Role Models for Change: Recent Episodes
Skoll Foundation
Human rights lawyer Karen Tse is Founder and CEO of International Bridges to Justice, an organization that provides prisoners in 48 countries with access to justice and prevents torture as a tool for confession. Every day in countries throughout the world, hundreds of thousands of citizens are arbitrarily detained, tortured, and denied access to counsel. International Bridges to Justice defends those citizens with early access to properly trained counsel--justice defenders. Journalist Ray Suarez sat down with Tse to find out how International Bridges To Justice fights to preserve the rule of law, end investigative torture, and implement the judicial infrastructure that protects the rights of prisoners.
According the UNHCR, there are 25.4 million people currently registered as refugees, and over half of them are under the age of 18. These numbers will continue to grow as global conflicts, economic volatility, and climate change force many more to flee their homelands. What can be done to ensure that refugee youth have access to quality mental healthcare, education, and opportunities? How can we better support their integration into communities of resettlement and their re-integration when they return home?
Muzoon Almellehan is an education activist and Unicef Goodwill Ambassador. She fled her homeland in Syria, and sought refuge in Jordan where she advocates for the rights of children to access quality education. Journalist Ray Suarez sat down with Almellehan to hear more about her experience as a refugee and her efforts to ensure educational opportunity for every child.
Sherrie Westin is President of Global Impact and Philanthropy for Sesame Workshop, the nonprofit educational organization behind Sesame Street. She leads the Workshop’s efforts to serve vulnerable children through mass media and targeted initiatives in the United States and around the world. Westin spearheaded a partnership to create the largest early childhood intervention in the history of humanitarian response, bringing critical education and nurturing care to refugee children in the Syrian response region.
Working with the International Rescue Committee, she led Sesame Workshop’s efforts to compete for and win a historic $100 million grant from the MacArthur Foundation to fund this work. With an additional $100 million grant from The Lego Foundation, this initiative has expanded to Bangladesh. She also oversees Sesame Street in Communities, Sesame’s comprehensive initiative designed to give children the tools they need to overcome traumatic experiences.
Journalist Ray Suarez interviewed Westin to learn about Sesame Street’s efforts in Afghanistan, and how its local, culturally appropriate programs promote gender equity and plant the seeds for transformative societal change.
Essam Daod co-founded Humanity Crew in 2015 to provide first response mental health and psycho-social support for refugees and people in crisis. Journalist Ray Suarez sat down with Daod to hear more about his unique “inverted pyramid” approach to mental health support, and how communities have the capacity to heal themselves.
Emily Bancroft is President of VillageReach, an organization that works to transform health care delivery to reach everyone. VillageReach won the Skoll Award in 2006. Its initiative in Malawi, Chipatala cha pa Foni, a toll-free hotline that provides health and nutrition information to people in remote communities, is an international model for closing rural healthcare gaps.
VillageReach recently transitioned Chipatala cha pa Foni successfully to the Malawian Ministry of Health which has made the service its primary platform for COVD-19 information. James Nardella, former Skoll Foundation Principal and current Chief Program Officer for Last Mile Health, sat down with Emily in April of 2019 to talk about her personal journey to this work, why government partnerships are a crucial lever for systems change, and her vision for global health equity.
Sohini Bhattacharya is the CEO and President of Breakthrough, a global human rights organization working to drive culture change to build a world where all people live in dignity, equality, and respect. Among its many initiatives, Breakthrough reaches nearly half a million adolescents in India through school and community programs, ensuring girls face less discrimination, complete school, and delay their age at marriage. James Nardella, former Skoll Foundation Principal and current Chief Program Officer for Last Mile Health, sat down with Sohini to talk about the hard work of shifting culture norms of gender-based violence and discrimination. James started the conversation by asking Sohini about her childhood in India.
Ai-jen Poo is a leading labor activist and the founder of National Domestic Workers Alliance. The Alliance works to bring dignity and fairness to the growing numbers of workers who provide care and clean our homes, the majority of whom are immigrants and women of color. Ray Suarez sat down with Ai-jen at the 2019 Skoll World Forum to talk about the future of work in the age of automation and a new kind of support infrastructure she calls “Universal Family Care”.
In May 2015, a group of ambitious philanthropic collaborators, including the Skoll Foundation, pledged to make a measurable dent in Africa’s hunger crisis through a catalytic $100 million investment to dramatically scale the work of One Acre Fund. A Skoll Awardee in 2010, One Acre Fund boosts the productivity of smallholder farmers with financing and training they need to grow themselves out of poverty.
One Acre Fund now serves more than 750,000 farmer families in Africa directly and more than a million additional families through government partnerships. With the $100 million Audacious Project investment, One Acre Fund set a bold target for 2020: 1.25 million farming families reached through the core program, and another 3 million reached through government partnerships and private sector agrodealers. To unlock the Audacious funding, they’ll need to reach these goals, One Acre Fund must raise $200 million—a 1:2 matching mechanism. Their big picture systems-level vision of change is to fully transform agriculture in sub-Saharan Africa.
Over the last ten years One Acre Fund has grown in leaps, with more than 6,000 staff now in sub-Saharan Africa. James Nardella recently sat down with Andrew Youn, Founder and CEO of One Acre Fund, for a conversation about what drives him in his work, some of his early setbacks, and what he loves about the complexity of massive warehouses.
During West Africa’s devastating Ebola epidemic in 2014, the Liberian Ministry of Health and Last Mile Health—an organization that delivers primary health care to some of the most remote corners of the country – collaborated with other partners to create a unified national policy to extend health services to remote Liberians. Together, they established Liberia’s Community Health Assistant Program, a network of trained community health workers and nurses who provide medical services in rural, remote communities. Now, Last Mile Health is working with the Ministry of Health and a coalition of other NGOs to ensure the national program achieves full coverage of all 1.2 million rural Liberians by recruiting, training, and deploying 5,000 frontline health workers.
James Nardella recently sat down with Raj Panjabi, co-founder and CEO of Last Mile Health, to talk about healthcare inequity, lasting systems change, and how he found his way into medicine.
Welcome to Role Models for Change, a series of insightful conversations with social entrepreneurs and other innovators on the front lines of some of the world’s most pressing problems.
Today we’re talking with Safeena Husain, Founder and CEO of Educate Girls. Growing up in Delhi, India, Safeena found refuge and opportunity in education. She went on to study in the UK before building a career in community-based development. Educate Girls is an Indian NGO that enrolls and retains out-of-school girls and increases learning for both girls and boys. They’ve reached 2.5 million children in India and are on a path to reach 4.4 million in the next five years.