A Letter From Our CEO
Welcome To
World Merit.
Breanna Leuze · Chief Executive Officer
The World Is Held Together by People You've Never Heard Of.
Somewhere in the world right now, before the sun rises, a woman is lacing up worn shoes and walking forty minutes through the mud of her village. She is going to a small community center to teach adults to read. Men and women who were told, by systems that failed them, that the written word was a luxury they didn't deserve.
She will never make a headline. She has no stage, no title, no follower count.
She is holding the fabric of humanity together with her bare hands.
She is not alone. In Bujumbura, young leaders are launching entrepreneurship clubs in crumbling classrooms. In Karachi, a young filmmaker is helping her neighbors finally see the climate crisis unfolding in their own backyard. When Covid savaged our world, our youth leaders in under one month's time took action and were helped to distribute vaccines all through Africa, setting up distribution to vaccine clinics, organizing logistics, and executing in what is now known as the Covaxx Initiative. In Morocco, when the earth shook in 2023, it was our young members who mobilized by the hundreds to carry relief to their neighbors before the cameras even arrived. The floods in the Philippines resulted in mass pollution of their waterways, and our volunteers are on site clearing the thousands of tonnes of rubbish from the waterways.
These are the people the world overlooks while it applauds the ones who get the credit.
They are why World Merit exists. And if you've read this far, they might be you.
Who We Are
A Global Community of Young Changemakers.
World Merit is a global community of young adult changemakers, ages 16 to 35, taking on the world's hardest problems through the United Nations Sustainable Development Goals. Since 2013, we have grown from an audacious dream into a community with members leading local action in more than 150 countries, anchored by independent, youth-led Councils in over 30 nations.
Read those numbers again. Then remember what they actually mean.
They mean a teenager in a town no one visits who refuses to accept that her river stays polluted. They mean a young man who watched his school lose its funding and decided to build the classroom himself. They mean thousands of people who woke up one day carrying the same quiet, burning frustration you may be carrying right now, and who found each other here.
We believe something the world keeps forgetting: opportunity is not evenly distributed. It is handed to the well-connected while the truly deserving are left in the shadows. Talent is everywhere. Access is not.
World Merit was built to close that gap. Not with pity. Not with charity that looks down. With a ladder.
What “Merit” Really Means
We Are Taking It Back.
For too long, the word merit has been hijacked by elite institutions and dressed in the cold fabric of credentials. Degrees. Titles. Connections. Zip codes.
“True merit is not what you have achieved. It is what you refused to stop caring about, even when caring was hard.”
Real merit is the stubborn persistence of the heart. It is the courage to stay soft in a world that demands you harden. It is showing up on the mornings when no one is watching, for people no one else is fighting for. If that is who you are, you have already earned your place here. There is no application for character. There is no rejection letter for hope.
Our Story
A Canvas For Unity.
World Merit was not born of coincidence. It was forged by the shared brilliance and selfless dedication of our co-founders, Chris Arnold and Ron Boehm, who looked at a fractured world and saw a canvas for unity. Under their stewardship, World Merit didn't just grow. It became a lifeline. They didn't just build an organization. They built a global conscience.
Their founding belief still guides everything we do: young people are not just the architects of the future. They are the architects of the present.
For over a decade, that belief has empowered thousands of young leaders with the skills, networks, and opportunities to create lasting change. Today the vessel our founders built sails on, with Ron Boehm serving as Chairman of the Board and CEO Breanna Leuze at the helm, toward horizons they always knew we could reach.
How We Turn Caring Into Change
Where Caring Goes To Work.
Caring is where it starts. It is never where we let it end. World Merit exists to take the fierce energy of people who refuse to look away and give it somewhere to go:
- Local Councils and Chapters. Independent, youth-led action hubs in over 50 countries. Safe, collaborative spaces where changemakers find mentorship, training, and a family of people who understand exactly what it costs to keep caring.
- GAIA, the Global Action Impact Accelerator. Our flagship accelerator delivering world-class training, leadership coaching, and social enterprise mentorship to frontline changemakers, free of charge, so the best ideas rise on merit and not on money.
- Action University. World Merit's flexible learning platform: just-in-time courses in project management, promotion, fundraising, and leadership. We have worked with prestigious professors around the world to create the curriculum from scratch, with over 60 classes and another 60 to be developed over the next year.
- Merit Volunteer to Fellowship program. World Merit's newest program is creating a pathway for our volunteers to have an opportunity for internships, fellowships, and ultimately leading into employment.
Every project our members lead advances the Sustainable Development Goals. Every dollar entrusted to us is reported back with clear stories and data. Every changemaker stands at the center of everything we do.
The Question That Drives Us
“What happens when the people doing the most important work on Earth are finally given the help and recognition they deserve?”
We are not waiting for someone else's answer. We are living it, in real time, in more than 150 countries. The solutions the world has been praying for are already here. They are being built right now by people who don't need another rejection letter. They need a hand. They need a ladder. They need a map of what is possible.
And they need witnesses. People who see them. People like you.
You Belong Here
You Are The Main Story.
Maybe you found this page at 2 a.m., wondering if the work you do matters. Maybe you have spent years feeling invisible, screaming into a void, watching things you love disappear while the world looked the other way.
You are not a footnote in someone else's agenda. You are the main story.
Whatever brought you here, that ache in your chest, that refusal to stop caring, that stubborn hope you can't seem to kill, it belongs here. We have been waiting for you. Come build with us, stay with us, and watch what happens when millions of overlooked people stop waiting for permission to change the world.
This is your home now. Welcome to World Merit.
