemotherapy with novel drugs,” Pui tells Fortune. “We want to reduce the suffering. When I see kids suffer, I suffer.”

Dr. Ching-Hon Pui

Malala Yousafzai has been an activist for girls’ and kids’ access to education since she was a young teenager. Now 23, her fight for the right to an education around the globe gained new resonance when millions of children lost access to learning as schools closed during the coronavirus pandemic. Her organization, Malala Fund, found that because of the COVID crisis, 20 million girls worldwide may be unable to ever return to the classroom. The pandemic arrived as the Pakistani activist was in her final year at Oxford, and she, like so many, finished up her education via videoconference. During an uncertain time for students, teachers, and parents, Yousafzai became a voice for the struggles of remote learning—and an advocate for girls around the world who can’t continue their education while schools remain closed. Malala Fund’s network of activists found creative solutions, like broadcasting lessons via radio in Nigeria for girls without access to the Internet and digitizing Pakistan’s national curriculum through an app for students unable to attend school.

Malala Yousafzai

Corporate America is facing a growing reckoning when it comes to its lack of diversity. One CEO aiming to fuel meaningful change is Adena Friedman, the president and CEO of Nasdaq. In December, Nasdaq proposed a new rule for its namesake stock exchange: Companies listed on the exchange would need to disclose their board diversity stats within a year of the rule’s approval. What’s more, most listed companies would be asked to have at least one woman and at least one individual who identifies as an underrepresented minority or LGBTQ+ on their boards—or else publicly explain why they do not. The SEC still has to approve the proposal, and it has already stirred up controversy on Wall Street. But Friedman’s Nasdaq would be the first major U.S. exchange with such a board diversity and transparency goal for its listed companies—another step in amping up the pressure on public companies to diversify their upper ranks.

Adena Friedman

Regan made history in March when his Senate confirmation made him the first Black man ever to lead the EPA. But he’s also joining the Biden administration on the heels of a noteworthy environmental winning streak. In his prior job as the head of the North Carolina Department of Environmental Quality, he scored two highly consequential settlement victories in 2020. One requires the chemical giant DuPont de Nemours to clean up contamination it caused over several years of releasing PFAS—substances linked to cancer and reproductive and developmental problems—into the Cape Fear River (<a href="https://fortune.com/longform/teflon-pollution-north-carolina">a toxic crisis Fortune wrote about in 2018</a>). The other settlement commits utility Duke Energy to cleaning up more than 80 million tons of highly toxic coal ash. 
 
Just as important as what Regan did in his home state is how he did it: In a state with a sharp partisan divide, he found allies on both sides of the aisle in working to counteract threats to the environment. He also has a track record of seeing business as a partner rather than a foe. One of Regan’s earlier professional stints, at the Environmental Defense Fund, involved placing MBA-student volunteers within companies to help them find energy savings. (He also helped expand the placement program, called the EDF Climate Corps, to public sector and nonprofit institutions, including historically Black colleges and universities, or HBCUs.)

Michael Regan

In May 2020, after women accounted for more than 11 million jobs lost in one month of pandemic-related shutdowns, Mason sounded the alarm about the looming (and, a year later, still ongoing) economic disaster for women. “We should go ahead and call this a ‘shecession,’” she told the New York Times, finding a viral catchphrase for what President Biden and Vice President Kamala Harris have since recognized as “a national emergency.” But Mason, the president and chief executive of the Institute for Women’s Policy Research, a think tank devoted to economic policies affecting women, has done more than just raise awareness of the emergency and its long-term effects. She is one of several policy experts and economists whose longtime advocacy for wage equity, paid leave, and greater caregiving infrastructure has helped shape Biden’s economic agenda, including the $1.9 trillion stimulus package that expanded childcare funding and tax credits. Now the IWPR is seeing more of its research and policy recommendations reflected in Biden’s proposed American Families Plan, a caregiving bill that Mason has called “a game changer.”

C. Nicole Mason

A carjacking conviction at age 16 landed Betts a nine-year prison sentence in Virginia. There, he encountered the anthology The Black Poets—someone slipped the book under the door of his cell while he was in solitary confinement. The experience of reading changed his life’s direction. Betts began writing poetry, and after his release he earned both an MFA and a law degree, becoming a published poet, a public defender, and an advocate for criminal-justice reform. 
 
Today Betts is also striving to give other incarcerated people the same opportunity he had for a transformative encounter with literature. In June 2020, in conjunction with the Mellon Foundation and Yale Law School (where he’s pursuing a Ph.D.), Betts launched the Million Book Project. The project aims to build “Freedom Libraries” inside 1,000 prisons and juvenile detention centers, each featuring a curated collection of 500 titles selected for their potential to help “open worlds and change lives.” To date, the project has shipped books to correctional facilities in 42 states. In a nation with some 1.8 million people behind bars, the project’s potential reach and the need for inspiration are equally vast.

Reginald Dwayne Betts

The former American Express CEO spent most of his 17-year tenure as one of the only Black chief executives in the Fortune 500. Now he’s asking the rest of corporate America to speak out against systemic racism—and persuading big companies to take political stands they’ve previously tried to avoid, especially around voting rights. After a reported personal outreach from Chenault, Delta CEO Ed Bastian reversed course and publicly condemned a new Georgia law that restricts voting access, and that opponents expect to particularly affect Black voters and other communities of color. Chenault and outgoing Merck CEO Ken Frazier, another one of the 21 Black people to ever run a Fortune 500 company, have teamed up to mobilize other Black business leaders—and much of corporate America—against similar proposed voting legislation across the country. Together, “the Kens” organized an open letter to “defend the right to vote and oppose any discriminatory legislation,” which was signed by about 700 companies and senior executives, including Amazon, BlackRock, Citigroup CEO Jane Fraser, and Warren Buffett. Meanwhile, Chenault is also pursuing racial equity through his day job as the chairman and managing director at General Catalyst. The venture capital firm is now planning a $300 million special purpose acquisition company (SPAC) to “invest in the next generation of Black entrepreneurship and leadership.”

Kenneth Chenault

U.S. soccer star Megan Rapinoe, a vital part of three women’s World Cup finalist teams (two of which won championships) and two Olympic squads, built on her long activism this year by being a forceful, prominent voice against a slew of state bills aiming to bar transgender youth from taking part in high school and college sports. Rapinoe also made headlines by continuing her advocacy for equal pay for women, reminding the public that the national women’s soccer team has won far more championships than the men’s, and that the women are paid less. (Antidiscrimination lawsuits by the women’s team continue to wind their way through the courts.) All the while, Rapinoe, who made waves a few years ago by taking a knee during a soccer game to protest police violence, has been an outspoken supporter of the Black Lives Matter movement.

Megan Rapinoe

On Jan. 6, 2021, rioters angered by the defeat of Donald Trump marched on the U.S. Capitol to demand that Congress overturn the presidential election results—then breached the building, overwhelming the outnumbered and underprepared Capitol Police. Five people died as a result of the ensuing melee, but the number might well have been higher if not for Eugene Goodman. 
 
Goodman, a Washington, D.C., native who led a U.S. Army squad in combat in Iraq, joined the Capitol Police in 2009. As the insurrectionists made their way through the building, Goodman found himself as the only officer standing between a large group of rioters and the Senate chamber, which hadn’t yet been evacuated. Goodman goaded the group into following him in the opposite direction, away from the chamber—averting what likely would have been a far more frenzied clash between the rioters and officers guarding the unarmed senators and their aides. Video of Goodman’s actions was viewed by millions, and he emerged as a symbol of sanity and public service at a moment when American democracy reached a near nadir. The Senate voted unanimously to award Goodman the Congressional Gold Medal; Goodman, who has largely sought to avoid public attention, said that he would “do the same thing again.”

Eugene Goodman

Like so many other small American cities that once flourished as hubs of industry, Laurel, Miss., had found itself in a long, rusting decline. By 2010, according to the U.S. Census Bureau, the population of some 18,500 had barely changed from a decade earlier, except that less of that population was working, with the local unemployment rate reaching nearly 11%. Just over a decade ago, 70% of the city’s homes were valued under $100,000. The once-booming lumber town in Mississippi’s Piney Woods was on nobody’s map of destination towns, it seems. Except for Ben and Erin Napier’s. 
 
Straight after graduating from Ole Miss in 2008, the pair decamped to a loft in the city’s tumbleweed-empty downtown, making camp with two other fearless couples. “It was just us and the feral cats,” Erin, who grew up in Laurel, told Southern Living magazine. For those who follow the Napiers on Home Town, their popular HGTV resettle-and-rehab show, now in production for its sixth season, what happened next is no surprise: They began to rebuild, one front porch at a time. But even more than that, they began to inject life into Laurel, luring in new settlers by promising to make each one feel instantly at home. The Napiers accomplish this recurring feat as much through narrative—carving or painting each homebuyer’s story into the smallest of design details—as they do with kitchen islands and flooring. “Both my parents are ministers, and storytelling and ministry go hand in hand,” says Ben, 37, an avid student of history. “But I think, for both of us, we don't see story necessarily as something that is written or spoken.” It can be as tangible as a piece of furniture, a wall hanging, or a quilt laid out on a bed—and the Napiers bring in a host of local artists and artisans to help tell those often-emotional tales. “Every person on earth has a history. And that’s what home is,” says Erin, 35, who is also a trained and gifted artist. “It doesn’t matter what the whole world thinks about your home; it matters that your home is the place that’s the most personal and the most welcoming place on earth to you.” 
 
Outside of their HGTV show, they have retold the tale of Laurel’s rebirth as if it were a chapter in the Bible—an upbeat parable that has found a ready audience on social media. And with 1 million followers on Instagram, Erin has given a big-city reach to her beloved hometown. “If no one tells the story of Laurel, then no one hears the story,” she tells Fortune. “And so, I’d started a daily journal, like a blog, about what it was like for us renovating a loft in downtown where no one lived; it was a ghost town. And then you tell the story of what you know to be true, the goodness of it, and then you make other people believe that it could be possible for them too, and then they want to be a part of it.” 
 
Today it’s clear that many people do. According to real estate site Zillow, home valuations in Laurel have been on a rocket ride for the past seven years. No surprise, then, that the Napiers (and their HGTV producers) have exported their model to a new small community, Wetumpka, Ala., where the couple are rejuvenating not merely homes but also the neighborhood tethers that connect and nourish them: restaurants, public spaces, even an entire downtown street. (That show, Home Town Takeover, debuted May 2.) HGTV says that it received applications from 2,600 American towns hoping to be considered for the Napier treatment. Is it any wonder?

Ben and Erin Napier

Being one of the few women in the room is tough enough, but when Fawzia Koofi enters peace talks with the Taliban, she’s not only vastly outnumbered by men, she’s also sitting across from the militant group that imprisoned her late husband and tried to kill her at least once. The Taliban targeted her convoy in 2010, and an unidentified gunman shot her in August 2020. (The Taliban denied responsibility for the second attack.) Koofi is unintimidated. The Afghan member of Parliament, who was first elected in 2005, has been at the table with Taliban representatives since September 2020, pushing for an end to the decades-long war between Afghanistan and the Taliban without compromising democratic institutions and Afghan women’s hard-fought rights. Koofi, who previously worked as an English teacher and for Unicef, has called the U.S.’s unconditional withdrawal from Afghanistan a “moral defeat” that could jeopardize negotiations with the Taliban. But she’s determined to press on because “we know that an inclusive Afghanistan is the only path to a lasting, just peace and end to the war.”

Fawzia Koofi

It’s rare that social media influencers encourage their followers not to spend money. But frugality and prudence are core to the brand for Nathália Rodrigues, a.k.a. Nath Finanças, a 22-year-old business administration student whose colorful, conversational video lessons on personal finance have earned her a cult following in Brazil, with a quarter-million YouTube subscribers and some 350,000 Instagram followers. Avid Nath fans can even download a browser plug-in that will interrupt them when they make an online purchase, activating a pop-up photo of Rodrigues with the words “ARE YOU SURE YOU NEED THIS?” superimposed in comic book capitals. 
 
Rodrigues launched her series in 2019, after what she has called a bad personal experience with ultrahigh-interest credit card debt. But her popularity soared after the pandemic began, when millions of lower-income Brazilians began receiving cash subsidies from the government and gaining access for the first time to digital bank accounts. Nath Finanças focuses on basics—how interest rates work, budgeting and juggling multiple bills, avoiding unnecessary fees. But for many of her followers, it’s the first detailed financial advice they’ve ever received. Among her missions: Keeping her audience from jumping rashly into meme stocks. “I say look, guys, let’s stop and think,” she recently told Americas Quarterly. “Are you still in debt? Yes? Then why are you getting into the stock market?”

Nathália Rodrigues

The Food Network celebrity chef and host of Diners, Drive-Ins and Dives is no stranger to philanthropy. When California struggled to contain wildfires in recent years, Fieri, who grew up in Northern California and launched his restaurant empire there, mobilized teams to prepare and serve meals to exhausted firefighters and first responders. And when the COVID-19 pandemic devastated the restaurant industry, Fieri raced to the aid of the kinds of mom-and-pop restaurants and workers he has long spotlighted on his signature show, partnering with the National Restaurant Association to create the <a class="waffle-rich-text-link" href="https://rerf.us/">Restaurant Employee Relief Fund</a> in March 2020. With the help of more than 50 companies and organizations and 15,000 individual donors, the fund raised $21.5 million, providing 43,000 restaurant workers nationwide—60% of whom are women and more than 50% of whom are minorities—with $500 grants.

Guy Fieri

Aurora James, a fashion designer and founder of the brand Brother Vellies, responded to last summer’s Black Lives Matter movement by taking a hard look at her industry: retail. Since then, she has persuaded major companies including Gap and Sephora to sign on to what she christened the 15 Percent Pledge. Those retailers promise to devote 15% of their billions in purchasing power to Black-owned brands, giving many of those brands unprecedented access to nationwide shelves. Meanwhile, her movement has continued to draw attention to retailers who haven’t signed the pledge—and highlighted where their own actions to support Black businesses have fallen short. Her continued pressure on the industry encourages many power players to translate words to hard cash—and means that last summer’s corporate promises won’t be forgotten. As of early May, about 20 brands had signed the pledge.

Aurora James

Too often, people who worked hard to get to college don’t end up getting through it. The reasons are myriad—financial, bureaucratic, logistical, and more—but the result is a tragic, all-too-familiar story of American inequality: Those most likely to be derailed are low-income and first-generation students, often from underrepresented communities of color. 
 
Confronted by Georgia State’s yawning achievement gaps—a little over a decade ago, graduation rates for African American and Hispanic students at the 50,000-plus-student school were barely above 20%—Renick, who is also a religious studies professor, turned to technology. Using big data and predictive analytics that Renick helped deploy, GSU preemptively targets students with financial aid and adviser interventions. With chatbots, it responds to student questions immediately and when they tend to come in (after midnight). The results have been staggering: Graduation rates at the school have increased 70% overall and are now equal across demographic groups. And for the past six years, GSU has graduated more Black students than any school in the U.S. The Boston Consulting Group found that GSU got a financial return on its investment, too (retaining students is good business). Renick, whose playbook has already been adopted by institutions in South Africa, New Zealand, and across the U.S., now leads an institute focused on sharing it more widely.

Timothy Renick

Early on in the pandemic, millions of people became armchair epidemiologists overnight, tirelessly (or sleeplessly) devouring nuanced, evolving information about the coronavirus and translating it for their online networks. Some of those sources, of course, were far more reliable than others: Many medical professionals, from infectious disease experts to <a href="https://twitter.com/DavidJuurlink">doctors in the field</a>, parlayed their knowledge into public service announcements for rapidly growing follower bases. Some have been particularly effective and accessible: Jessica Malaty Rivera, an infectious disease epidemiologist and the science communication lead for the <a href="https://covidtracking.com/">COVID Tracking Project</a>, regularly answers ask-me-anything Q&amp;As via <a href="https://www.instagram.com/jessicamalatyrivera/">her Instagram</a> stories, where she dispels common misconceptions (“Does the COVID vaccine elevate cholesterol?”) and empathetically shares how her young family is adapting. Malaty Rivera has appeared on national and local broadcast news, Instagram Lives with Sophia Bush and Sheryl Sandberg, and the cover of Parents magazine. Another reliable voice is Ellie Murray, a.k.a. <a href="https://twitter.com/EpiEllie">@EpiEllie</a>, who is known for animating simple illustrations in her educational videos. Throughout the past year-plus, the associate epidemiology professor at Boston University has outlined a <a href="https://twitter.com/epiellie/status/1264615815988613120?lang=en">#ContactBudget points system</a> that individuals can use to assess exposure risk. She helped create a safety tips flier for Black Lives Matter protesters, and even began selling merch (masks, mugs, totes, shirts), with sales benefiting the <a href="https://buepicovid.square.site/s/shop">COVID Corps</a> research and education team at BU. 
 
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Epidemiologists of Social Media

Reaching the top of the world’s tennis rankings and winning two Grand Slams in under six months would be a career year for any tennis player. But for 23-year-old Naomi Osaka, her powerful serve on the court may not have been as impactful as her voice off it. After visiting Minneapolis last summer to participate in protests against the killing of George Floyd, she withdrew from one tennis tournament in protest of systemic racism and police brutality. To the U.S. Open, she wore seven masks, a different one for each match—each emblazoned with names like George Floyd, Breonna Taylor, and Tamir Rice, to commemorate Black victims of police violence. She won every match en route to a championship. Osaka plans to return home to Japan this summer to lead her country’s Olympic delegation. Born to a Haitian father and a Japanese mother, Osaka gave up her U.S. citizenship in 2019 so that she could compete for her home country—where she has become a transformative figure in her own right. In December, influential manga comic book maker Nakayoshi released a new series starring Osaka—one of the only times a manga comic has featured a biracial protagonist. The series is called Unrivaled Naomi Tenkaichi. “Tenkaichi” translates, in English, to “the best in the world.”

Naomi Osaka

An award-winning journalist and the long-serving editor of the Gazeta Sporturilor, a leading Romanian sports publication, Tolontan has broken plenty of big stories. Twice, his paper’s investigations landed top-ranking ministers in jail. And yet none of that prepared him for the astonishing, nation-shaking revelations he and his team uncovered about Romania’s corrupt-to-the-core health system—as chronicled in the documentary Collective, which earned a couple of Oscar nominations this year. His team’s reporting focused not on why so many young people died in a devastating Bucharest nightclub fire in 2015, but on why so many of the victims died afterward while being treated in Romanian hospitals. Their discoveries were chilling and the starting point for criminal investigations, government reforms, and important if slow progress. 
 
Tolontan stresses that the investigation (like good journalism, generally) owes its success to a newsroom and the efforts of many. He says he’s tickled that the documentary featuring his team has been so widely embraced, including by people known to otherwise be on opposite sides, like former President Barack Obama and his onetime nemesis Edward Snowden—not to mention appreciation from journalists around the world who have been inspired. Since the documentary was released, Tolontan’s newsroom has exposed untrained “doctors” in Romania and continues to work away. As for being a sports paper? Tolontan says it’s an advantage: Its audience is less likely to approach stories with a political bias, and reporters learn early that they can’t please people.

Cătălin Tolontan

Masiyiwa’s entrepreneurship has had a major impact in Zimbabwe, his home nation, and on the African economy more generally. Econet, the telecommunications firm he launched in the 1990s, helped pioneer mobile loans and cashless payments on the continent, sparking a wave of adoption that has expanded economic well-being for millions of unbanked people in Africa—while also helping Masiyiwa become a billionaire. Now based in London, Masiyiwa is a board member at Unilever and Netflix, among other big Western companies—helping each do business in Africa with local development needs in mind. 
 
But his most urgent current role is as the African Union’s special envoy in charge of acquiring the materials to fight COVID-19. Masiyiwa spearheaded the creation of the African Medical Supply Platform (AMSP), an online marketplace designed to make it easier for the AU’s 55 member nations to order PPE, drugs for treating COVID patients, and above all, vaccines—consolidating their buying power to help them to compete with wealthier nations. While the effort is far from reaching its goals—Masiyiwa recently said that the continent had secured long-term commitments for a total of 700 million doses, for nations with a total population of well over a billion—his leadership and global business ties are leveling the playing field.

Strive Masiyiwa

No current technology promises to be more transformative than artificial intelligence. And arguably no company is pushing the boundaries of A.I. as far and as fast the one Hassabis leads: DeepMind. Owned by Google-parent Alphabet, DeepMind is more research skunkworks than business, best known for creating A.I. software able to beat the world’s top human players at the ancient strategy game Go. 
 
But the London-based company has also made a mark in matters of greater consequence. It has quietly contributed to a slew of improvements in Google’s ubiquitous products, from the voice generation behind Google’s digital assistant to the longer battery life enjoyed by Android phone customers around the world. Increasingly, though, what motivates Hassabis is using A.I. to answer fundamental scientific questions. This past year, DeepMind took a giant step in that direction when it used A.I. to conquer a 50-year-old biochemical challenge: successfully predicting the folded shape of a protein from its DNA sequence. It’s an achievement likely to help accelerate drug discovery for potential treatments for conditions ranging from diabetes to cancer, as well as boosting other life science research. 
 
Now the company is working on boundary-pushing advances in material science and astronomy. Hassabis, a former child chess prodigy with a doctorate in cognitive neuroscience, has been compared to the Manhattan Project’s Robert Oppenheimer for his ability to assemble and motivate scientific dream teams, marshaling them to achieve big breakthroughs years, if not decades, sooner than most thought possible.

Demis Hassabis

Navigating a pandemic is kind of like finding your way through a labyrinth—except that the fellow travelers attempting to reach the same destination may have very different ideas on which turn to take. In the effort to contain an outbreak of COVID’s scope, there’s a delicate balance between messaging, compassion, and sober analysis. And Ashish Jha has become a downright Ariadne of this maze. 
 
A respected physician and public health scholar, Jha is a familiar face on cable news channels seeking insight on all matters COVID. That’s for good reason. Jha has a way, both in his public commentary and social media presence, of breaking down complicated public health issues in accessible language. His lack of a government affiliation has also helped him appear more trustworthy to skeptically inclined viewers. His Twitter threads expertly blend data, charts, and human impact. Concluding one recent discussion of herd immunity, he wrote: “But this is all manageable. We’ll settle into a new equilibrium as we do with many viruses. And COVID won’t dominate our lives. And that’s what matters.’” Jha’s unrelenting effort to share hard facts, easy-to-understand analysis, and a healthy sprinkling of empathy without judgment is a standard worth aspiring to.

Ashish Jha

In truly unprecedented times, these leaders stepped up to make the world better, and inspired others to do the same.