Karlie Kloss, 25

Model, Founder, Kode With Klossy 30 Under 30 debut: 2018

“I didn’t go into this with the plan to build an education nonprofit,” says supermodel turned philanthropist karlie kloss, whose kode with klossy has taught over 500 girls the basics of computer programming. “I really went into all this out of my own curiosity of wanting to learn what the heck coding was, because it was building massive enterprise value for people in a short period of time.”

kode with klossy runs a summer camp that aims to fix the gender disparity in software engineering. It launched last year as a two-week program for young women (ages 13 to 18) in New York, Los Angeles and kloss’ hometown of St. Louis and soon expanded to nine more cities with plans to grow further. It also sponsored monthly scholarships for women at the Flatiron School, an adult-education company in manhattan where kloss took an intensive two-week coding class in 2014.

She enjoyed that experience—her favorite subjects in school had been math and science—but found coding’s male-dominated ranks disturbing. kloss figured her audience (she earned $9 million from June 2016 to June 2017 fronting brands like Swarovski and express) made her the perfect person to change that. “I realized, here I am with this platform and reach to young women across the country and around the world,” says kloss, a 36-time Vogue cover girl with 7 million followers on Instagram. “If I could just help a handful of girls, that would be really meaningful.” And, kloss says, she’s just getting started. “I plan on building a big business at some point, too.”

—Natalie Robehmed