There's a wall in Montgomery, Alabama, massive, towering two stories high, covered in names. Thousands upon thousands of last names, each one representing families torn apart by slavery, lives reduced to property, humanity stolen.

When Jailen Level typed his surname into the database at the Legacy Museum, he didn't expect to find anything. Leavell isn't Smith or Johnson. It's not that common.Surely, his lineage wouldn't be there.

But it was.

"It took the breath out of me," Jailen recalls. "Like, what? Someone connected to me, one of my ancestors, is on this wall because they were once enslaved. It was like all of the puzzles, that final piece of the puzzle."

For Jailen and Daunte, two 2026 Ripples of Hope Fellows, the 2026 Lekgotla trip to Montgomery wasn't just a history lesson. It was a reckoning.

A Ripples of Hope Series

When two people meet at the right time in their lives, there's a particular kind of magic that happens, when one person's experience becomes a roadmap for another's journey, and when that exchange flows both ways. For Derrick and Thando, a mentor-mentee pair in the Ripples of Hope Fellowship, that magic began with a Boston sweater and a hunch that they had more in common than geography would suggest. 

We're thrilled to announce our partnership with Creative Visions on Students Rebuild: Unique & United. This exciting initiative invites young people (ages 5–25) to explore their identities and celebrate their differences.

Current Fellow Thando Mzmiela and his organization, uniMark (learn more below!), placed third at “The Pitch UCT” the University of Cape Town’s flagship entrepreneurship challenge!

This year’s event was particularly special, it marked the 10th anniversary of the competition, with higher stakes, greater expectations, and some of the brightest young minds shaping the future of innovation.

This past year, we were grateful to be a recipient of the Spark Peace Project grant from Students Rebuild and Creative Visions. The Spark Peace Project invites young people everywhere to use their power and creativity to engage with the world’s most pressing issues and build a more peaceful world. Each work of creative expression—or student engaged—triggers a $5 donation for organizations doing peacebuilding work around the world.

Introducing the 15 incredible fellows of class of 2026!