Luanda Domi is the Founder and President of the Americans for Informed Democracy chapter at Hunter College. In that role, she has been a pioneer in developing new ways for young people to connect with the issue of sustainable development. She helped to set up a videoconference that connected girl scouts across America with global women leaders, hosted a three-day summit to expose youth leaders to human trafficking, and even organized a “Boot Camp” on how young people could take action to end malaria. The “Boot Camp” was so successful that participants even succeeded in telling Matt Lauer live on the TODAY show about how the public could take action to stop malaria by “sending a net and saving a life.” Domi was inspired to become a leader with AID based on her own experience as a refugee from Kosovo. As a Muslim of Albanian ethnicity, she and her family literally lived an Anne Frank existence during the ethnic cleansing in that nation. She was able to find a way out of that troubled area by becoming a high school foreign exchange student to the United States and continued on to Cottey College, a 2-year women's college, run by a women's philanthropic and educational organization, and then found her way to Hunter College.
- The Young Innovator in Smart Invested award will be presented by Darin Kingston, the founder of the AID Chapter at Brown University and a leader of the Young Professionals Network in New York City. Since graduating, Darin has worked at the Council on Foreign Relations and will soon be returning to school to pursue a master’s at the School for Public and International Affairs at Columbia University.
