Six Social Entrepreneurs Receive their Awards | Skoll World Forum 2016
Speakers
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Managing Director, Sesame Workshop India
Sonali Khan leads Sesame Workshop’s educational mission in India to create innovative and engaging content that maximises the educational power of all media to help kids grow smarter, stronger and kinder.
As Managing Director of Sesame Workshop India, Sonali spearheads Galli Galli Sim Sim, a multi-platform initiative that combines the power of mass media with educational outreach to prepare children for school and life. Under her leadership, the organisation develops and implements ground breaking programs to reach children everywhere – especially those who need it most.
Sonali is a global advocate for human rights and for ending violence against marginalised communities, with an emphasis on girls and women. Her work has focused on promoting gender equity in education, empowerment of adolescent girls, along with ending domestic violence, sexual harassment and early marriage. She began her career as a television journalist covering politics and business and has since worked for a variety of organisations that harness the power of media for social change.
Prior to Sesame, she was the Director of Knowledge Creation and Dissemination at Dasra, a leading strategic philanthropy foundation, where her work covered areas including urban sanitation, adolescent girls’ rights, and democracy and access to justice. Previously she has also served as the Vice President and then India Country Director for Breakthrough, where she spearheaded large-scale program implementation, numerous multi-platform campaigns promoting gender equity, developed M&E practices and supported global fundraising and partnership development. She also served on the Boards of Plan International and MenEngage.
Sonali is a proud recipient of the prestigious Nari Shakti Puraskar (Women’s Empowerment Award) from the President of India. In 2016, she also received the Skoll Award for Social Entrepreneurship for her work in ending child marriage.
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Founder & CEO at Kamara Global Group / President at Videre Est Credere, Kamara Global Group
Oren Yakobovich is an experienced social entrepreneur who has been challenging and disrupting unjust systems. He combines traditional knowledge gathering with new technology and cutting-edge tools to shine a light on abuses and hold power to account.
He is founder and CEO of Kamara, a social enterprise that works with human rights and grass-roots organisations, building resilience through holistic security management and strategic investigations with the aimed to protect both the organisations and the social impact investors funding them.
He co-founded Videre Est Credere, an NGO that equips oppressed communities with customised technology to uncover information from places where media can’t or won’t go. Prior to that, he lead the video department at B’Tselem, training hundreds of citizens fighting for justice in the West Bank.
He is an Ashoka Fellow and recipient of the 2016 Skoll Foundation Award and a TED Global Speaker
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BRYAN STEVENSON is the founder and Executive Director of the Equal Justice Initiative in Montgomery, Alabama. Mr. Stevenson is a widely acclaimed public interest lawyer who has dedicated his career to helping the poor, the incarcerated and the condemned. Under his leadership, EJI has won major legal challenges eliminating excessive and unfair sentencing, exonerating innocent death row prisoners, confronting abuse of the incarcerated and the mentally ill and aiding children prosecuted as adults. EJI recently won an historic ruling in the U.S. Supreme Court holding that mandatory life-without-parole sentences for all children 17 or younger are unconstitutional. Mr. Stevenson’s work fighting poverty and challenging racial discrimination in the criminal justice system has won him numerous awards. He is a graduate of the Harvard Law School and the Harvard School of Government, and has been awarded 29 honorary doctorate degrees. He is the author of award winning and New York Times bestseller, Just Mercy. In 2015, he was named to the Time 100 recognizing the world’s most influential people. He was named in Fortune’s 2016 and 2017 World’s Greatest Leaders list.
In 2018, EJI will open a new museum called “The Legacy Museum: From Enslavement to Mass Incarceration” built on the site of a former slave warehouse in downtown Montgomery Alabama. This will be a companion to a national memorial to victims of lynching called “The National Memorial for Peace and Justice” which will also open in 2018.
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As the first President and CEO of the Skoll Foundation, Sally Osberg partnered with Jeff Skoll to build it into the leading philanthropy in the field of social entrepreneurship. During her tenure, the Foundation supported more than 100 entrepreneurial organizations driving equilibrium change on many of the world’s most pressing problems and developed innovative platforms for connecting civil society, government and private sector leaders with societal problem solvers. Among these platforms are the annual Skoll World Forum on Social Entrepreneurship, the Skoll Centre at Oxford University’s Said Business School, and the Sundance Institute’s “Stories of Change” initiative.
In 2015, Sally and Roger Martin published Getting Beyond Better: How Social Entrepreneurship Works, which articulates a theoretical framework for social entrepreneurship and distills lessons for practitioners, academics and impact investors. Her thought pieces have appeared in leading social impact and business journals and books; in 2015, she and Roger Martin were honored by Thinkers 50 for their intellectual leadership in the field of social enterprise.
Prior to joining Jeff Skoll and the Skoll Foundation, Sally served as the founding Executive Director for Children’s Discovery Museum of San Jose, a pioneering institution in the field.
Sally currently serves as the Chair of the Camfed (the Campaign for Female Education in Africa) USA Foundation, on the Philanthropy Advisory Council of the Royal Bank of Canada, on the Advisory Council of the Elders, as Vice Chair of the Social Progress Imperative and as a board director for New America and the Palestine-based Partners for Sustainable Development. She is also an Associate Fellow of the Said Business School of Oxford University.
She received her M.A. in English and American Literature from the Claremont Graduate School and her B.A. in English from Scripps College, where she was elected to Phi Beta Kappa.
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Program Director, Gender Equity and Governance,
BreakthroughMallika Dutt currently serves as Program Director of the Gender Equity and Governance program at the Hewlett Foundation. She inspires leaders to remember their innate interconnectedness and transform their impact. In a world of division and isolation, she invites us to see our shared well-being with people and planet.
As a strategic innovator, Mallika has pioneered effective approaches of social change through the founding of several nonprofits, including Breakthrough and Sakhi for South Asian Women. She has also provided transformational leadership in her roles as a Program Officer for Human Rights and Social Justice at the Ford Foundation’s New Delhi Office, the Director of the Norman Foundation, and the Associate Director of the Center for Women's Global Leadership.
A recipient of multiple awards, she received the Skoll Award for Social Entrepreneurship in 2016.
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Multi-Grammy Award-Winning Musician & Founder, Fundacion Mi Sangre
With seven solo albums to his credit and multi-platinum sales of over 16 million copies, Juanes is the world’s leading all-Spanish language rock artist - both a 2-time GRAMMY and 20-time LATIN GRAMMY winner with ten #1 singles on Billboard’s Latin charts. Hailed as “The single most important figure of the past decade in Latin music” (Los Angeles Times), Juanes is also frequently recognized as one of the Spanish-speaking world’s leading social media voices with an online following of over 20 million fans. The Colombian superstar’s dedication as a global activist also extends far beyond his passionate lyrics and is seen in his wide ranging charitable work for his own Mi Sangre Foundation and as a co-founder of the "Paz sin Fronteras" (Peace Without Borders) organization. Juanes’ latest album “Loco De Amor” was released in the Spring of 2014 and debuted at #1 on Billboard’s “Latin Pop Albums” chart and topped iTunes sales in over a dozen countries. ‘Loco De Amor’ was hailed as “One of the Five Best Albums of 2014 so far” by PEOPLE Magazine, saying it “is one of the best records out now in any tongue… Juanes has never sounded better.” Juanes’ latest single “Juntos (Together)” also leapt to #1 in iTunes Latin sales in the United States and numerous other countries, and reached a global audience of millions with a groundbreaking performance of the track on this year’s Grammy Awards.
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Founder & Chairman, Jeff Skoll Group
Founder and Chairman Emeritus of the Skoll Foundation
Founder and Chairman Emeritus of Participant Media
Founder of Capricorn Investment Group
Co-founder and GP of the RISE Fund
First fulltime employee and President of eBay
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Chuck Slaughter is the founder of TravelSmith and Living Goods, is a managing Director of The Horace W. Goldsmith Foundation, and a Senior Advisor to TPG’s Rise Fund, a $5 billion impact investing platform. Chuck earned a BA and Masters in Public and Private Management from Yale. In 1991 he founded TravelSmith, a leading travel gear company, and grew it to over $100 million in catalog and online sales. As an advisor to several private equity funds, he has participated in the acquisition of over $2 billion in consumer businesses. As its pro-bono president Chuck lead the turnaround of a network of clinics serving the poor in Kenya. This inspired him to create Living Goods, which supports government community health workers who provide health care on call delivered to the doorsteps of over 8 million people. Living Goods Smart Health app automates diagnoses, enables managers to optimize the performance of thousands of health workers in in remote villages, and provides real-time, auditable data to health ministries and funders. A RCT shows this approach is reducing child mortality by over 25%, for less than $3 per capita. LG’s is helping partners replicate the model in Uganda, Kenya Burkina Faso, and Ethiopia. Chuck serves on the boards of Yale’s School of Management, Tidepool, Digital Square, Aspen Management Partners, PATH’s Digital Advisory Board, and was previously the Vice Chair of the Initiative for Global Development (Co-founded by Bill Gates Sr). He received a Skoll Award, an Ernst and Young Entrepreneur of the Year Award, a Draper Richards Fellowship, and is a World Economic Forum Social Entrepreneur of the Year.
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Vivek founded Namati in 2011 to grow the movement for legal empowerment around the world. Namati and its partners have built cadres of community legal workers – sometimes known as “barefoot lawyers”– in ten countries. The advocates have worked with over 65,000 people to protect community lands, enforce environmental law, and secure basic rights to healthcare and citizenship.
Namati convenes the Global Legal Empowerment Network, more than 1,000 groups from every region in the world who are learning from one another and collaborating on common challenges. This community successfully advocated for the inclusion of access to justice in the 2030 Sustainable Development Goals.
Vivek is co-author of Community Paralegals and the Pursuit of Justice (Cambridge University Press). His TED talk, How to Put the Power of Law in People’s Hands, has been viewed over a million times.
