January 5, 2016 | Read Time: 1 minute
Veronika Scott, 26
Founder and Chief Executive, The Empowerment Plan
Detroit
Veronika Scott was a 21-year-old art-school student when she got an assignment that would change her life: Identify a community problem and design a product to solve it.
For five months, Ms. Scott spent three evenings a week talking with homeless people at a shelter in a rough part of Detroit. Her big idea was a winter coat that turns into a sleeping bag.
In 2011, she started the Empowerment Plan, a nonprofit that employs homeless women to make the coats — more than 10,000 jackets so far. The design is always changing; there’s now a version in which the sleeping bag can be removed from the coat and carried as a bag.
Some of the alterations are based on feedback from the women who make the jackets. A recent redesign reduced the amount of time it takes to make the coat from roughly five and a half hours to an hour and 40 minutes.
“My team is badass,” says Ms. Scott. “They’re very skilled, they’re very driven and motivated, and they make a very good garment.”
