Christy Vogel’s organization, Sounding Joy, puts hearing aids on children whose families cannot afford them. Amanda Rice’s organization, The Chick Mission, pays for fertility preservation for young women who have just been told they have cancer and days to decide whether they can ever have children. Neither woman started with a gala or a board of directors. Each started with a problem she understood from the inside, and on Tuesday L’Oréal Paris named both to its 2026 Women of Worth class.
The program, now in its twenty-first year, selected ten founders with its nonprofit partner Points of Light. Each honoree receives a $25,000 grant, mentorship, and a national platform across the beauty company’s channels. The full class totals $250,000, and it brings the program’s roster to 210 women honored since the first class.
A beauty brand’s philanthropy program can be easy to wave off as marketing. Twenty-one consecutive classes is harder to wave off. Longevity is its own kind of evidence, and this year’s list rewards a close read, because the ten organizations map almost perfectly onto the places where American families fall through.
The class of 2026
The health honorees work at the sharp edges of the system. Alongside Rice and Vogel, Jordan Pine of Camp Hill, Pennsylvania founded Greenlight Operation, which combats human trafficking and provides restorative care for survivors, and Christie Brungardt of Hays, Kansas founded Jana’s Campaign, an education-based program working to prevent gender and relationship violence.
The education group is building doors where institutions left walls. Chanel Power’s Mentor Me Collective, in New York, creates pathways for first-generation technologists. Emily Cho’s Juvie for STEM, in Bergen County, New Jersey, brings serious STEM education to justice-involved young people. Maya Bird-Murphy’s Mobile Makers Chicago teaches design and architecture to underserved youth, one of the few organizations in the country treating architectural literacy as an equity issue.
The remaining three work on connection itself. Arielle Galinsky’s Legacy Project, in Canton, Massachusetts, pairs younger and older adults for multigenerational friendship and storytelling. Vy Le’s WhereWear, in Olympia, Washington, turns donated clothing into targeted deliveries for women’s shelters and unhoused people. Marisa Hamamoto’s Infinite Flow Dance, in Los Angeles, is a disability-led professional dance company built on the premise that the stage belongs to every kind of body.
“Women of Worth is the beating heart of our brand,” said Laura Branik, president of L’Oréal Paris USA, in the announcement. Actress Kristen Bell, debuting as the brand’s newest global ambassador, offered the plainest version of the pitch: the company, she said, hands women “the tools to go prove it to yourself.”
What $25,000 actually does
Twenty-five thousand dollars will not endow anything. What it does, at the scale these organizations run, is buy a year of the unglamorous inputs that larger funders rarely cover: insurance, a part-time coordinator, hearing aids at cost, a van’s worth of deliveries. The grant arrives with mentorship and national visibility attached, and for founders whose organizations run on personal credibility, the visibility often compounds longer than the cash.
The selection partner matters here too. Points of Light, the civic engagement organization that screens the class with L’Oréal, mobilizes over 3.8 million volunteers across 32 countries. Its role means the honorees were screened by people who run volunteer infrastructure for a living, not only by a brand team.
Somewhere in Olympia this week, donated clothes are being sorted by size and need, then routed to a shelter that asked for exactly those sizes. That is the program’s real product after twenty-one years: not a trophy, but logistics, repeated ten founders at a time.
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