Episodes
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“If you want to get people behind the fight for climate change it has to be easy and simple to contribute.”
South Pole Group is a leading provider of global sustainability solutions and services. The company has delivered climate-proven solutions and policy advisory to a wide range of public, private and civil society organisations for over a decade. Areas of expertise cover key sustainability-related areas of corporate sustainability, investment climate risks, sustainable supply chains, green finance, as well as renewable energy and energy efficiency. A pioneer in emission reduction and renewable energy projects, the South Pole Group’s portfolio is at present the largest available on the market. South Pole’s impact include over 80 million tonnes of CO2 saved, over 500+ projects in renewables, forestry, agriculture, industry, households and public institutions, screening the climate footprint of over $1 trillion of investments and mobilising over $10 billion for clean energy investments in emerging markets as well as creating nearly 70,000 jobs in developing countries.
Renat Heuberger is a pioneer and social entrepreneur in the field of sustainability, climate change and renewable energies, where he has been engaged since 1999. As a founding partner and CEO of the South Pole Group, he coordinated the setup of the company's global sustainability solutions business. Before founding South Pole, Renat co-founded the myclimate foundation, one of the world's first players on the voluntary carbon markets. Renat has been elected "Social Entrepreneur of Switzerland" by the World Economic Forum's (WEF) Schwab Foundation, and he serves as a member of WEF’s Global Agenda Council on Climate Change. Renat is a board member of Climate-KIC, Europe's largest public-private innovation partnership focused on climate change, a board member of Climate Friendly Pty Ltd, Australia's leading voluntary carbon company, and of Perenia Pty Ltd. He is a member of the advisory board of HUB Zurich, a platform for social entrepreneurship and MyNewEnergy, a company launching the first-ever platform to compare power products in Switzerland.
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“I shouldn’t have been there in the capacity that I was.”
KickStart International is an award-winning, nonprofit social enterprise with a mission to lift millions of people out of poverty. They do this through their “MoneyMaker” human-powered irrigation pumps. These low-cost ($70 and $150) pumps are bought by small-scale farmers who use them to access wells or nearby water sources to irrigate their plots and grow crops year-round. As a result, farmers transform their farms into profitable businesses and this new income empowers families to properly feed and educate their children, afford healthcare and plan for their futures. MoneyMaker pumps are sold in local retail shops in 16 countries across sub-Saharan Africa. To date, more than 215,000 farming families have used MoneyMaker pumps and KickStart estimate that the pumps have lifted over 1,000,000 people out of poverty.
Jenna is KickStart International's Senior Partnership Officer. She has spent much of her career accelerating community-based organisations during their startup phase, helping to launch the Ford Family Program under the Kellogg Institute at Notre Dame and serving as director of groups in Uganda and Liberia. These roles entailed working closely with founding teams and local communities to identify needs and advantages, designing and executing programs, fundraising and communications strategies. Jenna is passionate about replacing traditional charity, with models that empower individuals to be the agents of their own change.
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“Violence against women is the most extreme expression of unequal gender power.”
Take Back the Tech! is a collaborative global campaign with a simple call: for everyone - especially women and girls - to take control of technology to end gender-based violence. Initiated in 2006 by the Association for Progressive Communications (APC), the campaign has been taken up, adapted and owned by individuals, collectives and organisations globally. In 2014, Take Back the Tech! was awarded the inaugural GEM-TECH award from UN Women and the International Telecommunications Union for Efforts to Reduce Threats Online and Building Women's Confidence and Security in the Use of ICTs. In both 2014 and 2008, Take Back the Tech! received an Honorary Mention for Digital Communities from the prestigious Prix Ars Electronica.
Jac sm Kee is a feminist activist and writer. She currently heads up the Women's Rights Programme for APC. Her areas of focus include internet governance and human rights, sexuality, women’s rights, and internet technologies and feminist movement building. Jac co-founded the Take Back the Tech! collaborative global campaign on technology-related violence against women, and KRYSS, an organisation working with young people on sexual rights in Malaysia. She is currently serving as a member of the Multistakeholder Advisory Group for the Internet Governance Forum, as well as board member for CREA and as co-director of the Centre for Independent Journalism in Malaysia.
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“We are in the middle of an economic, environmental and social crisis. And most of us don’t do anything to tackle that.”
PUR Projet is a collective organisation specialised in "Insetting via agroforestry". Insetting means offsetting the social and environmental footprint of a company within its own supply chains and sphere of influence. The forestry projects generate multiple benefits for local communities, while regenerating the ecosystems companies depend upon to make their supply chains and business sustainable. PUR Projet is a certified B Corporation with about 40 projects in around 40 countries. Since its inception PUR Projet has planted 7 million trees and has manages over 200 million trees under conservation.
Tristan is a serial social entrepreneur. He founded an NGO in Nepal for rural development in 1994 and in 1998, he founded Alter Eco, a now leading organic and fair trade company on the french market, which also sells to the US and Australian markets. In 2008, Tristan founded PUR Projet and in 2013, Tristan co-founded the International Platform for Insetting, gathering various companies engaged in the promotion, certification and blockchain registration of Insetting programs and projects. He has been appointed as one of the Time 100 Most Influential People in 2010 and as the “Social Entrepreneurs of the Year 2013" by the Schwab Foundation. Tristan is also a board member of the Chirac Foundation for Peace.
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“The real problem for countries emerging from conflict is the economic situation for young people.”
Mozaik Foundation was founded in 2002 and aims to contribute to the economic and social stability of Bosnia and Herzegovina (BiH). Mozaik is a leading social enterprise in the region and its mission is to create an army of young and enterprising people until 2023, who will create jobs and who will be role models for the 70% of young people who dream of leaving the country. Mozaik Foundation also support non-formal youth groups and organisations whose actions bring economic and social benefits. By opening two social businesses, EkoMozaik Ltd. and MaŠta Agency, Mozaik Foundation also showcase that you can run a successful business and still be responsible to society.
Zoran Puljic is the founding director of Mozaik Foundation and he emerged from the last decade with an innovative approach to community and economic development. He is the 2010 Schwab Foundation Social Entrepreneur and Zoran has served as a member and chairperson of numerous domestic and international boards, including the German Marshall Fund (Balkan Trust for Democracy), European Foundation Centre (Grantmakers East Forum), the Resource Alliance and others. He was also a Duke University Fellow in Civil Society, Harvard Business and Harvard Kennedy Fellow in Social Entrepreneurship and BoardSource Fellow in non-profit governance. Zoran holds an MBA and an MA certificate in Development and in addition to his mother tongue, he is fluent in English, German and Spanish.
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“Had I not played the piano, things might have been very different.”
Africa Check, founded in 2012, is the continent’s leading independent fact-checking organisation. Its mission is to promote accuracy in public debate and the media in key countries across Africa, as well as to foster a wider practice of fact-checking across the continent. It exists in the belief that people all over the world make decisions based on the best information available, and that misleading or false information makes for poor decisions. Africa Check currently operates offices in South Africa and Senegal and is soon to launch offices in Nigeria and Kenya. Its teams of researchers work from the Journalism Department of the University of the Witwatersrand, in Johannesburg, South Africa and the EJICOM journalism school in Dakar, Senegal. Besides publishing reports, Africa Check trains and mentors other media in fact-checking and runs the African Fact-Checking Awards.
Peter Cunliffe-Jones is the founder and executive director of Africa Check. He grew up in Liverpool, UK, before studying African history at Cambridge University between 1984-87. Peter then joined the Paris-based AFP news agency in 1990. Over the next two decades, he worked for AFP as a reporter. Peter were in Bosnia and Croatia during the Balkan wars, in Nigeria as bureau chief for four years over the end of military rule, and in Hong Kong, as chief editor for the Asia region running from New Zealand to Afghanistan. In 2010, his first book, “My Nigeria: Five decades of independence” was published. The following year Peter joined the non-profit AFP Foundation. He left AFP in March 2016, becoming a fellow of the Shuttleworth Foundation, and a visiting researcher at the University of Westminster. When not working, Peter divides his time between playing the piano and suffering alongside his 12-year old son as Liverpool miss out on the Premiership title year after year.
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“The official death toll is 10,000, however MSF estimates it to be 30,000-100,000.”
The Institute for Justice and Democracy in Haiti (IJDH) assists Haitians in enforcing human rights to escape poverty and vulnerability. IJDH, along with its local partner, Bureau des Avocats Internationaux (BAI), litigates cases in Haitian, U.S. and international courts. They train progressive Haitian lawyers, document human rights violations and works with grassroots activists in Haiti, North America and throughout the world. The BAI and IJDH have spearheaded several innovative, high-impact human rights cases, including the Raboteau Massacre case, tried in 2000 and hailed as one of the most important human rights prosecutions in the Americas. More recent IJDH/BAI cases include the prosecution of former dictator Jean-Claude “Baby Doc” Duvalier, a complaint against the United Nations for introducing cholera to Haiti, and the Rape Accountability and Prevention Project.
As a human rights lawyer and activist, Brian founded the Boston-based IJDH. He lived and worked in Haiti from 1995 to 2004, first with the United Nations and after 1996 with the BAI. Brian is a graduate of Georgetown University Law Center and Middlebury College. He has held a Brandeis International Fellowship in Human Rights, Intervention and International Law and a Wasserstein Public Interest Law Fellow at Harvard Law School. Awards Brian has received for his work include the 2014 Salem Human Rights Prize and an honorary degree from Canisius College. He has been widely published on human rights in Haiti, in legal journals, and prominent newspapers globally. Brian is on the Editorial Board of Health and Human Rights Journal.
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“700 million people can’t read a newspaper today in India.”
PlanetRead’s mission is “Literacy for a Billion”. It’s a registered non-profit which innovates, researches, implements, scales and engages policy and corporations around cost-effective and scalable solutions to support literacy. PlanetRead has implemented Same Language Subtitling (SLS) on mainstream song-based TV programming in eight major languages, on Doordarshan, India’s state television network, and Zee, one of India’s top private networks. As a result it has delivered regular reading practice to an estimated 200 million weak-reading TV viewers and conducted impact studies on their reading skills. PlanetRead’s goal is to have SLS on all song-based TV content in India in all official languages, and over time to leverage the India scale up to promote SLS in other countries. Bill Clinton has called it “a small change that has a staggering impact on people’s lives”.
Brij has a Ph.D. in Education from Cornell University and a Masters in Physics from the Indian Institute of Technology, Kanpur. He is on the faculty of the Indian Institute of Management, Ahmedabad (IIM-A). Brij is the founder of PlanetRead and BookBox, both dedicated to scalable solutions for literacy and language learning using ICTs. At IIM-A and PlanetRead, Brij and his team have innovated, researched and implemented SLS on television for mass literacy. The SLS innovation is the recipient of the International Literacy Prize from the US Library of Congress and awards from the All Children Reading Grand Challenge by USAID, the Institute for Social Inventions in London, UK, Development Marketplace from the World Bank and the NASSOM Foundation. Brij has served on the World Economic Forum’s Global Agenda Council for Education between 2012-2016. He is an Ashoka Fellow, a Schwab Social Entrepreneur and was a Reuters Digital Vision Fellow at Stanford University.
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New Media Advocacy Project (N-Map) is one of the world’s leading media and human rights groups. It advances human rights and social justice by using video and other media to strengthen legal advocacy in courts, legislatures and communities. At its heart, N-Map’s work addresses the need for greater participation in the legal and political process by those who have been directly impacted by abuse and injustice. Furthermore, communities most affected by violations are often unable to access key decision makers for a variety of financial, practical, or political reasons. N-Map has collaborated with dozens of human rights organisations around the world to merge media and storytelling into their advocacy. In 2014, N-Map was recognised as a technology and human rights leader when it received a “New Digital Age” award from Google Chairman Eric Schmidt.
Adam Stofsky is the founder and executive director of N-Map. He is a graduate of Amherst College (1998) and Harvard Law School (2004). After finishing law school, Adam served as a law clerk for the United States Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit. He then received a Skadden Fellowship to work as a litigator at the Lawyers’ Committee for Civil Rights Under Law. In 2009 Adam won an Echoing Green Fellowship for Social Entrepreneurship to found N-Map. Adam is a frequent speaker at convenings on human rights and innovation. He is also the founder and CEO of Briefly, a for profit social enterprise that seeks to make legal information more accessible. Otherwise Adam spends his time with his two year old son and support his wife who raises sheep, cattle and pigs on a farm in the Hudson Valley outside New York City. -
Based in Lagos, Nigeria, Mother's Delivery Kit is a social enterprise, established to promote and enhance safe births, instigate behavioural change and economically empower women. Since its founding in 2014, Mother’s Delivery Kit, has sold almost 100,000 kits, trained over 2,000 birth attendants and set up a technology platform to connect hundreds of women to the lifesaving information and quality healthcare personnel at childbirth. Mother’s Delivery Kit supply birthing kits to health centers, hospitals, university teaching hospitals, maternal and child health organisations, Traditional Birth Attendants and a host of other change makers. The kits include an immunisation calendar, and has played a part in the 70% increase in antenatal and immunisation attendance in communities where Mother’s Delivery Kit works.
Adepeju is the founder of Mother’s Delivery Kit and a lawyer by training. She is passionate about social entrepreneurship and provide simple lifesaving solutions to some of the world's biggest problems. Adepeju is a White House Emerging Global Entrepreneur, a PATH International Innovation Champion, a 2014 Mandela Washington Fellow, Fellow of the International Center for Women Canada, Fellow of the Unreasonable Institute, member of Women in Successful Careers (WISCAR), a 2015 Young Innovator of the World at the Innovation Summit for Health (WISH), one of She Leads Africa’s top 10 female entrepreneur for Diaspora Demo day, a 2015 YNaija top 10 most influential Nigerians under 40, a 2015 Cordes Fellow and an acknowledged Global Change Leader by the Coady International Institute in Canada.
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United Invitations connect migrants who want to improve their language skills with people who are fluent in the native language over a home-cooked dinner. The dinner is always free of charge, in someone’s home and takes place with no further obligations than to share one meal. It is a non-governmental, non-profit, politically and religiously independent initiative and participation is open and free for all. United Invitation's theory of change is that we can get around social exclusion and xenophobia by eating dinner together, by meeting as equals over food.
Ebba is Sweden's first Secretary of Dining and the founder of United Invitations. She has a BA in Art History and wrote her master’s thesis on the social-ecological system of the meatball. She is a basketball coach, producer of a youtube wine channel and a popular speaker, having spoken at TEDx and United Nations in Geneva for example. Ebba values her sleep, enjoys dancing and likes trees. Her least favourite activity is wearing socks. She loves California.
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Circle of 6 knows how hard it can be to reach out when you need help, or to talk about things that are awkward, confusing, or worse. Their goal is to make the world a safer and healthier place with technology that enhances friendship and trust. In 2011 the White House created the “Apps Against Abuse” challenge to inspire citizens to build a mobile tool to prevent sexual violence on college campuses. Taking a public health approach, Circle of 6 tested with students and learned from the experience of survivors, experts and LGBTQ users, to design a tool that met young people where they are. After winning the White House challenge they received immediate media coverage and the app spread to 36 countries around the world, and is being used on college campuses of all sizes across the US.
Nancy is a filmmaker, media strategist and catalyst for social change. She is a passionate advocate, who believes storytelling, mobile tech, gaming and social media can foster healthy relationships and build communities of respect. Nancy was recently named as one of the “Top 50 Global Leaders Working to End Violence Against Women” by SAFE Magazine. She has presented her work at the UN, the White House, TEDx, the Carter Center and at film festivals and universities around the globe. Nancy has been using new tech to innovate solutions around public safety for women and marginalised communities for over a decade, with Safestreets mapping in New York City, and now with Circle of 6. She directed the documentary “Roll Red Roll” and her prior film “xoxosms” aired on PBS in 2013. Nancy is a graduate of Columbia University.
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FoodCloud is a not for profit social enterprise that, through a software platform, connects businesses with surplus food with charities in their local community. It is based in Dublin, Ireland, but also operates across the UK. On a global scale it is estimated that approximately 30% of food produced for human consumption is wasted across the food supply chain. Farmland the combined size of China, Mongolia and Kazakhstan is used to grow food that is subsequently thrown away. This happens while 1/7 globally go hungry. In Ireland 1/10 people suffer from food poverty. Using the FoodCloud tech platform, participating businesses can upload details of their surplus food and the time period in which the food can be collected. By donating surplus food to various charities, businesses can assist them in reducing their food costs and therefore allow them to redirect funding to programs assisting those who are disadvantaged, and as such creating tangible and long lasting local benefits.
Iseult is one of the co-founders and the CEO of FoodCloud. She is passionate about food, and it is that very passion that drives FoodCloud. She is a Business and Economics graduate and winner of Trinity Business student of the Year 2013. Iseult was one of Time magazines Next Generation Leaders in 2014. Iseult is an accomplished and award winning social entrepreneur and she's creating and implementing solutions to social and environmental problems.
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Fab Lab Barcelona’s mission is to provide access to tools, knowledge and the financial means to educate, innovate and invent using technology and digital fabrication to allow anyone to make (almost) anything, and thereby creating opportunities to improve lives and livelihoods around the world. Design for the real world; Fab Lab Barcelona believe in bringing products to life that solve real needs and are part of a spiral production strategy and align different disciplines within the lab in the same direction. Design for liquid times; the world is not static, everything is constantly changing, Fab Lab Barcelona think in resilience terms and aims to connect with the emergent changes of the culture of today’s world. Fab Lab Barcelona operates in the scale of products, thinking in urban and global scales in terms of distribution, impact, socioeconomic change and cultural shift that those products carry with them.
Tomas Diez is a Venezuelan Urbanist specialised in digital fabrication and its implications in the future of cities and society. He is one of the founders of Fab Lab Barcelona at the Institute for Advanced Architecture of Catalonia (IAAC) and now he is leading the Fab City Research Laboratory. Tomas leads the FAB City Global Initiative and helps to run the Fab Academy program with a distributed team located in more than 50 Fab Labs globally. He is also the European project manager for the Fab Foundation. Tomas holds a Bachelor degree in Urban Planning and Sociology by the University Simon Bolivar in Caracas, Venezuela, a Diploma in social work from the University of Havana, Cuba, a Master in Advanced Architecture by IAAC, and a Diploma on Digital Fabrication in a pilot program on the class “How to Make Almost Anything” offered by the MIT Center for Bits and Atoms in 2008. Tomas is a tutor in Design Products at the Royal College of Arts in London, where he co-runs the Exploring Emergent Futures platform, he is co-founder of the Smart Citizen, FabLabs.io and StudioP52. Tomas has been appointed by The Guardian and Nesta as one of the top 10 digital social innovators to watch in 2013, and has been awarded by the Catalan ICT association as the entrepreneur of the year in 2014-15.
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GhanaThink Foundation is a youth-led NGO based in Ghana & the US. Its primary goal is to mobilise and organise talent for the benefit of Ghana. GhanaThink's landmark initiative is the Barcamp Ghana program, where people come together for a day of learning, sharing, networking and mentoring. The mission is to build a network of changemakers and entrepreneurs. GhanaThink also seeks to support the ideas generated at the Barcamps into projects, programs or ventures. With almost 60 events reaching over 8,000 young leaders since December 2008, Barcamp Ghana has been the launchpad for business start-ups such as Afrochic, Ahonya and Ashanti Tours. GhanaThink Foundation also hosts Junior Camp Ghana, the Junior Camp Internship Program and the Ghana Volunteer Program. Through a partnership with the US Embassy in Ghana, they organized TechCamp West Africa.
Ato is an entrepreneur, manager and social media champion. He has a Bachelor's degree in Civil Engineering from MIT and a Master's degree in construction and engineering management from Stanford. Ato is the director of GhanaThink Foundation and he's a member of the Global Shapers Accra Hub, and part of the World Economic Forum community. Ato has spoken at events such as the World Economic Forum on Africa, the Harvard African Business Conference, Pivot East and the Africa Youth For Results platform. He has previously worked at Rancard building new revenue services off its platform and for Google where Ato built sustainable tech communities in Africa. He co-founded Museke.com, an African music website and has through Museke organised two African music awards. Ato is also one of Ghana's top bloggers.
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Puntos de Encuentro (Meeting Points) is a Nicaraguan feminist non-profit organisation that was founded in 1990. Operating under the premise that "the personal is political" and social change is mediated by attitudes, values and behaviours of individuals; Puntos de Encuentro decided to create an independent and pluralistic space where they could work their own agenda on women, youth and adolescents. The mission is to foster a favourable social environment, with individual and collective action for the transformation of power relations as well as recognition, protection and exercise of the rights of women in everyday life. Puntos de Encuentro argues that a democratic and just society that acts in favour of the rights of women of all ages.
Amy believes that the personal is political and vice versa, and that to achieve the kind of progressive social change at the level of people's daily lives, "the magic is in the mix". She’s a United States citizen who has lived more than half her life in Nicaragua. Amy co-founded Puntos de Encuentro and spearheaded the development of two "social soap" TV dramas, that in addition to drawing huge audiences on TV throughout Central America, are used as organising tools by local groups working on gender equality and sexual productive rights, which are addressed in the series. The success and impact of the first series, Sexto Sentido (Sixth Sense) and the strategy "We're Different We're Equal" led to Amy becoming an Ashoka Fellow in 2007. She went on to develop the series Contracorriente (Turning the Tide), which has broadcast in Central America, the Dominican Republic and Bolivia, and is the basis for several regional campaigns to prevent sexual abuse, commercial sexual exploitation and trafficking of adolescents. Amy has also consulted for the World Bank, the Pan American Health Organisation and the Association for Women's Rights in Development, among others.
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WFP Innovation aims to accelerate high impact innovations to achieve Zero Hunger across the globe. Based in Munich, Germany, but sourcing ideas from across the world, the accelerator supports entrepreneurs working on eradicating hunger using human-centered design and a lean start-up approach. The Accelerator helps to identify and scale-up high-impact and transformative innovations both from within and outside WFP, inviting and collaborating with the private sector, civil society and WFP entrepreneurs to jointly tackle humanitarian and development challenges. Projects are piloted at an early stage to ensure wide impact and maximise cost effectiveness, as they argue that the way towards Zero Hunger is not necessarily in building grand plans, but in identifying and testing solutions in an agile way. The accelerator provides financial support and mentorship to take proven solutions to scale.
Bernhard Kowatsch is the Head of the Innovation Accelerator at the United Nations World Food Programme (WFP). Previously, Bernhard built up WFP’s Business Innovation team and worked as a management consultant at the Boston Consulting Group (BCG). He has also co-founded WFP’s ShareTheMeal smartphone crowdfunding app, which enables users to "share their meal" with hungry children with just a tap. Since the launch in 2015, over 500,000 users worldwide have provided more than 7 million meals. Bernhard holds a Masters degree in International Management, International Business Administration and Business Administration from HEC School of Management and Vienna University of Economics and Business.
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“The most common thing our customers tell us is; Wow, I didn’t know the sun was so powerful.”
Since 2013, One Earth Designs has been setting a new standard for clean energy and global business as one of the top ranked responsible businesses on B Corp’s Best for the World List. They developed SolSource as a solution for cooking and saving fuel while working with nomads in the Himalayas. Today, the solar-powered stoves are used by customers in over 60 countries. Their flagship product, SolSource, heats up five times faster than a charcoal grill, delivers a whopping 1,000 watts of power and harnesses sunlight seven times more efficiently than an average photovoltaic solar panel. Since releasing SolSource in 2013, the portfolio of international patents have grown, and this includes numerous advancements in solar thermal capture and storage technologies.
Guro is the co-founder and COO of One Earth Designs. She was awarded the Norwegian Government's Green Tech Award 2014, Venture Cup 2014 and Norway's Energy Star 2015. Guro holds a master degree within Material Science Engineering and Entrepreneurship from the Norwegian University of Science and Technology. She has lived and worked in the US, Colombia, Costa Rica, Germany and the UK. In Colombia Guro led the development of a banking system for 550,000 coffee farmers. Prior to One Earth Designs she gained deep experience within the solar energy sector, both as the former CEO of Morpho Solar and as a process engineer at REC Solar. Guro has focused on getting experience with solar and social impact ventures, both of which she now leverages in her position at One Earth Designs.
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“We’d written 26 grant proposals and had 26 rejections.”
Grassroot Soccer is an adolescent health organisation that leverages the power of soccer to educate, inspire and mobilise youth to overcome their greatest health challenges, live healthier more productive lives and be agents for change. Grassroot Soccer’s principles are that (i) young people have a vast potential to create meaningful change and play a significant role in overcoming their greatest health challenges, that (ii) soccer is an ideal way to reach, educate and inspire young people in a language they understand and enjoy, and finally that (iii) improving adolescent health, whether it’s eradicating HIV and AIDS, improving sexual and reproductive health services, or addressing gender norms, requires an integrated, collaborative, holistic and community-wide approach.
Dr. Thomas Clark is the founder and CEO of Grassroot Soccer, and also a paediatrician and former professional footballer. Tommy conceived the idea for Grassroot Soccer after living and playing soccer in Zimbabwe. Although born in Scotland he moved to Zimbabwe at age fourteen where his father Bobby Clark was coach of the Highlanders Football Club. Tommy attended Dartmouth College where he was captain of the soccer team. Following graduation, Tommy returned to Zimbabwe to teach English and play professional soccer. He attended Dartmouth Medical School and completed residency in paediatrics at the University of New Mexico, where he was twice named the Resident Teacher of the Year. Following residency, Tommy was a research fellow at the Center for AIDS Prevention Studies at the University of California at San Francisco. Tommy has been awarded the American Academy of Paediatrics Annie Dyson Child Advocacy Award, the Dartmouth College Martin Luther King Junior award, the International Association of Physicians in AIDS Care Nkosi Johnson Award, and the Peace Abbey Courage of Conscience Award.
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Vera Solutions is a social enterprise that uses cloud and mobile technology to help social sector organisations better track their impact and streamline their operations. Since 2010, Vera has worked with more than 175 organisations across 45 countries, from community-based organisations and social businesses to international NGOs and funders. Vera is a certified B Corporation and has been honoured with fellowships and awards by Echoing Green, the Mulago Foundation, Dasra, Entrepreneur Magazine, the Genesis Generation Challenge, Harvard Business School, and Salesforce.org.
Zak is a co-founder and the CEO of Vera Solutions. He couples five years of experience working in public health across Southern Africa and Latin America with more than seven years of experience architecting data solutions for social impact organisations around the world. Zak studied in the UK on a Marshall Scholarship, where he completed an MSc and PhD in Epidemiology at the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine. Zak graduated summa cum laude from Dartmouth College and has been honoured as a Truman Scholar, Bluhm/Helfand Social Innovation Fellow, and Forbes 30 Under 30 Social Entrepreneur.
Karti also co-founded Vera Solutions and has worked on dozens of implementations using mobile, SMS, OCR and other technology for health, agriculture and development organisations globally. He was previously a financial analyst in the investment banking divisions of Lehman Brothers and Barclays Capital, and has several years of experience running small businesses. Karti holds a BA in Economics from Amherst College and he is currently a graduate student at the Kennedy School of Government at Harvard University, while continuing to advise on and support Vera’s growth.
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