Human Interest Katy Perry, Moms Fighting Fentanyl and More: PEOPLE's 2024 Women Changing the World (Exclusive) Every year, PEOPLE highlights women making a major difference — get to know this year's honorees and their groundbreaking work By People Staff Updated on February 29, 2024 12:56PM EST Close Photo: Shuran Huang 01 of 08 Katy Perry & Angela Lerche Rony Alwin She’s one of the best-selling musicians of all time, but Katy Perry has always dreamed of leaving a legacy beyond her No. 1 hits. In 2018 the pop star and American Idol judge, 39, launched the Firework Foundation — which hosts annual summer sleep-away camps and partners with the Boys & Girls Clubs of America year-round — with her older sister Angela Lerche, 41. “The arts gave me such a different perspective than the one I grew up in. It expanded my mind and gave me confidence,” says Perry. Growing up, their family struggled financially. “We relate to [these kids] so much,” says Lerche, who serves as president of the foundation. Five years ago, they welcomed the first group of middle schoolers to Camp Firework, where kids from underserved areas surrounding Los Angeles participate in songwriting sessions, shoe design workshops and choreography classes. Perry and Lerche encourage the kids to take what they’ve learned, including mental health tools like Transcendental Meditation, back into the real world. “We [want to] support these young people throughout their whole educational journey,” says Perry. “I’m so grateful for my gift as a musician, but if in a hundred years nobody knows Katy Perry or the song ‘Firework,’ but they know what the Firework Foundation is, then I’ll have fulfilled my purpose.” 02 of 08 Kali Reis Justin J Wee As Kali Reis was racking up wins in the boxing ring in her early 20s, the world champion heard of the Missing and Murdered Indigenous Women (MMIW) movement, a social campaign to bring awareness to the epidemic of violence faced by Native women. “I had a family member [go missing], so it hit close to home,” says Reis, who is of Cape Verdean and Seaconke Wampanoag ancestry. “But a lot of times, as humans, we’re like little kids: We need picture books. We don’t want to read the words.” So Reis, now 37, worked to paint a compelling picture of some stark truths: that Indigenous women are 10 times more likely to be murdered than women of other ethnicities and that more than four out of five have experienced violence. She began advocating for MMIW at conferences, on social media and even during fights, with special insignias stitched to her trunks. “It wasn’t like I set out to be an activist,” she says. “I just was using my voice with the platform I had.” In 2021 she saw that platform get larger with her film debut in Catch the Fair One, about a half-Native American, half-Cape Verdean boxer tracking her abducted younger sister. Her performance caught the eye of Jodie Foster, who suggested Reis for the role of Evangeline Navarro, an Alaskan state trooper of Iñupiaq heritage, on True Detective: Night Country; next she’ll play a Native woman in Wind River: Rising. “I keep getting these opportunities to voice the voiceless,” she says. “The stories that are going to be [shared], the faces that are going to be seen, the truths that are going to be told — I’m so excited for all of it.” 03 of 08 Deborah Szekely Monique Feil Two months shy of her 102nd birthday, wellness pioneer Deborah Szekely is redefining what it means to live long and prosper. “The morning I turned 100, I laid in bed and said, ‘Here’s this great gift. What am I supposed to be doing with it?’ And I couldn’t think of anything special, so I just got up and kept doing my job.” That job has been the one she’s practiced for more than eight decades: helping people understand that good health is within everyone’s reach. It started at home. Szekely’s mother was vice president of the New York Vegetarian Society and fed the family a diet of raw foods, years before terms like farm-to-table and organic were commonplace. “In school, nobody wanted to share my whole wheat bread and chopped nuts, so I felt myself a pariah — and then I decided I’d become a flag-waver,” Szekely says. She founded wellness resorts Golden Door and Rancho La Puerta — and she’s taken her healthy message wide ever since, championing for school lunch programs to serve more nutritious, plant-forward meals and working with Congress on initiatives to educate children on health and fitness. “Anyone can have a healthy routine,” says Szekely. “You don’t need the fancy equipment — only a little motivation to make yourself a priority every day.” Szekely still walks an hour every day, relishes a pescatarian diet and gives lectures on holistic living. “If you do all these things, you can be my age, still active and having fun. And I am having lots of fun.” 04 of 08 Helen Christoni & Emma Heming Willis Geoff Moore Emma Heming Willis first experienced brain fog after the birth of her youngest daughter, Evelyn, 9, in 2014. Her doctor dismissed it as “mommy brain.” Unconvinced, the entrepreneur and model, who also shares daughter Mabel, 11, with her husband, actor Bruce Willis, sought out a specialist. “I’d never heard the term ‘brain health’ before,” she says. The fog lifted thanks to “fistfuls” of daily supplements and healthy lifestyle tweaks, but she was stunned by how little brain health was considered in everyday life. “My doctor will talk to me about my breast health, my cholesterol, my heart, but not about my brain.” So in 2020, Heming Willis, 47, alongside business partner Helen Christoni, 53, cofounded Make Time, a wellness brand and movement to raise awareness of the importance of brain health, particularly for women. The cause has become deeply personal. Heming Willis and family revealed in Feb. 2023 that Bruce had been diagnosed with frontotemporal dementia (FTD). Christoni lost both her grandmother and mother-in-law to dementia and her daughter to mental health issues. “All families are affected by this,” says Christoni. “We found ourselves in this position, with this mission. Your purpose finds you.” “Making time,” Christoni points out, can be as simple as blocking out plans with a friend. As a caregiver herself, Heming Willis has learned the value of recharging, and the comfort in shared experience. (Part of the proceeds from Make Time’s line, including multivitamins and supplements, benefits Hilarity for Charity, a nonprofit dedicated to caring for families impacted by Alzheimer’s.) “I’ve been able to lean in on this new community I find myself in, so giving back to people who are on this journey as care partners has been super meaningful,” Heming Willis says. “Community is everything.” 05 of 08 Laney Crowell & Jordan-Risa Santos NEIL RASMUS/BFA.com When Laney Crowell, CEO and founder of the clean beauty brand Saie, was considering the next steps of the Every Body Campaign, an initiative she launched in Oct. 2022 to mobilize other brands to support reproductive justice, she thought of Jordan-Risa Santos. The two had been “internet friends” for years, and she was intrigued by Santos’s Seen Library, which hosts pop-up book events mostly in Los Angeles to help people connect and have meaningful conversations. While Every Body had been largely internet-based, Crowell, 42, was ready for a real-life component. “It felt like incredible synergy,” she says. “Education is a huge part of justice, and books are getting banned now.” Together, they created the Every Body Library, a collection of books about women’s rights and experiences, including some that have been removed from shelves by state legislatures. At their first pop-up in New York City in February, titles were wrapped in cream-colored paper, symbolically encouraging attendees not to judge a book by its cover. One hundred percent of the proceeds from book sales at the weeklong event benefited SisterSong, a national organization devoted to helping marginalized communities get access to healthcare, including contraception, sex education, prenatal care, domestic violence assistance and more. "These topics are stigmatized,” says Santos, 32. “We’re trying to support a deeper understanding.” Adds Crowell, “Human rights are being stripped [away]. When that happens, you end up with a lot of very passionate people who want to create change. We’re putting our stake in the ground.” 06 of 08 April Babcock & Virginia Krieger Shuran Huang When April Babcock and Virginia Krieger see how their advocacy group Lost Voices of Fentanyl has grown in the past three-and-a-half years, it shakes them. “We cry,” admits Krieger, 59, whose daughter, Tiffany Robertson, died after unintentionally ingesting fentanyl in 2015 at age 26. “When we grow, it means more loss, more suffering, more families and children going through this.” They also know their group’s 32,000 Facebook members represent only a fraction of the loss caused by fentanyl, which killed more than 112,000 people in the U.S. last year. “I’m on the phone with another mom or dad every day,” says Babcock, 51, whose son Austen died in 2019, at 25; she launched the nonprofit from his empty bedroom in their home in Maryland. “It’s nonstop.” The two mothers first connected on social media. “We were sisters in grief,” says Krieger, who lives in Ohio. They have joined forces to amplify other grieving families’ voices through rallies and to drive legislative change. Among the group’s priorities: harsher penalties for distribution in cases of death or injury; the creation of a federal requirement that the opioid antidote Narcan be as available as fire extinguishers; and the closing of a loophole that allows small international packages of fentanyl to bypass customs. “When we see the death toll continuing to go up, we start to feel powerless,” says Krieger. “But then we remember we’re doing it for the living. We can’t bring back our children, but we can prevent it from happening to somebody else. That keeps us moving.” 07 of 08 Marlee Matlin Josh Telles/August Watching Super Bowl LVIII on Feb. 11, Marlee Matlin felt disappointed, but it had nothing to do with the final score. Though Reba McEntire, Post Malone and Andra Day, the pre-show acts at Las Vegas’s Allegiant Stadium, were each accompanied by a live American Sign Language performer on the field, CBS didn’t show the ASL performers on television. Matlin, who is deaf, vented to her 400,000 followers on X and tagged CBS. “It’s important to acknowledge the lack of accessibility for the deaf and hard of hearing in that particular moment,” says the Oscar winner, 58, through her longtime interpreter, Jack Jason. It’s just the latest reminder that despite the work the CODA star has done for decades with organizations like the National Association of the Deaf (NAD), the Starkey Hearing Foundation and the American Civil Liberties Union, there’s much room for improvement. “Even something as simple as watching TV as a family requires access,” says the mother of four, who alongside NAD, successfully lobbied Congress to require streaming services to provide closed captioning for all programming in 2014. NAD’s goals include getting more ASL interpreters in senior facilities, providing resources for the parents of deaf babies and improving the well-being of deaf youth. Matlin quips it doesn’t require “rocket science” to make a difference, just more collaboration between deaf and hearing people. In that spirit, she will continue to “make noise for access,” as she puts it. “It’s just part of who I am.” 08 of 08 Angela Bassett John Russo Behind Angela Bassett’s many successes — including more than 100 credits in nearly four decades in the business and an honorary Oscar — are long days, tough choices and an unwillingness to accept reductive roles. With two college-bound teens at home and scant time off from shooting her hit series 9-1-1, “you have to know what to say no to as well as what to say yes to,” says Bassett, who often leaves her home before the sun rises and returns after dark. Some days, she says, “I feel a little guilt in that, but also I hope that what will come out of that is that [my kids] see a mama, a woman, a Black woman achieving her dreams, having success. They’ll see that hard work pays off. And they’ll be about that life for themselves.” Beyond the example she sets at home, Bassett has also been an advocate for heart health since her mother Betty, who had type 2 diabetes, died in 2014 from heart disease. Spreading the message of the link between diabetes and cardiovascular disease is important, Bassett adds, “because African Americans deal with a great deal of stress just going about day-to-day living. And it impacts us tremendously." John Russo For more of PEOPLE's Women Changing the World, pick up the March 11 issue, on newsstands Friday.