While studying at UCLA, then-aspiring filmmaker Louie Schwartzberg found nature to be his greatest teacher. Schwartzberg took those inspiring lessons to launch a 30-year career that intersects nature’s beauty with entertainment. His brand, Moving Art, uses time-lapse, high-speed and macro cinematography techniques to share nature’s greatest stories.

“Nature has taught me amazing lessons and insights about life by observing [its] rhythms and patterns,†Schwartzberg reveals. “I’ve been able to share that with people — that’s my gift and that’s my goal.â€

When Jeanne Pritzker fostered a friend’s child years ago, it opened her eyes to a major societal issue that is often swept under the rug. She founded Foster Care Counts as a way to make a difference in the lives of foster care families. Approximately 400,000 children are in the foster care system today, and many more families are needed to come forward to meet the demand. Pritzker believes there is a direct connection between negative environmental effects and those that end up homeless due to lack of quality foster care.

“Being homeless does create a negative impact on the environment,” Pritzker says. “We believe that if there were more foster families available to help raise foster children that the homelessness numbers would diminish and the effect on the environment would improve.”

From his days as a youngster surfing in California’s polluted Santa Monica Bay, Paul Polizzotto become interested in urban runoff issues, which segued into a desire to look at climate change and cities’ climate action plans. He knew he needed the help of all forms of media — television, radio and more — to help spread awareness on these topics and partnered with CBS to create EcoMedia. Now, EcoMedia is essentially a multimedia ad model that helps fund nonprofits that are taking on the most urgent social issues — the environment, human health and education — of our time.

“You can harness human energy,” Polizzotto says. “You can harness human communication — in this case advertising — in a way that fundamentally improves the quality of people’s lives.”