Thursday, March 31, 2011
Working with Governments to Deliver High Impact Solutions
Session Description
Social innovators often work with governments to leverage existing infrastructure and to deliver the highest impact. These partnerships offer tremendous promise for scaling and pave the way for sustainable approaches to other social challenges. Four successful social entrepreneurs describe their breakthrough initiatives and high-impact results in the public sector –each with different approaches, issues and geographies, but with similar challenges.
When | Where
11:00 - 12:30
Thursday, March 31
Session leaders
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Gary Cohen has been an advocate in the environmental health community for over thirty years. For many years he worked for an organization that provided technical assistance to community leaders living in polluted places. Over the last twenty years he has led Health Care Without Harm, whose mission is to address the environmental footprint of the health sector and transform health care organizations into community anchors for resilience and sustainability. Cohen received a MacArthur Award in 2015. He is married to a yoga teacher and has a daughter who is training to be a horse whisperer.
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Director, Global Strategy, Riders For Health
Lakshmi Karan is Global Strategy Director of Riders for Health, a social enterprise delivering transportation solutions to millions in the last mile. In the social sector, she was the Skoll Foundation’s Director of Impact Assessment and served as a strategic advisor to global non-profits. In the private sector, she was a management consultant to Fortune 500 companies. Her expertise is in growth strategy and social impact.
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Ma. Cecilia Flores-Oebanda (Cecilia) spent most of her life as a Freedom Fighter. She fought against the Marcos regime as a freedom fighter. She was captured when she was pregnant with her second child and for four years, raised two of her kids in jail. Upon her release after the People Power revolution, she established the Voice Of The Free (formerly known as Visayan Forum Foundation) (VF), a non-proft recognized worldwide for its innovative solutions to end modern slavery. She is an Anti-Slavery Awardee, a Trafficking in Persons Hero, and the Skoll Award for Social Entrepreneurship Awardee. She was featured by The CNN Freedom Project in a full-length documentary entitled “The Fighters". She is also featured in BBC, PBS-US and CCTV. The safehouse VF operates now houses trafficking victims who are on the way to healing, economic empowerment, prosecution of their abusers and re-integration to mainstream society.
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Vicky Colbert
Laureate of the first edition of the Yidan Prize for Education Development (2017) and 2013 WISE Prize for Education Laureate, Vicky Colbert is founder and director of Fundación Escuela Nueva.
Colbert is a Sociologist from Javeriana University in Colombia and pursued her graduate studies in Sociology of Education at Stanford University in the United States. In 2015, the American University of Nigeria distinguished her with an Honoris Causa Doctorate in Philosophy.
She is co-author of the worldwide renowned Escuela Nueva model and was its first National Coordinator. Colbert has pioneered, expanded and sustained this educational innovation from many organizational spheres: as Viceminister of Education of Colombia, UNICEF´s Education Adviser for LAC and now from Fundación Escuela Nueva (FEN), an NGO she founded to ensure its quality, sustainability and innovation.
She has been recognized with several awards and distinctions in the fields of leadership and social entrepreneurship, such as the Skoll Award for Social Entrepreneurship, the Clinton Global Citizenship Award, the Kravis Prize, the Colombiano Ejemplar Prize (Colombia 2017) and Magisterio Prize (Spain 2017). She has also been recognized as Outstanding Social Entrepreneur by the Schwab Foundation, Ashoka and the World Technology Network.
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Founder and President of Ciudad Saludable, and President of Healthy Cities International Foundation, all belonging to Healthy City Group; external Consultant for the InterAmerican Bank – IADB and the World Bank. Albina obtained her Ph.D. summa cum laude in Chemical Engineering, at the Universitat Ramón Llull, Spain (2010). Graduated as Industrial Engineer at the UNI (National University of Engineering), and as Sanitary Engineer in Solid Waste, as second specialty, Peru. M.A. in Ecology and Environmental Management at Ricardo Palma University (2000), Peru. Ashoka Social Entrepreneur Fellow since 1996, she is considered among the world’s best social entrepreneurs. Also chosen by Schawb Foundation and by Skoll Foundation as Outstanding Social Entrepreneur and Avina Leader as well, as a result of the work she develops in environmental issues and especially in solid waste and water care; she has performed several environmental studies of the basin of the Santa River, of the Yarinacocha Lagoon, due to the impact that solid waste and sewage water have on this water stream. She is Board Member at the Global Fairness Initiative in USA.
