Echoing Green, an organization that provides seed funding for social entreprenuers, recently announced its 2011 Fellows. The winners, and their projects, are:
Faty Tanriverdi and Majid El Jarroudi
Adive
Program Area: Economic Development
Location of Impact: Europe
Bold Idea: Transform the workforce of French corporations by connecting procurement officers with suppliers and entrepreneurs from underrepresented communities.
Organization: Every year, big companies spend billions of Euros in procurement, but discriminate against local entrepreneurs who do not have the right networks/reputation. Adive is bridging the gap by setting all entrepreneurs on an equal footing in the eyes of corporations through a unique platform that connects procurement officers’ needs and the potential of entrepreneurs in disadvantaged territories, which fosters an unprecedented shift of mind and reveals a new generation of first-class entrepreneurs.
Yusuf Randera-Rees
Awethu Project
Program Area: Entrepreneurship
Location of Impact: South Africa
Bold Idea: Inspire an entrepreneurship revolution in under-resourced communities across South Africa
Organization: We use a unique model to liberate the world-class entrepreneurial potential lying untapped in South Africa’s under-resourced communities. Our aspirations for our entrepreneurs are unprecedented among peer organisations, and our talent identification process is entirely innovative. In only eight months our story has captured South Africa's imagination to the extent that we believe we can inspire an entrepreneurship revolution in a country in which entrepreneurship rates are dangerously low.
Brenden Millstein and Raphael Rosen
Carbon Lighthouse
Program Area: Environment
Location of Impact: United States
Bold Idea: Take on global climate change, at a meaningful scale, by building a one-stop-shop for companies to eliminate their entire carbon footprint.
Organization: Carbon Lighthouse will enable consumers and corporations across the globe to profitably eliminate their carbon footprints. By combining four existing technologies – energy efficiency, demand response, renewable energy, and carbon allowances into a single financed package, Carbon Lighthouse eliminates the upfront costs, transaction costs, and redundant engineering/contracting currently preventing corporations from profitably eliminating their carbon footprint.
Javier Lozano
Clinicas del Azucar
Program Area: Health
Location of Impact: Mexico
Bold Idea: Establish a major chain of low-cost diabetes management clinics that provide accessible preventative and supportive care to the underserved 90 percent of Mexicans who need this care.
Organization: Diabetes in Mexico is called ‘the disease of the rich’. This is because current care alternatives are expensive, inconvenient and out of reach for 90% of the population. By developing innovative evidence-based algorithms for diagnosis and disease management, and by creating a chain of low-cost diabetes clinics, we will revolutionize the way diabetes care is delivered in developing countries and for the 14 million patients with diabetes in Mexico.
Ameca Reali and Adrienne Wheeler
Cooperative Advocacy for the People
Program Area: Civil and Human Rights
Location of Impact: United States
Bold idea: Bring together the recently incarcerated, defense attorneys, prisoner rights advocates, and plaintiff attorneys as a membership cooperative that addresses systemic criminal justice deficiencies in Louisiana, and develops strategies for accountability and reform.
Organization: Implementing a non-capital post-conviction project in New Orleans provides incarcerated individuals with the possibility of freedom, access to justice and the opportunity to make radical changes in a system with glaring deficiencies. Also creating a collaborative space where attorneys, legal workers, and advocates can participate collectively in planning and implementing strategies for accountability and reform.
Reid Saaris
Equal Opportunity Schools
Program Area: Education
Location of Impact: United States
Bold Idea: Narrow the achievement gap in U.S. schools by working with principals to find “missing” minority students and implementing a rigorous 12-month college prep curriculum, including AP and IB classes, in the most underserved communities.
Organization: EOS is an early-stage, education-reform non-profit that changes lives and narrows the achievement gap by collaborating with principals to address an inequity in our schools: under-enrollment in the best academic programs, especially by students who are Latino, African-American, or low-income. EOS identifies these missing students who we have shown can succeed at the highest academic levels within their schools – and works with schools to transition them into the best, college-bound classes.
Deborah Ahenkorah
The Golden Baobab Prize
Program Area: Education
Location of Impact: Africa
Bold Idea: Solve African illiteracy by inspiring a new generation of African authors to write children’s literature to which African youth can relate.
Organization: GBP is an award that inspires creation of African literature for young readers & annually calls for unpublished short stories & awards monetary prizes. Outstanding stories are connected with publishers in Africa & abroad. GBP produces stellar works to supplement educational curricula, open up new windows of thinking for youth, provide a voice for African people & encourage mutual cultural understanding. It also promotes workshops & training to further stimulate youth literature market in Africa.
Bonnie Oliva and Shivani Siroya
InVenture Fund
Program Area: Microfinance Institution
Location of Impact: Global
Bold Idea: Provide direct, crowd-sourced investment from individuals to the next frontier in microfinance—job- and wealth-creating micro-business owners caught in between a traditional micro-loan and bank finance.
Organization: We fill a significant gap in the microfinance sector by providing micro-business owners with the expansion capital and resources they need to grow their businesses, and we raise this capital through our online investment platform. As businesses grow, they become engines for job creation and economic growth in their communities. We help catalyze this long-term growth by requiring businesses to re-invest a small portion of their profits in their communities.
Amy Bach
Judicial Outcomes Center
Program Area: Criminal Justics
Location of Impact: United States
Bold Idea: Shine a spotlight on criminal justice and inspire change in the U.S. judicial system by creating a widely available ranking of local courts based on their effectiveness in crime reduction and recidivism prevention.
Organization: The Center will house a Justice Index that will rank local criminal courts on factors such as recidivism, crime reduction, and collateral consequences (e.g. whether people lose jobs or homes after contact with the system.) Most important, the Index will spot egregious conduct and lagging performance so citizens can demand improvement from legal professionals. As of now, no one knows how a court is operating, so there's no pressure for change. We will then offer services to those who rank low.
Mohamed Ali Niang and Salif Niang
Malo Traders
Program Area: Agriculture
Location of Impact: Mali
Bold Idea: Radically improve the health of Malians with the organized “micronutrient fortification” of locally-produced rice.
Organization: Malo Traders LLC is a cross-cultural social venture committed to combatting poverty and malnutrition by purchasing, storing, processing, and fortifying rice grown by small-scale farmers. Micronutrient food fortification is one of the most effective ways of addressing a range of problems facing the world and our model is socially responsible, socio-culturally appropriate, and financially viable. Our model is designed to not just tackle food insecurity but also nutritional insecurity.
Joel Jackson
Mobius Motors
Program Area: Transportation Technology
Location of Impact: Kenya
Bold Idea: Design and manufacture functional and low-cost vehicles for farmers and entrepreneurs—in Africa, for Africa.
Organization: Mobius designs, manufactures and sells highly functional, highly affordable vehicles for Africa. We empower entrepreneurial buyers with business advice and financing to use their Mobius cars as a platform for transport services to lower income end-users. The range of business-in-a-box services is vast from public transport, to mobile medical care, to consumer goods distribution. These endogenous businesses will create systemic change in the capacity and utility of Africa’s transport network.
Mark Hecker
Reach Education, Inc.
Program Area: Education
Location of Impact: United States
Bold Idea: “Flip the script” on traditional literacy programs by hiring and training struggling high-school students to tutor younger children, improving educational outcomes for both groups.
Organization: Using a three-pronged approach — training, tutoring, and compensation — Reach Incorporated provides struggling high school readers with the opportunity to improve their reading skills through teaching. Two days each week, our tutors prepare lesson plans. On two alternating days, they tutor 2nd and 3rd grade students. Tutors are paid a stipend for their participation, and they are able to address academic skill gaps – “ their own and their students” – in an affirming and empowering environment.
Ani Vallabhaneni and David Auerbach
Sanergy
Program Area: Sanitation
Location of Impact: Kenya
Bold Idea: Resolve the massive sanitation problems in the world’s slums, starting in Kenya, with an economically sustainable network of clean, containerized toilets that convert waste to electricity and fertilizer.
Organization: Sanergy promotes the fundamental human right to sanitation in the slums of Kenya by increasing access to and usage of hygienic sanitation facilities. We create an efficient, equitable, and sustainable sanitation cycle by building a dense network of small-scale sanitation centers across the slums, a low-cost containerized waste collection infrastructure, and converting this waste at our central processing facility into electricity, fertilizer, and other high-margin products.
Michael Carter
Strive for College
Program Area: Education
Location of Impact: United States
Bold Idea: Help low-income students break the cycle of poverty by getting into and attending a four-year college, using an affordable, scalable network of “near-peer” mentors—well-trained undergraduate students with similar backgrounds.
Organization: Strive’s vision is to build a movement of college students dedicated to creating opportunities for and maximizing the potential of high school students from low-income communities. Strive pairs high school students with trained undergraduates to provide one-on-one support through every step of the college application process. This innovative and cost-effective approach has proven to be both scalable and effective, helping low-income students break out of the cycle of poverty.
Rajesh Panjabi and Peter Luckow
Tiyatien Health
Program Area: Health
Location of Impact: Liberia
Bold Idea: Pioneer a comprehensive approach to reconstruct the rural health care system in war-torn Liberia with a new model for community health workers.
Organization: Founded by survivors of Liberia’s civil war, Tiyatien Health partners with the Liberian government to pioneer a model community health worker (CHW) system that is redefining how post-conflict nations rebuild rural public health services. Filling the massive health worker shortage in rural post-conflict areas, our CHWs form a novel locally-led primary care workforce that delivers comprehensive home-based medical and social services – providing access to care for the poorest of the poor.