Skip to footer

Tom Osborn, inventor of 'green' charcoal, proves you’re never too young to innovate

18-year-old Kenyan Tom Osborn founded GreenChar, which makes clean-burning smokeless cooking charcoal from agricultural waste.

|
Courtesy of GreenChar
Tom Osborn (far right) is the CEO and founder of GreenChar, which makes environmentally sustainable charcoal for cooking in Kenya.

[This article first appeared on TruthAtlas.com. TruthAtlas is an online news source featuring multimedia stories about people and ideas making the world a better place. Learn more at www.truthatlas.com.]

 Tom Osborn, CEO and Founder of GreenChar, was recently chosen as one of the 42 Echoing Green Fellows for 2014. Over 3,000 organizations from around the world applied for the fellowship. Tom is the youngest recipient to receive the fellowship in its 27-year history.

GreenChar is a Kenya-based social enterprise that creates charcoal briquettes and distributes clean cookstoves to various households and institutions. The charcoal briquettes are made from revitalized agricultural waste (as opposed to wood chips) and are smokeless, high energy, and long lasting.  

The cookstoves use the charcoal briquettes to optimize GreenChar’s clean household energy solution. By creating a charcoal that burns clean, GreenChar is capable of drastically reducing the number of people affected by lung-related illnesses. And by steering the developing world away from wood-based charcoal, they will simultaneously help to tackle deforestation.

“It’s our job to find innovative, clean household solutions and offer them to our target market. This fellowship will go a long way in helping us achieve this,” co-founder Ian Oluoch told Echoing Green. Through this fellowship, GreenChar hopes to expand its business throughout all of Kenya, and eventually all of Africa.

GreenChar also has high aspirations for the youth in Kenya, and hopes to empower youth around the globe to think critically about the needs of their communities. Osborn said too many people sit back and wait for the government or the NGOs to solve their problems, but GreenChar is proof that everyone can look for solutions.

“We want young people to know that their ideas and passions are valid, and that they can be agents of impact and change,” said GreenChar’s Yina Sun.

Echoing Green works to promote impact investing, social entrepreneurship, and innovation​. As a recipient of the fellowship, Osborn and his team will receive two years of funding totaling $80,000, foundational leadership and business development support, and a lifetime membership to a vast network of social entrepreneurs.

Alumni of the Echoing Green Fellowship have gone on to receive MacArthur Genius Awards, TED Fellowships, Goldman Prizes, and Skoll Awards. And 85% of these fellows remain in the social sector in key leadership positions.

To see a list of all the 2014 Echoing Green Fellows, visit www.echoinggreen.org/.

• Michelle Burwell is a Chicago-based journalist and fiction writer. She works as a copywriter for Joint Loyalty, a Chicago loyalty card start-up. She’s also a freelance journalist for 1776D.C.’s Challenge Cup, a global tour to find the most transformative start-ups. Michelle obtained a B.A. in journalism and political science from Miami University Ohio. When she’s not writing, Michelle enjoys traveling, thrifting, and live music. Learn more about Michelle here.

You've read  of  free articles. Subscribe to continue.
Real news can be honest, hopeful, credible, constructive.
What is the Monitor difference? Tackling the tough headlines – with humanity. Listening to sources – with respect. Seeing the story that others are missing by reporting what so often gets overlooked: the values that connect us. That’s Monitor reporting – news that changes how you see the world.
editor@csmonitor.com
Subscribe
Mark Sappenfield
Editor

Dear Reader,

About a year ago, I happened upon this statement about the Monitor in the Harvard Business Review – under the charming heading of “do things that don’t interest you”:

“Many things that end up” being meaningful, writes social scientist Joseph Grenny, “have come from conference workshops, articles, or online videos that began as a chore and ended with an insight. My work in Kenya, for example, was heavily influenced by a Christian Science Monitor article I had forced myself to read 10 years earlier. Sometimes, we call things ‘boring’ simply because they lie outside the box we are currently in.”

If you were to come up with a punchline to a joke about the Monitor, that would probably be it. We’re seen as being global, fair, insightful, and perhaps a bit too earnest. We’re the bran muffin of journalism.

But you know what? We change lives. And I’m going to argue that we change lives precisely because we force open that too-small box that most human beings think they live in.

The Monitor is a peculiar little publication that’s hard for the world to figure out. We’re run by a church, but we’re not only for church members and we’re not about converting people. We’re known as being fair even as the world becomes as polarized as at any time since the newspaper’s founding in 1908.

We have a mission beyond circulation, we want to bridge divides. We’re about kicking down the door of thought everywhere and saying, “You are bigger and more capable than you realize. And we can prove it.”

If you’re looking for bran muffin journalism, you can subscribe to the Monitor for $15. You’ll get the Monitor Weekly magazine, the Monitor Daily email, and unlimited access to CSMonitor.com.

Subscribe to insightful journalism

QR Code to Tom Osborn, inventor of 'green' charcoal, proves you’re never too young to innovate
Read this article in
https://www.csmonitor.com/World/Making-a-difference/Change-Agent/2014/0807/Tom-Osborn-inventor-of-green-charcoal-proves-you-re-never-too-young-to-innovate
QR Code to Subscription page
Start your subscription today
https://www.csmonitor.com/subscribe