2012 Ashoka Globalizer Munich Fellows


Casey Fenton

Organization: CouchSurfing International

Country: United States

CouchSurfing’s vision is to create a world where everyone has the opportunity to explore, and create meaningful connections with the people and places they encounter. Through inspiring, face-to-face meetings, the 3 million strong member base is helping create a better, friendlier world, forming friendships that help build a global community. As Chief Inspiration Officer, Casey wants to focus on attracting members who respect and appreciate cultural diversity, and bringing magnetic, inspiring experiences to as many people as is needed to begin to impact society at large.

Eric Dawson

Organization: Peace First

Country: United States

Eric Dawson is Co-Founder and President of Peace First, a leader in youth violence prevention and peacemaking education. Peace First teaches children how to act peacefully, inspires and enables teachers to teach peace-making skills, and encourages all of us to see and celebrate the role that young peacemakers can have in changing their own lives, their communities, and the world at large

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.

Rosanne Haggerty

Organization: Community Solutions

Country: United States

Rosanne is working to end homelessness by housing the chronically homeless and convincing governments and developers to commit to large-scale projects that serve as models for public policies. In 1991 when Rosanne Haggerty successfully converted New York’s historic Time Square Hotel from a dilapidated drug den, nicknamed “Homeless Hell”, into the nation’s largest supported housing development for the formerly homeless, she accomplished a previously unimaginable feat: She demonstrated that a permanent solution to homelessness could be provided for a fraction of the cost of the conventional short-term services such as shelters that maintained individuals in homelessness.

Hilmi Quraishi

Organization: ZMQ Software Systems

Country: India

Hilmi is pioneering mobile phone technology to spread public awareness on a range of pressing health and social issues, through the use of electronic games. Beginning with a highly successful HIV/AIDs awareness campaign that reached rural communities in India, Kenya, Tanzania and Uganda, Hilmi is now taking gaming to the next level by introducing a variety of other important issues such as climate change, education, agriculture and micro-finance. Reaching nearly 33 million people in India and Africa, Hilmi’s edutainment strategy is reaching media-dark areas and undereducated populations with sensitive information.

Brij Kothari

Organization: Planet Read

Country: India

Brij Kothari is the founder of PlanetRead (non-profit), co-founder of BookBox (for-profit) and is an Adjunct Professor at the Indian Institute of Management, Ahmedabad. PlanetRead has innovated, researched, and nationally implemented Same Language Subtitling (SLS) on TV for mass literacy. Since 2002, SLS on Bollywood film songs delivers 30 minutes of reading practice every week to 200 million early-readers in India, prompting Bill Clinton to call it “a small change that has a staggering impact on people’s lives.”

Mike Feerick

Organization: ALISON

Country: Ireland

Mike’s company ALISON is aiming to become the global source for online education in what he believes will be the “Google of higher education.” ALISON is a free form of online community college, offering interactive multimedia courses for basic education and workplace skills. ALISON’s modules are standards-based, developed with global brand names such as Microsoft (IT Skills) and the British Council (English language). Mike targets these services towards the marginalized sectors of society including: the unemployed, low-skilled, low-waged, elderly, and immigrants and developing country populations.

Nicholas Reville

Organization: Participatory Culture Foundation

Country: United States

Universal Subtitles is an open, collaborative toolset for creating, displaying, and editing captions and translations for web videos-- a Wikipedia for subtitles.  Our mission is to break down barriers of language and accessibility.  Universal Subtitles has been winning awards and is growing quickly -- more than 30,000 videos have already been translated by individuals, companies, and organizations.  We will be announcing several enterprise customers for the service before the end of 2012 and plan to expand our direct sales and reseller partnerships throughout the year.

Rikin Gandhi

Organization: Digital Green

Country: India

Rikin brings together technology and social organization to improve the efficiency of training and sharing best practices among smallholder farming communities. Across India, his Digital Green network of partners and communities has produced over 1,900 videos by farmers, for farmers, and of farmers which reach over 65,000 farmers every week. Over the next 3.5 years, Digital Green aims to connect with over 1 million farmers across South Asia and Africa by amplifying the effectiveness of public, private, and civil sector organizations that work with rural communities.

Rodrigo Baggio

Organization: Center for Digital Inclusion

Country: Brazil

Rodrigo bridges the digital divide by empowering poor and underserved communities to use information and communication technology. His non-profit organization called Center for Digital Inclusion (CDI), works with communities such as favelas (Brazilian Portuguese for “slums”), remote villages, detention centers, and medical clinics to set up local CDI Community Centers that provide its constituents (very often young people) with access to technology and the technical skills needed. Rodrigo believes that by enabling disadvantaged people to use digital technology, they have the tools to exercise their full capabilities as citizens and tackle the issues that affect their communities.