Westly Prize

APPLY NOW FOR THE WESTLY PRIZE

We believe that small bets and a growth mindset lead to breakthrough innovations. Since 2012, we’ve awarded cash prizes to Westly Prize finalists once a year to early-stage, young social innovators in California with novel solutions to community challenges.

Click the “Apply Now” button above to become the next Westly Prize winner. Prizes totaling up to $145,000 will be awarded to winning changemakers and social innovators. Three top prizes of $40,000 in unrestricted funding will be given.

To apply to be a 2025 Westly Prize finalist, submit your application between Tuesday, September 3 – Wednesday, October 16, 2024 at 11:59 P.M. PST.

Innovations in any of the following categories are eligible for consideration:

Artificial Intelligence (AI)
Arts
Civic Engagement
Education
Energy
Environment
Food Production/Distribution
Health
Safety
Technology/Tech for Good
Transportation
Youth Development

NOTEWORTHY TIPS

Review the information listed in the “Criteria” and “Q&A” tabs on this website to determine your eligibility.
Include a YouTube video describing your innovation. The video can be entirely informal and does not need to be professionally produced. (For example, the video can be created from your couch using a phone.) We simply want to hear about your innovation and its impact in your own words.
Be available to present to a panel of judges on a Saturday, January 25, 2025.
Include a YouTube video describing your innovation. The video can be entirely informal and does not need to be professionally produced. (For example, the video can be created from your couch using a phone.) We simply want to hear about your innovation and its impact in your own words.
All finalists must agree to the Westly Prize showcasing their work in traditional and social media sources.

If you would like to nominate someone worthy of consideration for the Westly Prize, please click on the “Nominate Now” button to add your referral. We will personally reach out to invite them to apply to this year’s Westly Prize for Young Social Innovators.

NOMINATE

Meet Our Westly Prize Winners

Beamlink

Arpad Kovesdy & Mateo Abascal

Beamlink revolutionizes internet access worldwide at a 99% cost reduction with its lunchbox sized cell towers, impacting safety, education, healthcare, and equity outcomes in disaster zones and internet-deprived communities.

Beamlink

Birth By Us

Ijeoma Uche & Mercy Oladipo

Birth By Us, an innovative digital platform, bridges gaps in maternal health by addressing disparities faced by American Black women who are 3-4 times more likely than their white peers.

Birth By Us

Mida: 100+ Languages to Polished English

Jason Lin, Scott Hickmann, & Schwinn Saereesitthipitak

Mida: 100+ Languages to Polished English transforms the way non-native English speakers communicate utilizing a custom version of OpenAI Whisper for transcription and an ensemble of learning language models.

Mida: 100+ Languages to Polished English

Finalists

Esin Gumustekin: Brain Exercise Initiative (BEI) delivers a unique approach to Alzheimer’s care, rooted in proven cognitive stimulation methods, that is executed across 80 universities internationally.

Gabriel Reyes: FLi Sci addresses the accessibility gap for low-income high school students of color aspiring to enter science graduate programs through a high-touch, transformative two-year experience.

Madeline Hilliard & Madison Minear: Team Awareness Combating Overdose (TACO) Inc. was founded by former University of Southern California (USC) students during the pandemic as drug-related deaths plagued their campus, and now operates as a national nonprofit dedicated to eliminating accidental overdose deaths among college students.

Karly Hou: Wave Learning Festival addresses systemic inequities in education through their live, no-cost, interactive, peer-learning platform serving 20k+ students across 600 schools and organizations.

Saanvi Arora & Ayaan Moledina: Acknowledging the absence of youth decision-making power, the Youth Power Project is reshaping the landscape of public policy engagement by empowering young people to actively participate in local, state, and federal policymaking.

PAST WINNERS

2023 Westly Prize Winners

Noah Schecter & Miles McCain: Atlos When Russia’s invasion of Ukraine spawned a massive volume of eyewitness media and left journalists with outdated methods of preserving the vital historical records, Stanford University undergraduates, Noah Schechter and Miles McCain recognized the urgent need to create Atlos: an open-source platform dedicated to collaborative visual investigations. Atlos continues to serve as a database purpose-built for media verification, powering the open source journalism organization, Bellingcat’s Global Authentication Project.

Hannah Wilen & Neil Bhatia: Capd Period, Capd Period’s CapdCup is the first menstrual cup that can be emptied without removing it, serving as the only sustainable period solution for women who have minimal access to clean water. The innovation reinvents the future of period care with an affordable, more hygienic, and sustainable solution for the billions of women disproportionately affected by the water crisis worldwide. Traditional menstrual products can be costly, lead to an increased risk of infections, require reinsertion several times throughout the day, and generate more than 200,000 metric tons of waste annually.

Amelia Eichel & Shiloh Sacks: Wonderfil’s refill stations tackle plastic pollution by allowing consumers to dispense and refill their daily-use items at a discounted price, replacing single-use plastic items that would otherwise litter the ocean and landfill. The self-serve kiosks occupy little space, allowing them to transform previously unused space into new revenue that requires little maintenance. This sustainable solution preserves all of the benefits of plastic packaging while reducing labor costs, consumer costs, and the harmful effects of plastic waste.

Finalists

Mary Zhu, Develop for Good Develop for Good empowers the next generation of leaders in tech to commit their skills for social good, while accelerating the digital transformation of the nonprofit sector.

Joyce Lam, Kaimore Kaimore places vulnerable communities on the path to economic security through programs in financial literacy, career development, and entrepreneurship training through free, targeted professional development services.

Navy McKee, Kai Pono Solutions Kai Pono Solutions offers the only stormwater filtration device that streamlines data to pinpoint sources of pollution for each individual storm drain.

Austin Martin, Rhymes with Reason Rhymes with Reason is an education technology company enabling vocabulary acquisition, literacy skill development, and education equity for Gen-Z students through popular music and culture.

Chris Wang & Vikram Sreedhar, Shimmer Shimmer is changing the game in ADHD support with the first ever ‘bite-sized’ ADHD coaching platform that is 5-10X more affordable than alternatives.

2022 Westly Prize Winners

Sierra Fan & Natasha Allen – Illu Illu offers tangible solutions to thousands in rural communities internationally through their tech software startup working to illuminate operations and maintenance for decentralized renewable energy (DRE).

Lauren Yen & Laura Roed – Frontida Records When a fire decimated the medical records of 10,000 refugees in a camp in Lesbos, Greece where college students Lauren Yen and Laura Roed were studying, they became motivated to create scalable, custom digital health records that may be accessed by medical professionals online Frontida Records now operates in several countries.

Ariel Koran & Sofia Ondina-Aria – Respond Crisis Translation With a focus on the language-based violence which underpins the immigration system, Ariel and Sofia started Respond Crisis Translation, the country’s first rapid-response language collective of more than 2,500 trauma-informed translators and interpreters representing 108 languages.

Finalists

Aris Reyes – American Trans Resource Hub A resource hub providing transgendered individuals the comfort and stability they seek during their social, medical, or legal transition via resource, referral, and direct assistance.

Audrey Wisch & Alec Katz – Curious Cardinals A virtual platform designed for K-12 students to discover and pursue personal passions with the guidance of college mentors.

Abdulhamid Haidar – Darsel A digital platform supplementing K-12 instruction in developing and resource-constrained countries that is accessible via social media, WhatsApp, and SMS.

Ahmad Elhaija – International Collegiate Health Initiative A mobile clinic and telemedicine initiative expanding needed primary and preventative services for uninsured and underinsured populations.

Candice Delamarre & Armelle Coutant – Kit Switch A building component-kit that assists in converting vacant commercial buildings and other small dwellings into livable apartments, ultimately increasing housing stock faster and cheaper.

2021 Westly Prize Winners

James Kanoff & Aidan Reilly – Farmlink Project

Despite growing lines at local food banks, billions of pounds of food are being discarded. Birthed from a sheer desire to give back during the COVID-19 pandemic, James and Aidan have mobilized nearly 1,000 student volunteers and since delivered 24 million pounds of fresh produce to nearly 350 desperate communities nationally. This is food that otherwise would have ended up in the landfill.

Leslie Vasquez, Michael Piña, Khatia Osuna, and Yadira Hernandez-Figueroa – Central Valley Scholars
The Central Valley contains the least educated congressional district in the nation. Central Valley Scholars, a college mentoring and scholarship non-profit co-founded in 2019 by U.C. Berkeley University students Leslie Vasquez, Michael Piña, supports Central Valley students underrepresented in post-secondary education to realize their university goals through financial assistance, capacity-building, research opportunities and “themtorships”.

Nathan Mallipeddi – Stuttering Scholarship Alliance
Knowing first-hand the significant limitations a speech impairment has on a child’s development and mental health, Nathan Mallipeddi founded the Stuttering Scholarship Alliance. The cost of speech therapy and support services can be exorbitant. Stuttering Scholarship Alliance pays for speech therapy and connects children with more comprehensive community support.

Finalists

Michael Cesar & Rhys Richmond, Duet
Connecting donors, beneficiaries, and local stores in beneficiaries’ communities to change the way we donate by enabling fiercely personal and maximally impactful aid.

Devshi Mehrotra & Leslie Jones-Dove, JusticeText
Expediting the review of body camera footage, interrogations, and more to produce fairer criminal justice outcomes.

Anna Casalme, Novelly
Creating youth-driven spaces, online and in-person, for courageous civic-minded conversations.

Riese Wismer & Kristein Farr, Tyme for Survivors
Building the first survivor-focused reporting platform that redesigns the Title IX process for both survivors and universities.

Ton Hua & Belinda Mo, VivaTranslate
Expanding reach and communication between organizations and their non-English-speaking clients via user-friendly SMS texting.

2020 Westly Prize Winners

Bailey Farren & Noah Wu – Perimeter
Perimeter is developing a real-time disaster visualization platform to provide citizens and first responders with the situational awareness they need to make decisions during an emergency. Traditional incident response depends on paper maps or requires users to have substantial expertise in geographic information systems, and familiarity with complicated desktop software.

Connie Lui – Project Invent
Project Invent is a nonprofit that empowers high school students nationwide to invent technologies that make a difference. They train and support educators to run programs where students identify a real problem in their community and invent a human-centered, technology solution. Through inventing, students learn to be creative, resilient problem solvers who care.

Georgia Messinger & Ari Sokolov – Trill Project
Trill Project is an anonymous and safe social network that fosters tight-knit communities built upon support. Users choose a color to randomly generate their anonymous username, follow topics rather than people, chat with new friends, and gain easy access to professional, crisis resources during times of need. Moderators and machine learning algorithms protect user safety and privacy.

Honorable Mention

Ananya Sridhar – Neptune Project

The Neptune Project uses big data to pinpoint places at potential highest risk for lead contamination, helping bring safe water to all children effectively and efficiently, and provides at-risk communities with a simple and affordable “litmus” testing method.

Annie Lu & David Lu – H2Ok Innovations
H2Ok Innovations empowers communities with the cost-saving information for sustainable access to clean water through machine learning and IoT. Their platform is revolutionizing the water quality monitoring industry by capitalizing on citizen science, making micro-contaminant monitoring frictionless and easy.

Paige Balcom, Juliana Mora-Cabrera, Peter Okwoko – Takata Plastics
Takataka is locally transforming plastic waste in Uganda into quality, affordable construction materials and creating jobs and support for trauma victims in a healing workplace. Takataka is turning this waste into a resource to fuel the booming Ugandan construction market.

Tiphaine Boyer & Eric Boucher – Ovio
Ovio offers social impact organizations free and maintainable software development through code donations. With their innovation and the power of open source, they create meaningful and sustainable connections between a talented volunteers and organizations solving the most pressing problems in the world.

Vanessa Gill & Amy Wu – Social Cipher

Social Cipher Games enables players to engage in human experiences without fear of judgement or rejection; creates role-playing video games that give neurodiverse players a safe space to practice social situations; and promotes self-advocacy.

2019 Westly Prize Winners

Atif Javed, Aziz Alghaunaim – Tarjimly
Tarjimly improves the lives of refugees and efficiency of humanitarian services by eliminating language barriers. Tarjimly’s goal is to enhance the quality of communication to people in need, and ultimately improve the effectiveness of the entire humanitarian industry with software.

Dante Alvarado-Leon, Itzel Martinez – Latinas Engineering Leadership Program (LELP)
The Latinas Engineering Leadership Program (LELP) is empowering the next generation of Computer Science Latina Leaders across California. LELP is a 4-month virtual mentorship experience designed to inspire and prepare more Latinas to enter the tech industry and land their first technical internship.

Sam Gorman, Jerry Registre, Julie Chen, Sravya Alla – Peerlift
Peerlift connects high school students of all backgrounds to a proven selection of exceptional scholarship opportunities for college via a platform that enables donors to make micro-scholarships to students.

Honorable Mention

Annie Marggraff – Step Ahead
Step Ahead is a national community network of running teams for children with autism and their siblings. Step Ahead running teams are college campus-based and powered by college student-athletes.

Nihal Satyadev – Youth Movement Against Alzheimers
YMAA is a non-profit comprised of young individuals committed to changing the perception of Alzheimer’s Disease. Their members can be found in high schools and college campuses across the nation creating a grassroots movement to seek the cure. YMAA includes youth advocates, caregivers, and researchers.

Dayo Adewole, Michael Wong, Tiffany Wong – InstaHub
InstaHub focuses on the two major problems with lighting: its overuse and lack of accessible automation. By bridging the gap between environmentally-minded individuals and high-quality technology, InstaHub creates a greener future and saves you money.

Jean Guo – Konexio
Konexio advances socio-economic inclusion among the most vulnerable populations, notably refugees and migrants. Konexio is a certified training provider, offering high-quality digital training and access to a network of support to students, with the ultimate goal of placing them with corporate partners.

Soraya Fouladi – Jara, Inc.
Jara provides emergency education to impoverished and disaster-affected communities around the world through the Jara Unit, a personal handheld device that can be used anywhere, anytime, without requiring access to infrastructure.

2018 Westly Prize Winners

Kana Hammon –YCore
Kana catalyzes the next generation of social impact by equipping young professionals with the tools to impact their communities – for the rest of their lives. YCore harnesses millennials’ energy and desire to give back in order to help local nonprofit organizations.

Kevin Madrigal – Farming Hope
Kevin strengthens community and grows opportunity by providing homeless people with transitional jobs in gardening and cooking. Through pop-up dinners and catering, Farming Hope turns the soup kitchen on its head and empowers people out of homelessness.

Kartik Sawhney – NextBillion.org
Kartik, who has been blind since birth, built a mentorship program for students with disabilities interested in tech, connecting them to industry professionals, job opportunities, and resources. By bringing together talented and passionate students and young professionals with mentors and corporations, NextBillion empowers people with disabilities to reach their full potential.

Miranda Wang – BioCellection
Miranda has been dedicated to sustainability since high school and has developed an innovative thermochemical process that can turn the 92% of unrecyclable plastic waste that ends up in landfills into sustainable materials, such as clothing, car parts, and solvents, transforming our planet.

Honorable Mention

Ben Alemu – SENDforC
National network of student mentors designing high-impact educational service programs and entrepreneurial initiatives for underserved schools.

Jack Amend – Web Neutral Project
Novel and comprehensive certification that calculates, reduces, and neutralizes the carbon footprint of websites, which generate as much carbon emissions as the airline industry.

Berk Coker – Teach FX
Personalized professional development tool for teachers that uses machine learning to provide them with daily metrics about the dialogue happening in their classroom, improving teaching and learning in a whole new way.

Demetri Maxim – A Novel, Non-Invasive Device for Detecting Chronic Organ Rejection
Rapid, inexpensive, and non-invasive device that can detect chronic kidney transplant rejection in 20 minutes for less than $5, with only a few drops of blood.

Maya Sussman – Practica
Mobile platform that helps non-native English speakers improve their spoken English, expanding their employment opportunities in the United States.

Helen Zou – FreeWill
Free and intuitive online tools to help users make legal wills, aiming to raise $1 trillion for high-impact nonprofits by making giving through estate planning easier.

2016 Westly Prize Winners

Andrew Logan – A Novel Treatment for Hypoxic-Ischemic Encephalopathy
Combining his entrepreneurial drive, compassion, and technical skills as a University of California, San Francisco medical student, Andrew has teamed with doctors in India to develop a low-cost and effective device to save newborns in India and the developing world from a common and often fatal medical condition.

Anh-Thu Ho – Ladon Language Project
Leveraging her skills as a bilingual Vietnamese speaker, Anh-Thu joined with other UC Berkeley students to create a multi-lingual, crowd-sourced, on-demand, telephone translation service to aid non-English speakers in educational, healthcare, and other settings.

Emmanuel (Manny) Escamilla – CodeX
Manny, completing his studies at the Harvard Divinity School, gives back to the Central Valley community where he was raised. He founded CodeX, training middle school youth in Modesto to code, engaging their families, and connecting them with technology businesses that can open doors to a brighter future.

Mingming Jiang – Releaf
A Stanford-trained engineer experienced in design and psychology, Mingming has created an app enabling high school and college students to support their friends who are experiencing stress, using research-based techniques and one-way anonymity.

Roi Matalon – SLAM!
Roi used his love of music to create a network of passionate college student volunteers to teach after-school music programs in underserved middle and high schools in Los Angeles, filling the critical voids left by underfunded or nonexistent music programs.

Samuel (Sam) Sinyangwe – Campaign Zero
Sam believes in an America in which police don’t kill people, by limiting police interventions, improving community interactions, and ensuring accountability. He built a platform to provide information on comprehensive policy solutions to achieve this vision, and give people the tools to use this information to take action.

Honorable Mention

Hilary Braseth – Ozé, an initiative of Dare to Innovate
Mobile application that collects financial and social transaction data at the point of sale for African entrepreneurs, analyzing it to spot problems and solving them with targeted training and mentoring.

Marc Robert Wong – TeenTech SF
Teen-led community connecting teens with tech leaders through workshops on design thinking, coding, app creation, modeling, game design, networking, entrepreneurship, venture capital, and tech trends.

Michael Xia – Answer.ky
Artificial Intelligence-based grading system for teachers that reads human handwriting to automatically grade a wide variety of answers, including numbers, words, equations, and graphs.

Shannon Walker – EV Match
Crowd-sourced online platform for electric vehicle (EV) charging that allows individuals to rent out their private charging stations, helping communities share charging resources and support more EV use.

Tyler Van Herweg – Wakabi Boda Solutions
“Uber” of rural Uganda, connecting villagers with motorcycle riders using an automated toll-free number on a standard cellphone, improving access to medical services and markets.

Ugwem Eneyo – Solstice eBox
Hardware and software platform that uses data to help Nigerian homes solve energy challenges by collecting data on previously unknown energy usage patterns.

2015 Westly Prize Winners

Eli Erlick – Trans Student Educational Resources
Trans youth-led organization transforming the educational environment for transgender and gender nonconforming students through advocacy, empowerment, and policy change.

Khari Menelik – #IGottaMakeItAcademy
Online video lessons teaching inner city youth how to start a business and develop life skills.

Daquan Oliver – WeThrive
A mentoring program matching college students with low-income youth to teach life skills through entrepreneurship and develop leadership.

Kimberly Souza – Hand Hero
Innovative, low-cost hand splint that aids recovery for post-surgery burn patients with hand injuries in the developing world.

Honorable Mention

Lisa Curtis – Kuli Kuli
Nutrition bars and powders made from the superfood, moringa, to improve health in the US and support women farmers growing moringa in the developing world.

Ritankar Das – Dascena
Machine learning algorithms applied to save lives by predicting sepsis in hospital patients.

Amit Gandhi – Sensen
Portable, simple, and versatile data collection products using remote sensors to evaluate efficacy of international development innovations in the field.

Peter Gault – Quill
Free, open source, game-like online learning to help middle and high school students improve writing skills and logical reasoning.

Jacob Savage – Concrn
Cloud-based social service network connecting individuals suffering from homelessness, mental illness, and/or substance abuse with volunteer civilian responders.

Ben Simon – Imperfect Produce
Distribution and delivery of fresh but “ugly” produce to prevent food waste and make produce more affordable.

Rachel Sumekh – Swipe Out Hunger
Campus-based program combatting hunger by donating the value of unused meal plan “swipes” to food-insecure people in the community and building awareness of local homelessness.

Maya Varma – iBreathe
Ultra-low-cost smartphone-based pulmonary function analyzer that measures lung function and assists in the diagnosis of respiratory illnesses.

2014 Westly Prize Winners

Khalil Fuller – NBA Math Hoops
Fast-paced basketball board game and mobile app empowering students with fundamental math skills through direct engagement with real statistics of their favorite NBA and WNBA players.

Grechen Huebner, Kodable
Helping young children learn the building blocks of every programming language through a fun and intuitive game.

Lesley Marincola, Pay-As-You-Go Solar for Off-Grid Markets (Angaza Design)
Mobile technology removing the upfront price barrier of solar-powered lights for off-grid families in emerging markets like East Africa, enabling families to purchase clean, reliable solar energy in weekly, affordable increments.

Christine Su, PastureMap
Mobile app helping cattle farmers manage their pastures sustainably, monitoring grazing and grass growth to prevent overgrazing of land.

Honorable Mention

Varun Arora, OpenCurriculum
Web–based platform for K-12 teachers to find and remix curriculum from curated sets of Common Core teaching materials for their own classroom needs.

Shadi Barhoumi, CodeCamp
Summer camp empowering youth from low-income backgrounds with programming skills to jumpstart potential careers in technology.

Paul Duan, Bayes Impact
Fellowship program engaging top data scientists with nonprofit and civic organizations to help solve big social challenges.

Darren Hau, Dragonfly Systems
Technology to reduce the cost of large-scale solar plants.

Karan Jain, tinyGive (Acquired by Give Lively)
Enables anyone to donate to their favorite cause with simple social actions (e.g., via Twitter).

Joy Jin, New Visions of Tomorrow (NVoT)
Services to aid blind and visually impaired (VI) youth in becoming more independent.

Aaron Lander, PopUpsters
Enabling vendors to test their products, build a loyal customer base and avoid the upfront capital costs of starting a brick-and-mortar business.

Paola Santana, Matternet
Creating the world’s next generation transportation system using networks of small autonomous flying vehicles (aka drones).

Noor Siddiqui, Remedy
Software on Google Glass “Beam”, allows remote experts to see through the eyes of the physician and weigh in on a procedure, a treatment plan, or a diagnosis.

Charlie Stigler, Zaption (Acquired by Workday)
Intuitive web app enabling teachers to quickly add quizzes, discussions, and slides to existing videos from YouTube or Vimeo.

James Ward, Homeless to Higher Ed Foundation
Raising awareness about the barriers underprivileged youth face with regards to accessing higher education and providing them tools to complete their education.

Phil Weiner, UrbMat Guided Gardens
UrbMat guided gardens enable people in urban areas to grow their own food and flowers in small spaces.

2013 Westly Prize Winners

Oz Hasbun, Medical Interpreter Education Program
Revolutionizing volunteer medical interpreter services.

Akshay Madhani, MyHelpAlert
Mobile app for personal safety.

Kiran Sridhar, Waste No Food
Web-based “marketplace” matching surplus food with qualified charities working with the needy.

Jane Mitchell, Reset Foundation
Empowering incarcerated young adults to succeed professionally and personally.

Honorable Mention

Chase Adam, Watsi
Global crowdfunding platform for healthcare.

Grechen Huebner, Kodable
iPad game teaching the basics of programming to kids as young as 5.

Gary Kurek, Rollator Wheelchair Hybrid
Manual or power-assisted walker / wheelchair for disabled users.

Ajay Ramesh, Summit Tech Help
Student-driven, open-source website for peer-to-peer tech support.

David Rathmann-Bloch, 21st Century Chalkboard Project
Educational video games for students in Haiti.

2012 Westly Prize Winners

Eden Full, SunSaluter
An intuitive, gravity-powered device that helps solar panels follow the sun, while providing clean water.

Tatiana Grossman, Spread the Words: Global Literacy
Handheld, solar-powered digital projector that brings to life over 100,000 textbook pages and education videos for children in the developing world.

Kiah Williams, SIRUM
Online platform connecting the untapped surplus of drugs from health facilities and manufacturers with the needs of safety-net clinics.

Shilpa Yarlagadda, Club Academia
“Education of the students, by the students and for the students” through website composed of over two hundred video tutorials on a variety of courses.

Honorable Mention

Zak Kukoff, Autism Ambassadors
Peer-based curriculum empowering students with Autism to build friendships with other students.

Jessica Ladd, Callisto (formerly Sexual Health Innovations)
Technology to empower people to make informed sexual health decisions.

Beth Schmidt, Wishbone
Sends low-income high school students to after school and summer programs to pursue their passions.

Vineet Singal, Care Message (Formerly Anjna)
Mobile solutions that engage and educate underserved patients to lead healthier lives.

Megan Winkelman, Project Not Alone
Touch-screen health education modules to improve access to education about chronic diseases.

We welcome applications from young innovators from California who want to make the world a better place. We evaluate candidates on these criteria:

Quality of the Innovation

The community challenge is significant, and the innovator(s) has/have a working prototype of the solution that exhibits creativity, originality, and has been tested with some success.

Impact

Applicant has developed a new and compelling solution to a social challenge anywhere in the world, and has developed an innovation that shows potential to scale.

Capacity & Sustainability

Applicant demonstrates sufficient organizational infrastructure to move forward or the ability to build that capacity, and is committed to the ongoing sustainability and scaling of their innovative venture.

Leadership

Applicant is a leader and creative problem-solver with a willingness to try, fail, adapt, and persist.

Additional Guidelines

An individual founder or at least half of the founding team must be resident(s) of or live in California at the time of the application and throughout the selection process.
Out-of-state residents enrolled in a California school are eligible. California residents attending school in a different state are also eligible.
An individual founder must be under the age of 28 years during the calendar year in which they apply. If a team of co-founders applies, at least half of the founding team must be under age 28 in the year they apply.
A team of co-founders may not exceed four founding members in applying.
An innovation must be the idea of the applying individual or individuals listed as co-founders in the application.
An individual who leads the effort to build out the innovation, but did not come up with the innovation directly, is not eligible to apply.
Only one individual or one team may be nominated or apply for the same innovation.
Prize awards are unrestricted and will be paid in U.S. dollars to the successful individuals (which may affect the taxes of these individuals) or as a donation to a charitable organization of the winners choosing.
Prize awards are given in recognition of the social impact of the innovations.

I just turned 28 a couple of months ago. How flexible is the age limit?

No, an individual founder must be under the age of 28 years during the calendar year in which they apply. If a team of co-founders applies, at least half of the founding team must be under age 28 in the year they apply.

I live outside of California and am not from California, but we’re piloting our program in California. Am I eligible?

No. While we’d love to reward all the good work happening here, the Westly Prize is limited to California-based innovators, or Californians temporarily at school elsewhere. If you apply as co-founders, at least half the members of the team must be from or attend school in California.

I’m still in high school. Am I eligible?

Yes!

We work as a team. Can my whole team apply?

I have a fantastic idea for a non-profit or social business, and some solid plans in place. We’re going to pilot our first program by the end of the year. Am I eligible?

Only if you have already prototyped your idea with users/customers/clients and can convince us in your application that you have valid and feasible plans for implementation in the short term and scale in the intermediate term. This is not a business plan competition. Your application may be stronger after your pilot. You might want to apply next year.

Is it ok that I haven’t won any prizes before or participated in any other incubators or innovation programs?

Yes! Some of our prior winners have participated in these programs before or won other prizes, but we actually prefer to find and reward early-stage innovators.

I’ve already won lots of prizes for my innovation and have significant seed funding from angel investors or institutions. Am I eligible?

Yes, but if you are already well on your way to success and our Prize will not materially affect your trajectory, you may not be the best fit for the Westly Prize. Congratulations on what you’ve achieved!

It’s really hard to convey all the nuances of my innovation in a two-minute video. Can I submit a longer video?

Please do not do that. We believe the most effective innovators can tell their story clearly and concisely. Longer does not always mean better, and we want all our applicants to be judged by the same rules.

I’m not really experienced in shooting video, and I can’t afford to have someone produce a video for me. What do I do?

Don’t worry! We’re not looking for high production values. Grab a smartphone and a selfie stick, and tell us your authentic story from your couch.

Will the references listed in my application be contacted?

References of the potential finalists will be contacted in late November or early December.

(Updated 9/28/2021)