Leila Janah, Founder and CEO, SamaSource

In 2008, Leila Janah created Samasource to address one of the root causes of poverty - no access to wage-earning work by the 4 billion people who live at the bottom of the pyramid. After working at the World Bank and seeing the flaws in large systems of aid to developing countries, Leila came up with a formula to link isolated women, youth and refugees to computer-based work needed by companies like Google and Linkedin. Samasource has provided jobs to close to 1,000 people who otherwise wouldn't have had access to work.

A more in-depth view into Leila's story and the founding of Samasource (worth the time) is here.

Dhruv Lakra, Founder and CEO, Mirakle Couriers

In 2009, Dhruv Lakra, received an Echoing Green Fellowship and created Mirakle Couriers in India. He applied his business sense (MBA from Oxford) with a social cause of employing people who are deaf to build a courier delivery service. Over the past two years, he has grown the business from one employee to a cadre of 64 deaf couriers and office workers who who make 40,000 shipments a month.

India, which expects to have half its population under age 29 by 2020, has a television feature on young changemakers. Watch here to learn more about Dhruv's business. Here's another video about this social enterprise.

Katy Payne, acoustic biologist

This month's feature is a bit different from the rest because Katy Payne has not started a new organization or business, and yet, I find her work so fascinating that I wanted to share it with you. Given all the chaos in the human world, it is comforting to remember there are more creatures out there. Katy Payne has spent several decades listening to whales and elephants. She is an acoustic biologist who is able to share with us amazing understandings about her discoveries that humpback whales compose ever-changing songs and elephants communicate across long distances by infrasound. We are treated to a window into those worlds in this interview she did with Krista Tippet. Her incites should also be a call to action to protect the habitats of these magnificent creatures.

Payne is the author of "Silent Thunder: In the Presence of Elephants" (1998) and "Elephants Calling" (1992), a children's book.