William Drayton is an American social entrepreneur. Drayton was named by U.S. News & World Report as one of America's 25 Best Leaders in 2005. He is responsible for the rise of the phrase "social entrepreneur", a concept first found in print in 1972.
Rajdeep Sardesai is an Indian news anchor, reporter, journalist and author. He is a consulting editor and an anchor of India Today Television. He was the Editor-in-Chief of Global Broadcast News, that included CNN-IBN, IBN7 and IBN-Lokmat, before resigning in July 2014.
K. G. Suresh is a New Delhi based senior journalist, columnist and communication specialist. He is currently serving as Vice Chancellor of Makhanlal Chaturvedi National University of Journalism and Communication, Bhopal. He is also Emeritus Professor at the Apeejay Institute of Mass Communication, New Delhi & Hony Professor with Apeejay Stya University, India's first liberal arts university.
Vinod Dua was an Indian journalist who worked in Doordarshan and NDTV India. In 1996, he became the first electronic media journalist to be bestowed with the Ramnath Goenka Excellence in Journalism Award. He was awarded the Padma Shri for Journalism in 2008 by the Government of India. In June 2017, for his lifetime achievement in the field of journalism, Mumbai Press Club awarded him RedInk Award, which was presented to Dua by Devendra Fadnavis, former Chief Minister of Maharashtra.
Jack Sim is the founder of the Restroom Association of Singapore, the World Toilet Organization, the World Toilet Day initiative and Bottom of the Pyramid (BoP) Hub. Formerly from the construction industry, he decided to devote the rest of his life to social work after attaining financial independence at the age of 40.
Chetna Gala Sinha is an Indian social entrepreneur working to empower women in areas of rural India by teaching entrepreneurial skills, access to land and means of production.
Ramji Raghavan is a social innovator and entrepreneur. He is the founder and chairperson of Agastya International Foundation and Chairperson of the Navam Innovation Foundation, both Non Profit Organizations. Ramji served as a member of the Central Advisory Board of Education, Government of India. He is member of the Governing Council of the Marico Innovation Foundation. He has also served as a board member of Vigyan Prasar and as a member of the Working Group on Attracting Children to Science and Math of the Prime Minister's National Knowledge Commission. Ramji has spoken at the Education World Forum, the annual INK Conference in association with TED, the Clinton Global Initiative, MIT Media Lab, Peking University, Indian Institute of Science, the Tata Institute of Fundamental Research the PanIIT Conference, the Confederation of Indian Industry, Deshpande Development Dialogue, the Indian Institute of Management – Bangalore, the WISE Summit 2014, Qatar and RAFT- Resource Area For Teaching, Bay Area, USA.
Ritu Vasu Primlani is an Indian stand-up comedian and environmentalist. She received the 2015 Nari Shakti Puraskar from the Government of India for her work.
Piyush Tewari is an Indian social entrepreneur, focused on improving road safety, access to emergency medical care and urban governance across India. He is the Founder and CEO of SaveLIFE Foundation, and best known for his work to pass a Good Samaritan Law in India. In 2016, GQ Magazine named him as one of the most influential young Indians. In 2014, Tewari was featured as an expert on Satyamev Jayate, a popular TV show on social issues, hosted by actor Aamir Khan. The episode Tewari was featured in was focused on the epidemic of road accidents in India.
Ashoka is an American-based nonprofit organization that promotes social entrepreneurship by connecting and supporting individual social entrepreneurs. Their stated mission is "the creation of an association of the world's leading social entrepreneurs—men and women with system-changing solutions for the world's most urgent social problems—and fostering a global culture of everyone being a changemaker for the good of all".
Hopin Academy is a non-profit educational organization located in Tamale, Northern Region, Ghana, that is open to anyone 24 hours a day. Hopin Academy provides pragmatic and innovative approaches towards exploring the various fields of entrepreneurship with the aid of technology, thus beating the competition in labour market. It derived its name from its educational philosophy as a school designed for students to "hop in and hop out," rather than having strictly organized timetable structures. The school specializes on training online marketing, social media communication, writing, video production, entrepreneurial work and web communications. Hopin Academy has established an international academic partnership with Bryn Mawr College and Haverford College through the BiCo-Dalun Summer Action Research Fellowship, a learning program fostered in 2010 where Bryn Mawr and Haverford students create community projects with Ghanaian partners. According to the Hopin Academy website, they offer courses in writing, design, film, and entrepreneurial work. They also provide training to NGOs, government organizations, and other schools, such as the Olive School of Journalism and they as well provide entrepreneurial support to start up business from idea stages through to implementations and also provide financial support to many startups. Entrepreneurs are resourced with the best content available on internet platforms and in apps and are also trained to develop key competencies in the realizations of their goals.
Global Changemakers is an international youth organisation with headquarters in Zurich, Switzerland. To date they have directly trained over 1000 young people and provided grants to 450 youth-led projects in over 128 countries.
Meera Vijayann is a journalist covering gender-based violence and social entrepreneurship. She holds the position of communications manager and co-coordinator at Ashoka, Arlington, Virginia and youth ambassador for India with Youth to End Social Violence in Conflict.
Oluseun Onigbinde is a Nigerian entrepreneur and open data analyst popularly known as the co-founder and CEO of budgIT, a Nigerian civic startup. Oluseun Onigbinde is a fiscal transparency advocate and firm believer in the power of Open Data. In 2012, he was awarded the Future Awards Prize for Science and Tech Innovation. Oluseun on 13 September 2019 got appointed as Technical Adviser in the Ministry of Budget and National Planning. Some Nigerians reacted badly to his appointment due to his past criticism of the same government that appointed him.
Trisha Shetty is an Indian activist for gender equity and the founder of SheSays. She is known for human rights advocacy, especially advocating for gender-sensitive policies and law, quality education, youth and gender representation and preventing sexual violence in India. Her work and advocacy has been recognised by the United Nations, President Obama, Her Majesty, Queen Elizabeth II and President Emmanuel Macron. She currently serves as the President of the Steering Committee of the Paris Peace Forum, an international summit launched in 2018, under the leadership of President Macron; to promote good global governance. She is also part of the 8 member Global Leadership Advisory Council of the Museum for the United Nations - UN Live, alongside Ban Ki-moon; Former UN Secretary-General and Darren Walker; President, Ford Foundation. Shetty was named one of India's "7 Most Powerful Warriors" by India Today and was one of the honourees of the Vogue India Woman of the Year Award. She was also inducted as one of the 12 Obama Foundation Scholars at Columbia University in the inaugural batch. Trisha publicly shared her story of child sexual abuse for the first time in 2019, in a TED Talk titled, "Embrace your scars, be your own hero" as part of a special edition of TED conference broadcast on Television, hosted by and in collaboration with the Actor, Shah Rukh Khan.
Gloria de Souza was a social entrepreneur and the first fellow of the international non-profit organization Ashoka. She was known for her work in educational reform and modern social entrepreneurship. She began working in Mumbai, India as a primary school teacher and in 1971, while she was teaching at a private Jesuit school, de Souza was prompted to make changes by adopting experiential and environmental methods in her curriculum. She noted that India's rate of brain drain was high at the time and wanted to change the educational system as a whole.
Mirabelle Morah is a social entrepreneur and the founder of BlankPaperz Media, a digital publishing platform. Morah was a panelist at the 2019 and 2020 Social Enterprise World Forum where she spoke on "Innovation in Youth Engagement," and "Building Youth Movements." She is also a recipient of Her Network Woman of the Future Award.
Apar Gupta is a lawyer and writer on democracy and technology from India. In 2019 he was elected as an Ashoka Fellow for, "creating a model for digital rights advocacy in the country that is driven by the public, for the public."
Pushkin Phartiyal was a journalist and social worker from Uttarakhand, India. He was noted for his work in alleviating rural poverty, strengthening local institutions and rural livelihoods, and climate change mitigation in the Himalayas of Uttarakhand.
