Rea Izumi

Rea Izumi is a 16 year old student based in Tokyo, Japan, and her passions are in reducing inequalities and environmental conservation. 

When she was young, she happened to read an online article about ocean pollution. She was pretty shocked and sad about “one piece of plastic killing a sea turtle”. As a response to her frustration, she founded a student organization called Tierra which is aimed to solve the garbage issue in high school. However, through Tierra, she found that not only are most students not interested in environmental issues, but they also are not aware of the intersectionality of them with respect to larger social problems. 

To further scale her impact, she founded Fair Society, a project which advocates for equal opportunities for the people aged 13-17 to tackle environmental issues. Expanding from Japan, she sets up a two month-entrepreneurship program for the youth in Malaysia, Vietnam and the Philippines where they can encourage peer-to-peer knowledge, experience and know-how transfer; indeed support each other to develop the skills required for social entrepreneurship. Through FairSoiety, she aspires to provide the first step for  those who had lack of access to resources to start a small business/program responsibly which they want to truly solve. 

In the future, she seeks to major in environmental studies, focused on making a resource recycling system that does not harm the natural environment and other initiatives on circular economy.