HOPE founder Nanette Medved-Po receives prestigious Asia Society Game Changer Award

Nanette Medved-Po, founder and chairwoman of HOPE and Plastic Credit Exchange (PCX), will be named this year’s Asia Society Game Changer Award Honoree. 

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The prestigious 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 was given to Medved-Po for impacting many through her initiatives that improve public school education, providing agriculture interventions for smallholder farmers, and creating environmental programs that address the problem of plastic waste and carbon sequestration. 

Previous honorees include His Highness the Aga Khan; Alibaba Founder Jack Ma; Nobel Peace Prize laureate Malala Yousafzai; Tennis champion and advocate Naomi Osaka; award-winning architect I.M. Pei; and world renowned cellist Yo-Yo Ma. 

For this year, the Asia Society Asia Game Changers Awards & Gala will take place on October 27 in person at Cipriani 25 Broadway in New York, and will honor a powerful group of climate change and sustainability leaders. Alongside Medved-Po are other awardees of this year’s program such as 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 might inspire others to be unafraid to try and be the change they want to see in the world.”, said Medved-Po.

Nanette launched HOPE in 2012 with a mission to demonstrate that businesses that invest in social good would be rewarded by the market. 

Their HOPE in a Bottle product commits 100% 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 which not only provides free high quality coconut seedlings and market access to farmers, but also builds 100% 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 rather 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 very first Plastic Pollution Reduction Standard which provides a framework for the implementation of a credible and verifiable plastic offsetting program. 

HOPE was the first certified BCorp in the Philippines and has consistently won “Best for the World” each year since its certification.