At the age of 15, Sydney Kamen ’19 launched a social impact startup that has transformed public health around the world. At Dartmouth, she crisscrossed the globe to amplify that impact.
PHOTOGRAPH BY UNIVERSAL IMAGES GROUP/GETTY IMAGES
PHOTOGRAPH OF SYDNEY BY BRUCE WELLER
When she was 12, Sydney Kamen ’19 landed in the hospital with a frightening prognosis. Doctors feared she might lose her sight, her hearing, even the ability to walk. She missed a full year of school. “My doctors’ compassion and life-saving knowledge have given me the opportunity to pursue my passions of global and public health.” Sydney has devoted every year of her life since to audacious humanitarian efforts. In high school she talked her way onto a college's spring break service trip to Thailand, which turned out to be an eye-opening introduction to the mortality rate of children. “More than 1.8 million children die every year from diarrhea, but this can be prevented,” she says, “and hand-washing with soap could cut infections of Ebola in half.” Unfortunately, Sydney found that soap was prohibitively expensive in many areas of the world.
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That revelation motivated her to create a social impact nonprofit called SOAP—So Others Are Protected. Sydney launched a pilot effort recycling bars of soap from local hotels and partnered with communities to train educators to spread the word about the impact of hand-washing. Under her leadership, 50,000 bars of soap have been distributed across Rwanda, Thailand, Uganda, Burma, India, and Kenya. As a Dartmouth student majoring in geography and sociology, Sydney continued her work with SOAP and expanded her efforts to other humanitarian causes in Israel, Rwanda, Tanzania, and Kosovo. She served as a War and Peace Fellow, a Global Health Fellow, a Great Issues Scholar, a campus Peace Corps ambassador, a leader at the Dartmouth Center for Social Impact, and the president of the International Development Forum at
the Dickey Center for International Understanding. Sydney also has been awarded both a prestigious Truman Fellowship and a Thomas R. Pickering Foreign Affairs Fellowship, which funds two years of her graduate study focused on humanitarian action, human security, and sub-Saharan Africa in exchange for a commitment of five years to the United States Foreign Service. She believes the experience will be a crucial stepping-stone for increasing her ability to effect change. “I am inspired by the courageous men and women who brave the fight for change, for the rights of the oppressed, for justice against all odds and obstacles—even at the risk of their own lives.”