Senior Leadership

Romanus Berg

Romanus serves as a member of Ashoka's Leadership Group in the role of CIO. He had previously served on Oceana's leadership team, which established and rapidly grew a small start-up into the largest international organization focused solely on ocean conservation. Romanus began his career developing the online communications practice that supported the successful $1.9B privatization of the U.S. Uranium Enrichment Corporation (USEC.) In addition to shifting the focus of uranium enrichment from military to civilian use in both the U.S. and Russia, it was the largest successful government initial public stock offering in U.S. history. Romanus currently serves on NetHope's board, which works to share social solutions across citizen, government and private sectors.

Dr. Iman Bibars

Iman Bibars has a BA and an MA in Political Science from the American University in Cairo, and holds a Ph.D. in Development Studies, with a focus on states' social policies and reform, from the Institute of Development Studies, Sussex University, in the UK. Her recent work examined public expenditures specifically regarding social safety nets. A Regional Expert, she has more than 25 years of experience in strategic planning, policy formulation, community development and project design. She has dedicated her life to working with marginalized and voiceless groups: female heads of households in Egypt's poorest areas, street children, street vendors and garbage collectors. She has also worked with UNICEF, Catholic Relief Services, CARE-Egypt, GTZ and KFW.  Lastly, Iman is herself a social entrepreneur, co-founding and currently chairing The Association for the Development and Enhancement of Women, a CSO providing credit and legal aid for impoverished women heading their households.

Valeria Budinich

Valeria Budinich is a social entrepreneur who has worked for 25 years in the creation and expansion of new businesses with social impact in 22 countries worldwide. At Ashoka, Valeria founded in 2003 the Full Economic Citizenship (FEC) Initiative, a global initiative enabling large commercial alliances between social entrepreneurs and private companies to deliver products and services to small producers and low-income families through the articulation of Hybrid Value Chains (HVC™). Ashoka's FEC work is focused on housing, healthcare, and agriculture. As the Chief Entrepreneur of the Ashoka Housing for All program, Valeria launched the initiative 3 years ago and has been responsible for expanding it to Brazil, Colombia, Egypt and India. Prior to Ashoka, Valeria was the Chief Operating Officer at Appropriate Technology International, a founding Vice-President for Latin America at Endeavor, and a VP for New Initiatives at BDA, a California-based consulting firm specializing in business process redesign and technology innovations for private sector clients worldwide. She was brought up in Chile and trained as an industrial engineer. (photo credit: Nana Watanabe)

Anne Evans

Anne Evans has extensive experience as a management consultant, senior executive and nonprofit trustee. Formerly a partner with the MAC Group (now Gemini Consulting) she was also Executive Officer/Administrator of the National Gallery of Art in Washington, DC. In recent years, she has consulted to and served on the boards of a variety of nonprofit organizations, including as board chair for the Levine School of Music. In 2001, she entered the world of social entrepreneurs, co-founding the Nomadic Kenyan Children's Educational Fund (NKCEF) to support secondary-level education of nomadic children in Kenya. NKCEF is merging in 2010 with the Kenya Education Fund and Anne will continue on the board of the combined entity. A native of North Carolina, Anne received her undergraduate degree at Wellesley College, and Masters in Public and Private Management from Yale University's School of Organization and Management as part of its Charter Class.

Konstanze Frischen

Konstanze first heard about Ashoka while working as a journalist and researching a story on social change. Fascinated by Ashoka's concept and the stories of its Fellows, she decided against merely writing about social entrepreneurs and instead joined Ashoka in 2003. She founded and was managing director of Ashoka Germany before joining Ashoka's global leadership group in 2008 where she is now responsible for the social business platform and Ashoka Globalizer program. Born in Germany, she spent formative years in Costa Rica and the United Kingdom. Intrigued by how different people see the world, Konstanze studied social anthropology at the University of Heidelberg, the School of Asian and African Studies and the London School of Economics, and worked on questions of identity, politics, and development in Israel and in Indian shanty towns. She originally became a journalist to communicate her findings to a large audience, and worked for reputed outlets such as CNN International in London, Canal Siete in San José, and Die Zeit in Hamburg, as well as for Germany's distinguished FAZ where she was a business correspondent for three years. (Photo by kratz-photographie.de)

David Green

David Green has worked with many organizations to make medical technology and health care services sustainable, affordable and accessible to all. David is a MacArthur Fellow, Ashoka Fellow and is recognized by Schwab Foundation as a leading social entrepreneur. David helped establish Aurolab (India), to produce affordable intraocular lenses (now has 8% of the global market share) and suture. He has helped develop high-volume, quality eye care programs that are affordable to the poor and self-sustaining from user fees, including Aravind Eye Hospital in India - which performs 300,000 surgeries per year - 70 percent of the care is provided free of charge or below - cost, yet the hospital is able to generate substantial surplus revenue. Within this paradigm of 'humanizing capitalism, he now works as an Ashoka VP (since 2004) to create social investing instruments to support sustainable social enterprises (in eye care and solar energy). He graduated from the University of Michigan with a Bachelor in General Studies (1978) and a Masters degree in Public Health (1982). He is the recipient of the 2009 "Spirit of Helen Keller" award for humanitarian efforts in blindness prevention and is the recipient of the 2009 University of Michigan Humanitarian Service Award.

Al Hammond

Al Hammond is Senior Entrepreneur with Ashoka's Full Economic Citizenship program, where he is leading an effort to transform rural healthcare. He is also: a serial social entrepreneur, with five prior start-ups to his credit, now working on a health care enterprise that will pilot in rural India; an author who has published extensively in the scientific, policy research, and business literature and written or edited more than 12 books or book-length reports, including, most recently, principal author of The Next 4 Billion: Market Size and Business Strategy for the Base of the Pyramid; a consultant who has worked with numerous corporations, foundations, government agencies (including the White House science office), and international organizations; a former journalist who went on to found and edit several national publications, win several national magazine awards, broadcast a nationally-syndicated daily radio program for 5 years, and oversee the launch of a prominent blog, www.nextbillion.net. Dr. Hammond holds degrees from Stanford University and Harvard University in engineering and applied mathematics.

Valeria Merino

Valeria is a social entrepreneur who for two decades has been involved in systemic change and implementation of public policies to strengthen democracy, rule of law, transparency, civil society participation and overall human and economic development. She is currently leading the Rural Innovation and Farming Program at Ashoka. Ashoka’s theory of change is that large-scale solutions to improve the lives of rural inhabitants and farmers in Sub-Saharan Africa and India require a focus on innovation and entrepreneurship. Through identifying and investing in the boldest and most innovative actors of our time, Ashoka seeks to empower social entrepreneurs addressing poverty issues in the above mentioned areas. She also launched AshokaHub, an online curated platform for Ashoka’s community of innovators and entrepreneurs working across the globe to resolve the most intractable social problems and currently is the lead evangelist for the site. Previously, she headed Ashoka's Venture and Fellowship program from 2007 to 2011; she was responsible for overseeing the selection process of Leading Social Entrepreneurs to the Ashoka Fellowship and engaging them in its global community of innovators. Before coming to Ashoka she worked for the Pan American Development Foundation as Senior Civil Society Adviser. She was a member of Transparency International for almost 20 years and served on its international Board; she also founded and was the Executive Director of CLD, then Ecuador’s TI chapter, for fifteen years. She is also a founding member of Participacion Ciudadana Ecuador and Transparencia Ecuador. Valeria was appointed, by the Secretary General of the United Nations and the Secretary of UNESCO, as a Council member of the United Nations University based in Tokyo, for which she served from 1995 until 2001.

Felix Oldenburg

Felix Oldenburg serves as Europe Leader and Director Germany. An entrepreneur and expert at the interfaces of the social, business and political sectors, Felix has launched a number of national and international programs that accelerate the spread and impact of social innovations. Before joining Ashoka, Felix started an online business and worked for management consulting firm McKinsey&Company in London. As director at a political consultancy, he pioneered citizen consultations for governments and foundations, including the European Citizens' Consultations in 27 countries. He speaks and publishes on social entrepreneurship, citizen engagement, and corporate social responsibility. Felix studied Philosophy at the universities of Bonn, Tübingen and Oxford and acquired an Executive Master in Policy Management in Washington DC (Georgetown).

Beverly Schwartz

Beverly joined Ashoka as Vice President of Global Marketing from Fleishman Hillard International Communications where she created and managed their social issues portfolio and directed the non-advertising portion of the "National Youth Anti-drug Media Campaign". A behavioral scientist and social marketing expert, Bev has many systems changing innovations to her credit. She helped write and pass the nation's first non-smoking in public places state law in Minnesota, helped design and manage the first national "America Responds to AIDS" campaign and authored the first Surgeon General's report on HIV/AIDS for the U.S. Centers for Disease Control, developed the National Eye Care Project for indigent elderly at the American Academy of Ophthalmology and worked on gender and education reform issues while at the Academy for Educational Development.

Solomon Jaya Prakash

Solomon JP is part of the Ashoka Global Leadership team and is the Country head of Ashoka in India since March 2010. He was also elected an Ashoka Fellow in 2006 when he was working with MAYA and the associated companies and organizations he founded and worked. Before moving on to Ashoka, Solomon founded a Bangalore based non-profit called MAYA with a focus on the eradication of child labor and livelihood development of poor communities. In MAYA he worked with public school reforms and early child care using citizen action to change the quality of schools in two states in India and still scaling to reach thousands of schools.  He also setup two for-profit enterprises, one is Maya Organic, which works with artisans to develop and market high quality products around the world and another company LabourNet that has a network of urban informal sector workers together using Internet and communications technology to track workers and help them find Jobs.