Time Magazine Girls of The Year 2025

A Scottish pupil who designed a solar-powered backpack with an electric blanket inside to help homeless people has been named on the first-ever Time magazine Girls of the Year list.

Rebecca Young | Time Magazine

Now 12, she has been named alongside nine other girls from around the world all recognised as being young leaders inspiring communities, as part of a list aimed at celebrating and empowering girls.

Rebecca Young, from Glasgow, was aged just 11 when she came up with the idea after becoming concerned about people sleeping on the streets during a freezing Scottish winter.

In the middle of winter, temperatures in the Scottish city of Glasgow can drop well below freezing, and for anybody unfortunate enough to be sleeping on the streets, such conditions can be deadly. That fact was on Rebecca Young’s mind when the schoolgirl was asked during a club at school to come up with an idea focused on helping people.

Young’s innovative 'lightbulb moment' - a solar-powered backpack with an electric blanket inside - ended up winning an engineering award in a U.K.-wide competition with 70,000 entrants. It wasn’t just a vague concept: Young researched different types of solar panels, wiring, and batteries, and drew up a detailed blueprint.

The engineering firm Thales, which sponsored the competition, subsequently manufactured 30 of the blankets which were distributed to a homeless shelter in Glasgow earlier this year. There are plans to make many, many more. No wonder her mother said: “I’m very proud.”

Young understands that the homelessness problem won’t be solved with blankets alone, but the experience was a first taste of how engineering can work, beneficially, in practice. “It helped me see a different aspect of engineering, and how it could actually help people,” she says. “That definitely helped inspire me.”

See more of Time magazine Girls of The Year.