Maddie Freeman

Maddie is a changemaker, a digital wellbeing advocate, and a Bachelor of Business Administration degree-holder from CU Boulder. Maddie’s endless passion and dedication to this cause is rooted in her own mental health journey, deeply intertwined with her immense loss of 10 friends to suicide in her Colorado community. Through grief, she was driven to prevent this from happening to the next generation; in 2020, she wrote a petition that garnered 13,000 signatures in two days, shifting the narrative around mental health care for teens at local school districts. She began consulting the LPS district and, at 19 years old, began ideating, designing, and piloting 5 innovative mental health initiatives in the span of a year. NoSo was one of the ideas, and it stuck; students were alerting us to how much it improved their wellbeing. This idea sprouted into a national initiative that would grow exponentially over the next 5 years. Maddie continues to be fueled by directly impacting thousands of students annually. Today, after many successes at pitch competitions, Maddie is recognized for founding NoSo as a Social Dilemma/LookUp Innovator grant winner, a Young Innovator in Behavioral Health awardee, and a Watson Institute & McGill MTD Centre Fellow. She was also recently honored on the Forbes 30 Under 30 list.