Debbie Rogers has held leadership roles at Praekelt.org (now Reach Digital Health) for nine years, most recently as CEO. Debbie led the service design of the National Department of Health in South Africa’s MomConnect program and has a focus on advancing mobile technology for health. Debbie is a member of the World Health Organization (WHO) Digital Health Technical Advisory Group and Director and Board Chair for the African Developers Academy.

Episode available here

Ian Bassin is co-founder and Executive Director of Protect Democracy. He previously served as Associate White House Counsel, where in addition to counseling the President and senior White House staff on administrative and constitutional law, his responsibilities included ensuring that White House and executive branch officials complied with the laws, rules and norms that protect the fundamentally democratic nature of our government.

Episode available here

Dr. Michael McAfee became President and CEO of PolicyLink in 2018, seven years after becoming the inaugural director of the Promise Neighborhoods Institute at PolicyLink. His results-driven leadership, depth of knowledge about building and sustaining an organization, and devotion to serving the nation’s most underserved populations made him the obvious choice to lead the 20-year-old PolicyLink as Angela Glover Blackwell transitioned to founder in residence.

Episode coming out soon

Marco van der Ree is the Conexsus interim Executive Director and founding Board Member. He is a strategic, passionate and innovative executive leader and social entrepreneur with 25+ years of global sustainable development experience with a focus on building partnerships, fundraising, advocacy, volunteerism, and biodiversity and climate action.

Episode coming out soon

In the first episode of our special series with SSIR, we speak to Arne Duncan – former U.S. Secretary of Education and managing partner at the anti-gun violence organization Chicago CRED – about scaling up the prevention of gun violence.

Arne shares the research showing CRED’s potential to significantly reduce gun violence in Chicago by 80 percent and his vision for their programme to be adapted in many places across the country.

Listen to the episode: We know we can prevent gun violence. Now we need to scale it

Natasha Joshi is a development sector professional who has worked with multilateral organisations, foundations, and governments across India, Mexico, and Singapore, and currently serves as an Associate Director at Nilekani Philanthropies. She holds a degree in human development and psychology from Harvard University.

Listen to episode: Plotting Impact Beyond Simple Metrics

Dr. Hanh Cao Yu (She, Her, Hers) is the Chief Learning Officer of The California Endowment (TCE) where she oversees learning, strategic development, evaluation, and impact activities, and ensures that local and state grantees, board and staff understand the results and lessons of the Foundation’s investments in its 10-year Building Healthy Communities (BHC) initiative.

Listen to Episode: Philanthropic Investment in People Power

Robert K. Ross, M.D., is president and chief executive officer for The California Endowment, a private, statewide health foundation established in 1996 to address the health needs of Californians. Prior to his appointment in September 2000, Dr. has prior experience as Director of Health and Human Services Agency in San Diego County and as Commissioner of Public Health in the City of Philadelphia.

Listen to Episode: Philanthropic Investment in People Power

Judith Stroehle is Assistant Professor of Sustainability Governance at the “Institute for Accounting, Control and Auditing (ACA)”, as well as the “Institute for Economy & Ecology (IWOE)” of St Gallen University (HSG) in Switzerland. Judith’s research focusses on how tools of measurement, accounting, and finance can help to implement sustainable business and investment practice, and her teaching focuses on bridging sustainability and accounting.

Listen to Episode: ‘Sustainability Assurance as Greenwashing’

After a long career in industry in senior roles with large global corporations, Donna returned to school to pursue a PhD degree and is currently a PhD candidate in financial sociology at the London School of Economics and Political Science in London, England. Her research focuses on the role of investors and corporate governance in advancing sustainable and equitable financial systems.

Listen to Episode: ‘Sustainability Assurance as Greenwashing’

Kazbi Soonawalla is a Senior Research Fellow in accounting at the Saïd Business School and a Tutorial Fellow in Management at Keble College, University of Oxford. She is interested in capital markets research in financial reporting and disclosure, as well as in sustainability, governance, and management controls.

Listen to Episode: ‘Sustainability Assurance as Greenwashing’

Dawn Laguens is the Chief Global Strategy and Innovation Officer at Planned Parenthood Global and senior advisor to president and CEO Alexis McGill Johnson. She previously served as Planned Parenthood Federation of America’s (PPFA) executive vice president and chief brand officer. Dawn brings a wealth of expertise to Planned Parenthood Global, including strategy development, results driven management, board governance, and resource mobilization.

Listen to episode: Planned Parenthood on Innovating during Moments of Crisis

Nicola is a business leader and social innovator, driving multi-sector partnerships for systems change and inclusive economy. As Executive Director of Yellowwoods Holdings she leads the group’s efforts to drive system inclusion and sustainability through, and with, its portfolio of businesses that include financial services (e.g. Hollard Insurance), restaurants (e.g. Nando’s) and eco-tourism (&Beyond) businesses.

Listen to episode: The Entrepreneurial Approach to Scaling Impact

Wanjiku Nyachae’s personal and professional commitment is to other peoples’ and her own extra-ordinary self-expression through shared humanity. Professionally this includes mental health and wellbeing through psychotherapy (Cascade Therapy) and arts-led, tech-mediated social prescribing (Cascade SciArts).

Listen to episode: Coaching and Mentoring for Change Makers 

Chris Underhill MBE is a social entrepreneur and professional mentor. Over the years he has created and grown organisations focusing on wellbeing, resilience, and mental health. For example, Thrive, an organisation working in gardening, disability, resilience, and wellbeing.

Listen to episode: Coaching and Mentoring for Change Makers 

Zarlasht Halaimzai is the Founder and CEO of Amna – an organisation committed to supporting the mental wellbeing of refugees and other displaced communities. A former refugee from Afghanistan, Zarlasht’s experiences have informed her work and, prior to founding Amna, she advised NGOs on refugee education and wellbeing.

Listen to episode: Scaling Trauma-Care for Refugees

Joe Kenner was named president and CEO of Greyston in April 2020. His innovative leadership, experience, and expertise in collaborating with diverse stakeholders ensures our ability to deliver the best services possible to our neighbors in Westchester County (NY). oe joined the Greyston executive team in 2018 as the vice president of programs and partnerships, responsible for directing Greyston Workforce Development and Community Wellness strategies and activities.

Listen to episode: Breaking Employment Barriers Through Open Hiring

Mohamed is Spring Impact’s CEO, and has 20 years of experience of building partnerships, implementing and scaling programs in global health, social enterprise and humanitarian assistance across 25 countries. Previously Global Grants Director at Elton John AIDS Foundation (EJAF), Mohamed spent a decade growing the Foundation to become one of the foremost independent AIDS charities in the world.

Listen to the Episode: Lessons from A Life of Scaling Impact

Allison Metz, PhD, is a fellow of the UNC Frank Porter Graham Child Development Institute, as well as a developmental psychologist, professor of practice and director of implementation practice at the School of Social Work, former director of the National Implementation Research Network (NIRN), and adjunct professor at the Gillings School of Global Public Health at The University of North Carolina-Chapel Hill.

Listen to the Episode: The Path to Successful Implementation 

Scott Roy is a sales expert who consults with organizations that want to transform their sales performance. CEO and co-founder of Whitten & Roy Partnership (WRP), Scott leads a team of over 50 sales consultants who run sales transformation projects all over the world in both commercial and development markets. Since 2008, Scott has pioneered the provision of sales consulting services to the Social Enterprise movement.

Listen to the episode: How Social Entrepreneurs Can Become Effective Sales Leaders

Tom is a Co-Founder and Chief Strategy Officer of 60 Decibels. 60 Decibels is a social performance measurement company that helps organizations around the world better understand their customers, suppliers, and beneficiaries so as to both prove and improve their impact.

Listen to the Episode: Flipping the Script on Impact Measurement 

Lerato is an experienced development finance practitioner currently serving as the Managing Director of IMBE Enterprise Incubator – a social enterprise focused on advancing the financial resilience of women owned ECD enterprises. Lerato’s professional experience spans across financial services, youth employment, early childhood development, impact investing and corporate governance.

Listen to the Episode: Breaking Down Social Impact Bonds 

Dre is a Managing Partner of Rethink Education. He previously served as Managing Partner of Juvo Ventures. Before that, he came from Strada Education Network, where he was a Managing Director of Corporate Development, working as investment lead on several direct minority, control, and fund investments.

Episode: The Ins and Outs of Social Impact Investment

Smadar Nehab is an experienced hi-tech entrepreneur and executive who has started and led research and development organizations in Israel and California. Over the last decade she has focused on social entrepreneurship. Among other initiatives, she is co-founder of Tsofen High Technology Centers, a nonprofit that seeks to fully integrate the Arab community in Israel into the Israeli hi-tech industry. Tsofen’s work has led to considerable social change by up-starting high-tech industry in Arab cities and by promoting inclusion of Arabs in Israeli high-tech.

Featured in Episode: Tech Inclusion for Excluded Communities

Navigating between academic, professional, and activist positions, Linda is a research associate at the Harry S. Truman Research Institute for the Advancement of Peace at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, an experienced organizational consultant, and is involved in initiatives tackling the Jewish-Palestinian conflict. She studies and develops organizing strategies for interrupting economic and political inequalities and transforming national conflicts, and works with public, private and nonprofit organizations.

Featured in Episode: Tech Inclusion for Excluded Communities

Sonali has focused her career on the intersection of business, management and social impact. At Stanford Seed, she develops insights to continuously improve Seed’s programs and to enable Seed enterprises across Africa and South Asia to create greater impact as they innovate and grow. She also guides students in research on Seed enterprises, and partners with faculty on impact research and publications.

Featured in Episode: Pacing Entrepreneurs to Success

Tim Weiss is assistant professor of innovation and entrepreneurship at the Imperial College London and cofounding member of the Africa Tech Research Collective. His research program sits at the intersection of entrepreneurship and society, analysing the changing nature of entrepreneurship and its societal effects. He co-edited the open-access book “Digital Kenya: An Entrepreneurial Revolution in the Making.”

Featured in Episode: Pacing Entrepreneurs to Success

Finn is Executive Director of First Peoples Worldwide. Her expertise concerns articulating how the impacts of development in Indigenous communities must be addressed at all levels of business and investment in order to build healthy Native economies and communities for generations.

Featured in Episode: The Business Case for Indigenous Rights

Moira (she/ella/ela) brings over fifteen years of human rights and social justice advocacy, campaigning, and field experience to her work at Amazon Watch to hold the financial industry accountable for its contributions to Indigenous rights abuses, Amazon deforestation, and climate change. She has worked on researching community-based models of alternative economies, advocating for affordable housing, and promoting environmental protection, and spent several years as a human rights observer in Colombia.

Featured in Episode: The Business Case for Indigenous Rights

Ruth Wageman is one of the foremost scholars studying and working with teams, especially leadership teams. Ruth’s research, teaching, and practice are focused on the conditions that influence superb team performance. Ruth especially focuses on teams whose purpose is to solve complex problems and lead system transformation. Ruth has been a professor at Columbia, Dartmouth, and Harvard, where she has led many original research programs.

Featured in Episode: Dynamic Strategies for Successful Health Collaboratives

Gary Hirsch has been consulting with organizations on management strategy and organizational change for the past 50 years, working with clients in diverse areas such as health care, human services, education, microfinance, and news media. He specializes in applying System Dynamics and Systems Thinking and creating simulation-based learning environments that help clients understand the complex problems they are dealing with. Mr. Hirsch is a leader in promoting systemic approaches to health problems and health care delivery at the regional and national levels.

Featured in Episode: Dynamic Strategies for Successful Health Collaboratives

Dr. Gregory Unruh is a scholar, author and speaker on sustainability innovation and global leadership and serves as the Sustainability Editor for the MIT Sloan Management Review. Dr. Unruh is also a Senior Scholar at the Center for the Advancement of Wellbeing and the founding academic director of the Chief Sustainability Officer (CSO) Executive Education program.

Featured in Episode: Preserving Social Purpose Amid a Global Pandemic

Fernanda Arreola is the Dean of Faculty & Research at ISC Paris. She is also a Professor of Strategy, Innovation & Entrepreneurship and a researcher that focuses on service innovation, governance and social entrepreneurship. Fernanda has held numerous managerial and positions at a range of international academic and professional institutions.

Featured in Episode: Preserving Social Purpose Amid a Global Pandemic

Jeroo Billimoria is the founder of several innovative and award-winning NGOs and has over twenty years’ experience running systems change organizations as a Skoll awardee, an Ashoka and Schwab Fellow. Among her previous organisations are Child and Youth Finance International (CYFI), Aflatoun International, Childline India and Child Helpline International.

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Bart Houlahan, along with his partners, Jay Coen Gilbert and Andrew Kassoy, co-founded B Lab in 2006. B Lab is a non-profit organization with offices in 33 countries, driving economic systems change to build a more inclusive, equitable and regenerative economic system. Its mission is to serve a movement of people using business as a force for good by shining a light on leaders through a corporate certification (4000+ Certified B Corporations in 70+ countries), and then providing easy pathways for others to follow.

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Sharath Jeevan is one of the world’s leading experts on reigniting our inner drive (intrinsic motivation). He founded and led STIR Education – arguably the world’s largest intrinsic motivation initiative. Sharath is currently the Executive Chairman of Intrinsic Labs, which supports organizations all around the world to solve deep motivational challenges.

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Ann Mei Chang is a leading expert on social innovation and author of Lean Impact: How to Innovate for Radically Greater Social Good. Ann Mei served as the Chief Innovation Officer at USAID and first Executive Director of the US Global Development Lab, engaging the best practices for innovation from Silicon Valley to accelerate the impact and scale of solutions to the world’s most intractable challenges.

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Kevin Starr leads the Mulago Foundation. Mulago finds, funds, advises, and promotes organizations with scalable solutions to poverty. Mulago’s funding is unrestricted and continues as long as there is impressive progress toward impact at scale. The foundation’s two fellows programs teach promising early-stage social entrepreneurs how to design their solutions for maximum impact at big scale

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Anne-Marie Slaughter is the CEO of New America, a think tank that was founded in 1999. From 2009 to 2011, she served as director of policy planning for the United States Department of State, the first woman to hold that position. Anne-Marie is also the Professor Emerita of Politics and International Affairs at Princeton University. In 2012, she wrote “Why women still can’t have it all”, a piece that quickly became The Atlantic’s most read article in its then 150-year history.

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Tulaine Montgomery is an entrepreneur, educator, writer and organizer. She has played leadership roles in the launch and expansion of social enterprises across the U.S., the Caribbean, East Africa, Indonesia and South Africa. Tulaine currently serves as Co-CEO of New Profit, a venture philanthropy organization that backs visionary leaders who are scaling innovations and transforming our nation’s broken and inequitable systems.

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Emma joined The National Lottery Community Fund, the largest funder of community activity in the UK in 2017, with over 20 years’ experience of working with children, families and communities. As Funding Strategy Director, Emma is a member of the Senior Management Team and is responsible for ensuring that the strategic design, development and delivery of funding enables communities across the UK to thrive.

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Margot Fahnestock is a philanthropy and policy expert in family planning and reproductive health. In her role as Vice President, Strategic Development for nonprofit pharmaceutical organization Medicines360, Margot is helping align the organization though a strategy process integrating program development, impact measurement, and resource mobilization.

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Devin Hibbard is the Founder and CEO of Street Business School – an entrepreneurial training program that helps women living in poverty go from an average of $1.35 to $4.19 per day by starting their own businesses. Through a social franchise model, Street Business School is now in 25 countries and will reach 1 million women by 2027.

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Dr. Carmen Rojas (she/her) is the president and CEO of the Marguerite Casey Foundation. Prior to joining Marguerite Casey Foundation, Dr. Carmen Rojas was the co-founder and former CEO of The Workers Lab, an innovation lab that invests in entrepreneurs, community organizers, and government leaders to create replicable and revenue-generating solutions that improve conditions for low-wage workers.

Episode coming soon

Nisha Anand is a boundary-buster, common ground creator, non-violent culture-creator, outside-the-box experimenter, and national leader for social and racial justice. Her TED Talk, The Radical Act of Choosing Common Ground, was viewed over one million times in the run-up to the divisive 2020 election. Once a grassroots activist arrested in Burma for pro-democracy demonstrations, Nisha is known today as a leader in cultivating unlikely and unconventional partnerships to create change.

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Luvuyo’s entreprenerial spirit was nurtured from a young age growing up in Queenstown, South Africa and he founded Silulo Ulutho Technologies in 2004. The award winning IT services company now has over 46 stores in townships and rural areas in the Western, Eastern Cape and KwaZulu-Natal, 220 full-time staff members, and 18 franchisees. Luvuyo was named one of the JCI Ten Outstanding Young Persons of the World (JCI TOYP) in business, economics and/or entrepreneurial accomplishment; to be featured in Forbes Magazine’s March in 2014; and the Schwab Foundation Social Entrepreneur of the year in 2016.

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Karri led teams globally for clients such as Nike, Goldman Sachs, Toyota Motors, Sutter Health, Twitter and locally for Dignity Health and SHELTER, Inc and has built a reputation for the flexibility and cultural sensitivity required for not-for-profit and international relationships.

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Sharmi Surianarain serves as the Chief Impact Officer for Harambee Youth Employment Accelerator in South Africa. Sharmi is a fierce advocate for opportunity and social justice for young people and women across the African continent, and is a keen analyst and thinker on the future of work. Sharmi leads on Harambee’s impact and systems change agendas, and oversees Harambee’s work in new markets.

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