Scott Edward Anderson

Scott joined Ashoka in September 2007 as Vice President for Global Development after fifteen years of intrapreneurial work at The Nature Conservancy, the world's leading biodiversity conservation organization. Scott led the Conservancy in a fundraising management capacity in three US states -- New York, Alaska, and Pennsylvania -- and helped transform the fundraising focus and effectiveness of the organization as a member of its philanthropy cabinet. Scott then led resource development for Global Priorities, positioning and ensuring the long-term growth of the Conservancy's global marine, freshwater, climate change and other initiatives. While in that position, Scott developed PATHways, a unique system for packaging the Conservancy's global conservation work, modeled after mutual funds, which grouped conservation action and outcomes into a series of thematic funds. Most recently, Scott created and led a high-level creative team responsible for developing marketing concepts and materials for philanthropy, including further development of the PATHways model, the organization's Annual Report, and designing the Conservancy's next capital campaign.

Scott also has an extensive entrepreneurial publishing history, in print and online, including an arts and culture magazine, Rockstop; one of the first online literary journals, Ducky Magazine; and a pioneering blog, The Green Skeptic. It was as the founder and lead writer for The Green Skeptic that Scott's interest in social entrepreneurs developed, becoming one of the primary focus areas of the blog, along with climate change and microfinance. The Green Skeptic exposed new audiences to social entrepreneurship, and led to Scott's creating two social networking sites -- on gather.com and squidoo -- devoted to disseminating best practices and connecting social entrepreneurs and potential investors.

Scott is an award-winning poet, was a John Sawhill Conservation Fellow, and is currently a Senior Fellow with the Environmental Leadership Program. He contributes strategic thinking to the microfinance arena as a member of the advisory board of Green Microfinance, LLC.

Romanus Berg

Born in Guatemala, raised by German immigrants, Romanus grew up in the U.S. speaking four languages. He attended university in France and Germany before returning to the U.S. to obtain a BS in Computer, Mathematical, and Physical Sciences from the University of Maryland. After graduation, Romanus first learned the strategic value of developing innovative technology solutions in support of the successful $1.8 billion privatization of the U.S. Enrichment Corporation. Most recently Romanus helped establish and rapidly grow a Citizen Sector Organization called Oceana faster than any "for-profit" would normally be allowed to grow: As VP of Operations and CIO he helped push growth from initial inception to a global operating platform covering multiple languages and currencies across Europe, North and South America at a $10M+ budget - with impressive global impact and a timeframe of under three years. Though Romanus has worked over 12 years in and across public, private and citizen sectors he finds a true calling helping citizen sector organizations strategically and operationally manage the coalescence of people, process and technology. In his spare time Romanus can be found with friends and family around the Chesapeake Bay working on everything from boats and cabins to blue crabs and campfires.

Dr. Iman Bibars

Based in Cairo, Egypt, Dr. Iman Bibars is launching Ashoka's program in the ARAB WORLD. Iman has a BA and an MA in Political Science from the American University in Cairo (AUC), and a PhD in Development Studies from Sussex University in the UK. Iman also joined the Georgetown University Arab Studies MA Program and was a Parvin Fellow at Princeton. Iman is a regional expert with more then 22 years experience in the social sector of the Arab World and the Africa region. She has committed her life to work with marginalized and voiceless groups, such as female heads of households in the poorest slums of Egypt, street children, street vendors and garbage collectors. She has worked with many international agencies and NGOs, including UNICEF, Catholic Relief Services, CARE-Egypt, GTZ and KFW. Iman is herself a social entrepreneur, and co-founded and chaired The Association for the Development and Enhancement of Women (ADEW), an NGO providing credit and legal aid for poor women who head their households.

Valeria Budinich

Valeria Budinich has worked for 20 years in the creation and expansion of business development programs in 22 countries worldwide. At Ashoka, as the Vice-President leading the Full Economic Citizenship Initiative, Valeria focuses on enabling commercial alliances between social entrepreneurs and private companies to deliver products and services to small producers and low-income families. Her main area of professional interest is finding ways to harness the collective power of social and business entrepreneurs.

From 1986 to 1996, Valeria worked for Appropriate Technology International (ATI), a global non-profit foundation specializing in providing technical and financial assistance to small and medium-sized enterprises in rural areas. As its Chief Operating Officer, she assumed a leading role in the development field's thinking about small producers. From 1997 to 1998 she served as founding Vice-President for Latin America at Endeavor, a foundation specializing in linking entrepreneurs in emerging economies with venture capital investors in the US. Valeria launched endeavor's first field operations in Chile and was part of the core team that designed endeavor's search and selection process to identify high yield investment opportunities. From 1999 to 2001 she served as VP for New Initiatives at BDA, a California-based consulting firm specializing in business process redesign and technology innovations for private sector clients worldwide. At BDA, Valeria developed innovative services for small and medium scale entrepreneurs and launched the first seed capital fund in Chile financing exclusively enterprises at the start-up level. Since 1995, Valeria has also worked as an advisor to groups like Woman's World Banking, the International Fund for Agricultural Development (IFAD) and UNIFEM. She was brought up in Chile and trained as an industrial engineer. (photo credit: Nana Watanabe)

Susan Davis

Susan Davis leads Ashoka’s Global Academy for Social Entrepreneurship and oversees Ashoka’s expansion to the Middle East, North Africa and Central Asia. She serves on the Ashoka board committee that selects social entrepreneurs around the world. Susan is senior advisor to the Director General of the International Labor Organization. She is a founding board member and now chairs the Grameen Foundation USA, a microfinance and technology organization to support the poor. She also serves on the boards of Project Enterprise and Aid to Artisans and the Advisory Council of the Ethical Globalization Initiative. Susan was the Executive Director of a global women’s advocacy organization that pioneered new mechanisms for the global women’s movement to influence negotiations at global United Nations meetings from 1993-1998. Prior to that, she led innovative initiatives aimed at scaling up microfinance institutions that were owned and governed by poor women at Women’s World Banking and the Ford Foundation in Bangladesh. During her four and half years in Dhaka, she helped to start Ashoka in Bangladesh and served as its first volunteer representative. Susan served as the Assistant Director of the first quasi-public export trading company launched in the 1980s by the Port Authority of New York and New Jersey. Susan was educated at Georgetown, Harvard and Oxford universities and is from Louisiana.

Konstanze Frischen

(Photo by kratz-photographie.de)

Konstanze joined Ashoka in 2003 to build up and launch Ashoka's program and operations in Germany. She first heard about Ashoka while working as a journalist and researching a story on social change. She quickly became fascinated by Ashoka's concept and its Fellows and thus, decided against merely writing about social entrepreneurs and joined Ashoka instead. Konstanze was born in Germany but spent formative years in Costa Rica and the United Kingdom, a set of experiences which deepened her interest in culture, identity, and international exchange and led her to organize support services for foreign students. She studied politics and social anthropology at the University of Heidelberg, the School of Asian and African Studies, and the London School of Economics, and researched questions of identity, politics, and development in Israel and in Indian shanty towns. Realizing that writing papers for an academic audience was not going to cause the impact she envisioned, she quit her PhD. To reach a larger audience, she started working as a journalist for CNN International in London, Canal Siete in San José, and Die Zeit in Hamburg. She also worked for three years as a business correspondent for the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung, focusing on economic and social change issues. Konstanze now lives in Frankfurt.

Olivier Kayser

Olivier Kayser is a Vice-President of Ashoka. After launching its France operations, he is now based in London and supports his colleagues in other Western European countries as well as the global development of Ashoka’s Support Network, the network of business people who support Social Entrepreneurs. He also is contributing to Ashoka’s Hybrid Value Chain initiative, fostering partnerships between corporations and Social Entrepreneurs to serve low income communities in developing countries.

Before joining Ashoka in 2003, Olivier was a Senior Partner at McKinsey&Company. Throughout his 18 years at McKinsey in Paris, Chicago, HongKong and Shanghai, he served a wide variety of clients, from public sector organizations to multinationals, private equity firms and Chinese state-owned enterprises. Born in France, raised in Spain, Olivier graduated from HEC, a French business school in 1979. He lived in a small village in Belize, C.A. for a year before returning to France where - at age 23 - he started a consulting firm, working for public sector clients.

Carol Grodzins

Carol joined Ashoka in 2000 in a senior role integrating the work of Ashoka worldwide. She brings years of experience in international development, higher education, health, and grassroots organizing. Following a B.A. in Russian language and literature from Indiana University, Carol served in the U.S. Peace Corps as a teacher in Sarawak, Malaysia. The Peace Corps experience turned her attention to the challenge of creating healthy populations and so she next studied nursing at the Massachusetts General Hospital.

Carol served as President of a statewide, nurse-led organization promoting and advocating family centered obstetrics and birthing in Massachusetts. In the nineteen-eighties, Carol transformed a concern with the proliferation of nuclear weapons (the ultimate public health threat) into the Massachusetts Committee for a Nuclear Weapons Freeze which educated, lobbied Congress, and organized grassroots support for a comprehensive nuclear test ban treaty and an end to the design, testing and production of new nuclear weapons systems.

Expressing her continued interest in international development, she helped form the Boston Committee for Ashoka (1987) and served as its volunteer Chairperson. Professionally, in 1989, Carol joined the Harvard Institute for International Development's macroeconomic policy group as a Researcher/Program Manager and over the next eleven years enjoyed expanding roles at Harvard, including co-launching the Program on Non-governmental Organizations, directing the Kennedy School's Edward S. Mason Fellows Program for public sector leaders from developing and transitional economy countries, launching the Kennedy School's new MPA in International Development and, finally, directing all International Programs at KSG. Carol received a MPA from the Kennedy School in 1993.

Lisa Nitze

Lisa is Vice President of the Global Entrepreneur to Entrepreneur Program at Ashoka, facilitating connections between social and business entrepreneurs around the world. She spent more than a dozen years as a consultant, often developing public-private partnerships. As Executive Director of the New Jersey Governor’s Commission on the Preservation and Use of Ellis Island, she developed a restoration and reuse plan for the island. Ms. Nitze also created Prosperity New Jersey, a statewide economic development initiative. As Executive Director of the World Trade Center Baltimore and World Trade Center Institute in Maryland, she attracted foreign investments to the state. She worked as a teacher in Lebanon during its civil war and wrote for a business magazine while living in Thailand. Ms. Nitze is on the board of directors of the American University of Cairo. She holds an M.B.A. from Stanford University and a B.A. from Harvard.

Lucy Perkins

Lucy has been a Leadership Group Member since 1999 when she joined Ashoka.  She is currently serving as Ashoka’s Chief Financial Officer, leading the Finance Department in Washington D.C. through the transformations necessary for Ashoka’s rapid growth. She also continues to oversee Ashoka’s expansion in Europe, a role she has played for the last four years. She was based in Berlin, Germany from 2004 till 2007.

Lucy joined Ashoka in 1999 as Asia Director.  Since that time, she has also spent 4 years (2000-2004) leading Ashoka’s Global Venture program, guiding the growth and development of Ashoka’s Fellowship in Africa, Asia, Central Europe and Latin America.

Prior to Ashoka, Lucy spent 7 years developing new infrastructure investment opportunities in Asia for AIG and the World Bank’s International Finance Corporation. As an undergraduate at Stanford University and then after graduating in 1986, Lucy worked with and then led the Overseas Development Network, an innovative, student-based international development organization. After growing the organization to 70 university campuses with programs in 9 countries, Lucy left to do her MBA at Wharton. Lucy has lived, worked and/or traveled extensively throughout most of Asia and much of Europe.

Beverly Schwartz

Beverly joined Ashoka as the Vice President of Global Marketing from Fleishman Hillard, an international communications agency. At Fleishman, she built and helped manage their social issues portfolio, using her expertise in "social marketing" as the foundation for the portfolio.

Beverly's interest in social issues spans most of her career. In the mid-seventies she was Executive Director of the Minnesota Association for Non-Smoker's Rights and was instrumental in passing the nation's first non-smoking in public places state law.

Subsequently, at the U.S. Center for Disease Control, she helped design and manage the first U.S. education/prevention campaign for HIV/AIDS, "America Responds to AIDS" and simultaneously directed the Office on Smoking and Health's public information function. In other lives, Bev developed an eye care project while at the American Academy of Ophthalmology, with the Reagan White House, Apple Computers and the Mitre Corporation which supplied free eye care to indigent elderly (the project is about to mark its 20th year of operation). She has worked globally on the problem of education reform, with an emphasis on getting and retaining girls in school in developing countries, on civil society issues and changing health and environmental behaviors when at the Academy for Educational Development.

At Fleishman Hillard International Communications she developed and directed their domestic and international social impact portfolio and was Project Director of the non-advertising portion of the Office of National Drug Control Policy's "Youth Anti-Drug Media Campaign". Beverly has published articles and given numerous presentations around the world on social marketing and is dedicated to promoting the field. She is an Associate Editor of the Social Marketing Quarterly and a Steering Committee Member of the annual "Innovations in Social Marketing Conference".

The focus of Beverly's Master of Science degree while at the University of Minnesota and the City University of New York was behavioral science.

Arthur Wood

Arthur is an Englishman educated in the UK [LSE], France [HEC] and Italy [Bocconi], married to a Norwegian, trained by the Americans, who was last to be found working for the Germans - but who is now spearheading the Business Entry initiative as part of the Social Financial Services program at Ashoka. The objective being to engage global financial services firms to enter the business of social investing and ultimately change the way investors view and approach social investing, as well as increasing the flow and efficiency of financing to the social sector (and to our Ashoka Fellows!).

Prior to joining Ashoka, Arthur worked for over 20 years in the finance sector having held a number of senior positions in product development, change management, sales, and strategic marketing with companies such as Merrill Lynch and Coutts - the UK's oldest and most prestigious Private Bank. At Coutts in addition to the launching and involvement in "vellum" Investment products he instigated and managed a project (Partners Marsh and Swiss re) for the innovative use of Offshore Insurance products which has now been accepted across the private Banking industry as a key planning tool, as well as the launching an Art Advisory service which was widely profiled in the Financial press on launch. His last job was as a Director of a leading UK bank, Kleinwort Benson Private Bank (Part of the Allianz Group), where he headed up, re-engineered and managed the teams associated with Product Development across the whole range of financial instruments. The core team was subsequently voted the most innovative Product team in an award by Private Asset Management magazine.

He was also made head of e-commerce for the private bank, pioneering a model which was described by McKinsey as on the cutting edge of strategic web development - that was subsequently recommended as an industry standard model by IBM. His experience in both private client and institutional markets has touched on most financial products - both vellum and exotic, including offshore fiduciary structures, alternative investments of all types - from Art and Real Estate to Hedge Funds, as well as more commoditized investment products

Gretchen Zucker

Gretchen Zucker is the Executive Director of Youth Venture, overseeing the growth of Youth Venture in the US and globally, working together with Youth Venture’s sister organization, Ashoka. Prior to joining Youth Venture, Gretchen led the Innovative Learning Initiative at Ashoka. Previously, she was a management consultant with McKinsey & Co. in its New York, Amsterdam, and Washington, DC offices. She began her career in the Africa Bureau of the US Agency for International Development, primarily focusing on trade and development in East and Southern Africa regions. Additionally, she has worked for the Ethiopian government, both as the information officer in its embassy in Washington, DC and as a consultant in the Ethiopian Investment Authority, based in Addis Ababa. Gretchen also helped launch the Washington office of the Tigray Development Association, a development institution headquartered in Tigray, Ethiopia.