2011 Ashoka Globalizer Vienna Fellows


Anshu Gupta

Organization: GOONJ..

Country: India

Popularly known as the “Clothing Man”, Anshu created a mass movement for recycling and reusing tons of waste material by establishing a culture of sustained donations from urban, wealthy India and its impoverished rural areas. His organization, GOONJ.., has a mechanism for second-hand clothes and goods to pass from the wealthy to the poor, tackling a very basic and often neglected human need while also reducing waste.

Gregor Hackmack & Boris Hekele

Organization: Parliament Watch

Country: Germany

Gregor and Boris founded Parliament Watch, an online platform that creates transparency in politics. The platform allows the electorate to ask questions to members of parliament and candidates running for election and tracks the politician's responses, their speeches before and after election, and their voting records in parliament. Any citizen can gain easy access to information. In Germany, more than 90% of all delegates participate in this online dialogue on the state, federal and European level. After spreading the idea in Luxemburg, Austria and Ireland, Gregor and Boris are ready for the next step.

Felipe Heusser

Organization: Fundación Ciudadano Inteligente

Country: Chile

Felipe founded Fundación Ciudadano Inteligente (FCI) to reduce information asymmetries in Latin America that currently produce a gap in citizens’ relations with politics or the market. FCI conceives web technologies as a key tool for gathering, organizing, illustrating and sharing information through the web. Their platform hosts various apps like an online accountability website that acts as a watchdog to monitor congress information. Another web application allows citizens to request public information from any government-dependent agency, all from a single window that acts as a one-stop-shop.

Marina Kim & Erin Krampetz

Organization: Ashoka U

Country: United States

Marina and Erin started working together as student leaders at Stanford University 10 years ago to grow a social entrepreneurship education movement at colleges and universities. Now, as co-founders of Ashoka U, they have turned 15 universities into "Changemaker Campuses" in the US and Mexico. They have also developed a global network of over 100 campuses to connect higher education leaders with social entrepreneurs to transform the educational experience into a world changing one. They seek to use a leveraged model to scale throughout the Ashoka network.

Umesh Malhotra

Organization: Hippocampus

Country: India

Umesh’s vision is to inspire children to read more and improve their ability to absorb their education. He believes encouraging reading among young children will result in better learning throughout a child’s education. His approach is novel in crafting unique solutions for different socioeconomic classes to ensure that children have the resources to become better and more engaged readers wherever they attend school.

Brendan Martin

Organization: The Working World

Country: Argentina

Brendan's organization in Argentina, La Base, provides loans to cooperatives and other small businesses and creates an online marketplace to export and certify these organizations’ fair trade products. Concerned with the failures of many microcredit schemes, Brendan created ‘just-in-time credit’ – a new type of loan that focuses on wealth and job creation as well as sustainable economic growth from the bottom up. Brendan expands the reach of small-scale lending to include mini-loans for cooperatives and small businesses, with emphasis on the democratic and transparent governance of those organizations and the development and effective use of short-term business plans.

Satyan Mishra

Organization: Drishtee

Country: India

Satyan founded Drishtee, a low-cost direct delivery supply chain network that has facilitated and supported a network of over 14,000 rural enterprises (kiosks) to cater to the critical needs of poor customers at the base of the pyramid. Through the kiosks, Satyan delivers products but also services in health, education, banking or micro-finance, as well as opportunities to provide market access for products like eyeglasses, mobile phones or agriculture. Drishtee's implementation strategy rests on the core supply chain model it creates. Drishtee is growing fast and already has strong presence in three Indian states. Satyan is interested in steering this growth nationally and beyond Indian borders.

Pat Pillai

Organization: Life College Group

Country: South Africa

Pat is the founder of Life College, a social business that addresses the attitudes and mind-sets that underpin poverty. Life College programs are based on psycho-social and psycho-economic education which are catalyzed by micro-financed projects. Life College offers a range of Champion Mentality, Character and Leadership programs to youth and adults. Having gained recognition in his native South Africa, where Pat works with almost 9,000 people through his exclusive, global rights partnership with the Nelson Mandela Foundation, he now aims to influence millions of people, particularly by spreading the program: Nelson Mandela: The Champion Within to other African countries and beyond. 

Katie Redford

Organization: EarthRights International

Country: United States

Katie is the co-founder of EarthRights International which combines the power of law and people in the defense of human rights and the environment. ERI specializes in fact-finding, legal actions, training community leaders, and advocacy campaigns. Through these strategies EarthRights seeks to end abuses, and promote and protect human rights and the environment. With established programs in Thailand, Laos, Cambodia and Vietnam, Katie now hopes to further replicate these successful experiences.

Jean Claude Rodríguez-Ferrera

Organization: Comunidades AutoFinanciadas

Country: Spain

Jean Claude is providing full social and economic citizenship to Spain’s immigrants by bringing them together in self-owned investment funds that help them access the services they need to become entrepreneurs and professionals rather than welfare dependents.  Jean Claude and his partners are currently taking their Self-Funded Communities (SFC) concept to more than 50 countries in 4 continents.