Southwest Florida’s new think tank, Searching for Solutions Institute, is bringing 40 of the world’s brightest minds to its inaugural conference Feb. 22–23 at the Philharmonic Center for the Arts in Naples to tackle issues such as affordable healthcare, quality education, alternative energy sources, preserving the environment and energizing the economy.
One of the most exciting aspects of the conference is its proof that the next generation of leaders is stepping up. Twelve young social entrepreneurs—or “SocialPreneurs”—will discuss how their ideas, focused on fixing problems instead of the bottom line, have created true social change. They’re tackling blighted neighborhoods, homelessness, genocide, human trafficking, cancer and more. Meet the 12 and hear what they have to say about their challenges, successes and problems.

BARBARA BUSH & JOHN DORSEY
Founders, Global Health Corps, www.ghcorps.org
    Global Health Corps improves healthcare services for the poor and promotes global health equality by connecting young leaders with organizations working on the front lines. Barbara Bush, daughter of former President George W. Bush, is a Yale graduate who has worked at a children’s hospital in South Africa and traveled throughout Africa with UNICEF and the United Nations World Food Program. Dorsey took a two-year leave of absence from Stanford University to co-found FACE AIDS, a nonprofit student organization promoting global health activism. He was a leadership fellow at the Haas Center for Public Service, co-organized a retreat for emerging service leaders and led an alternative spring break called “Changemakers: Perspectives on Public Service Leadership.” Bush and Dorsey received an Echoing Green Fellowship to support their role in Global Health Corps.

How are social entrepreneurs changing the world?
    “After working at Red Cross Children’s Hospital in South Africa and interning for UNICEF in Botswana, I saw the impact young energetic professionals with varying skill sets and experiences can make in improving health delivery services for the poor. Global Health Corps aims to connect these talented young professionals with organizations working for global health equity.” 

—Barbara Bush

    “I spent a summer working in a refugee camp in northern Zambia. I was infuriated seeing countless people suffer from preventable and treatable diseases, from malaria to pneumonia to AIDS. The death of a friend from AIDS is what compelled me to devote myself to global health. I was sure others in my generation would want to get involved, too.”
             

   —John Dorsey

ANDREW BUTCHER
Co-founder and CEO, Growth Through Energy & Community Health Strategies, 
www.gtechstrategies.org
    The Pittsburgh-based, nonprofit GTECH reclaims blighted urban areas and revitalizes them using environmentally sensitive strategies, such as transitional bio-energy gardens. Butcher has studied and worked in the fields of renewable energy, resource management, public policy and community development for the past 10 years and was awarded an Echoing Green Fellowship for social entrepreneurs in 2008. He holds a master’s degree in public policy and management from Heinz College at Carnegie Mellon University and a bachelor’s degree in political science from American University in Washington, D.C.

How are social entrepreneurs changing the world?
    “In my experience, observation, reflection, adaptation and the translation of ideas into action is an essential recipe to gain momentum in changing the world. It is necessary for entrepreneurial folks to understand the context that sparks their ideas, share their ideas, build collaborations, adjust as necessary, but keep an eye on getting things done.”

DR. JORDAN KASSALOW
Founder, VisionSpring, www.visionspring.org
    A practicing optometrist, Dr. Jordan Kassalow founded VisionSpring with the goal of reducing poverty and generating opportunity in the developing world by grooming rural entrepreneurs to sell affordable eyeglasses. He created a franchise partnership using a “business in a bag” model that contains everything the entrepreneur needs to start a business selling reading glasses. The company has more than 1,100 vision entrepreneurs selling glasses in India, Mexico, Latin America and Africa. Kassalow has received numerous honors, including the Social Innovator of the Year Award from Brigham Young University’s Marriott School of Management, The Aspen Institute’s Henry Crown Fellowship, the John P. McNulty Prize and a Draper Richards Foundation Fellowship. He received a doctorate of optometry from the New England College of Optometry and completed a fellowship in preventive ophthalmology and a master’s in public health from Johns Hopkins University.

How are social entrepreneurs changing the world?
    “Forging different paths, social entrepreneurs all pave the way for people to lift themselves out of poverty by providing the means for economic self-reliance.  While improving global access to health, education, technology and more, social entrepreneurs also change the world by setting an example for the next generation of leaders.  They prove the impact one person can have in the world and set new definitions of what it means to be successful.”    

DEREK ELLERMAN
Co-founder and Interim Executive Director, Polaris Project, www.ellerman.org
    Polaris Project is a nonprofit organization combating human trafficking and modern-day slavery. Ellerman, who specializes in criminal network operations, law enforcement collaboration and trafficking policy, supervised the development and implementation of Polaris programs in the United States and Japan. He has trained and worked closely with federal and local law enforcement, testified before Congress and worked directly with trafficking victims. Formerly an adjunct professor at Trinity University, he taught graduate-level courses dealing with international criminal network operations and counter-trafficking strategies. He was named an Ashoka Fellow in 2004 and served as a senior advisor to the U.S. program of Ashoka Innovators for the Public.

What major obstacles are there to succeeding as a social entrepreneur?
    “Becoming a social entrepreneur is a lot like being a regular entrepreneur with one big difference: the bottom line. An idea had better be innovative, and you are still expected to do your homework. That includes writing a business plan and checking out the competition, among other things. We felt, based on looking at the existing organizations, none took the approach we wanted to take.”

ROSANNE HAGGERTY
President and Founder, Common Ground, www.commonground.org
    Common Ground has helped more than 4,000 people overcome homelessness by creating a network of well-designed, affordable apartments and a link to the services needed to maintain their housing, restore their health and regain their economic independence. A graduate of Amherst College and Columbia University, Haggerty is completing studies for a doctorate in sociology at New York University. She is an urban advisor to the Urban Land Institute; a board member of the Center for Urban Community Services, the Citizen’s Housing and Planning Council, Iraq and Afghanistan Veterans of America and Quest Diagnostics; and is a life trustee of Amherst College. Haggerty is a 2001 MacArthur Foundation Fellow and was elected an Ashoka Senior Fellow in 2007. She was also a Japan Society Public Policy Fellow, an Adelaide Thinker in Residence, a Rockefeller Foundation Bellagio Fellow and is a Hunt Alternatives Fund Prime Mover.

What is the future of this field in five years?
    “I think the challenges will continue to be ones of implementation: of finding the people who have the entrepreneurial mindset, the relational skills and any needed content knowledge to deliver results in challenging environments; to match resources, particularly government resources, with this new paradigm, and to scale up good models.”

MARK HANIS
Founder and President, Genocide Intervention Network, www.genocideintervention.net
    Mark Hanis created the Genocide Intervention Network in response to his outrage over the international community’s inaction to stop the Darfur conflict in Sudan, but GI-NET expanded its efforts to include providing individuals and communities the tools to prevent and stop genocide in Burma, Sri Lanka and the Congo. The grandchild of four Holocaust survivors, Hanis has a deep understanding of individual persecution and of hope and opportunity. He credits his work with Colombian asylum seekers and torture victims, and Sierra Leone refugees to opening his eyes to the plight of the underclass and leading him to a life dedicated to anti-genocide activism. Hanis has been honored with Ashoka, Echoing Green and Draper Richards fellowships, and is a 2009 World Economic Forum Global Leader. He has been featured in The New York Times, the Christian Science Monitor and The New Republic and has appeared on CNN, MSNBC and NPR.

How are social entrepreneurs changing the world?
    “Social entrepreneurs are changing the world by turning long-standing problems, often viewed as unsolvable, into concrete opportunities for widespread change.  Rather than Band-aid fixes to the symptoms of problems, social entrepreneurs are working to achieve an actual system change that eliminates the root cause of the problem and creates a new status quo.”

REBECCA ONIE
Founder and CEO, Project HEALTH, www.projecthealth.org
Rebecca Onie launched Project HEALTH during her sophomore year at Harvard to break the link between poverty and poor health. In addition to medical treatment, doctors at the group’s clinics also “prescribe” food and housing for their patients, who are then connected to a network of undergraduate volunteers and local resources to achieve stability and opportunity that will that lead to better health for the patients and their children. Onie attended Harvard Law School, where she served as an editor of the Harvard Law Review. She practiced law in Chicago, representing civil rights plaintiffs, health centers, affordable housing developers and nonprofits before returning to Project Health as CEO in February 2006. The organization now operates 18 clinics in six cities. Onie received a 2009 MacArthur Fellowship. She is also an Ashoka Fellow. 

What major obstacles are there to succeeding as a social entrepreneur?
    “One of the greatest challenges facing social entrepreneurs today is ensuring that there is a rich talent pipeline of people with the skills and talent that are necessary to bring a vision to fruition. With so many critical missions that social enterprises are driving toward, it’s even more important that we invest in training and mentoring for those who are interested in systems change.”

JOSH SOMMER
Executive Director, Chordoma Foundation, www.chordomafoundation.org
    Josh Sommer co-founded the Chordoma Foundation with his mother, Dr. Simone Sommer, after he was diagnosed with the slow-growing bone cancer during his freshman year at Duke University. The organization is dedicated to improving the lives of chordoma patients by rapidly developing effective treatments and ultimately a cure for the disease, which is usually fatal within seven years. Josh encourages patients to play an active role in the search for treatments. Soon after his diagnosis, he joined the lab of a noted Duke oncologist studying chordoma and switched majors to a self-designed bioengineering curriculum focused on solving biological conditions that may have led to the disease. Josh was awarded an Echoing Green Fellowship for social entrepreneurs in 2008 following his junior year. He has taken a leave of absence from Duke to lead the Chordoma Foundation.

What is the future of this field in five years?
    “There has been a boom of social ventures providing training, credit and technology to solve tough social problems. In the future, I believe we’ll see more and more social entrepreneurs venturing into the realm of science and engineering—not just funding research, but actually taking ownership of the innovation process. For example, watch for a new breed of non-profit biotechnology companies that develop affordable drugs for neglected diseases.”

JILL VIALET
Founder and President, Playworks, www.playworksusa.org
    Vialet launched Playworks (formerly Sports4Kids) in 1996, bringing play and physical activities to students at two low-income urban schools in Berkeley, Calif. It now serves urban schools in 10 cities around the country with the goal of serving more than 100,000 children each day. A graduate of Harvard University, Vialet studied medical sociology, played rugby and became actively involved with the school’s service-learning community. In 1996 she was awarded Radcliffe’s Jane Rainie Opel Award for achievement by a young alumna. Vialet was a Eureka Fellow in 2000 and an Ashoka Fellow in 2004. She serves on the board of directors at the Museum of Children’s Art in Oakland and is a member of the advisory board for the University of California, Berkeley’s Principal Leadership Institute. She plays actively by running and mountain biking, among other outdoor activities.

What major obstacles are there to succeeding as a social entrepreneur?
“The challenges facing the social entrepreneur are virtually identical to the challenges facing any entrepreneur: talent, the status quo, access to credit and an unstable economy. I would add that social entrepreneurs also have the added pressure of dealing with an irrational market because people’s investments in nonprofit organizations tend to be even more subjective than their investments in income- generating operations.”

JESSAMYN WALDMAN
Founding Director, Hot Bread Kitchen, www.hotbreadkitchen.org
    Around New York City, Hot Bread Kitchen is known for its great bread, but it is more than a bakery. It’s a business that enhances the futures of immigrant women by providing them with paid training in baking, access to a diverse professional and social network, and a flexible schedule that allows for their development of better-paying careers. Waldman holds an MPA from Columbia University where she specialized in immigration policy.  She has worked extensively at the U.N. and with NGOs in the United States and abroad, focusing on human rights education and immigration policy. She developed professional bread-baking skills with a Master Baker’s certificate from the New School University and as a baker at New York’s renowned Daniel, Daniel Boulud’s flagship restaurant.

What major obstacles are there to succeeding as a social entrepreneur?
    “Anybody who talks about this is going to say funding is a major obstacle, and I agree to a certain extent. Your conviction requires a high level of commitment to responding to social issues. It takes a lot of sacrifice in the start-up stage. We got a competitive start-up grant that’s not available to most people. The unfortunate reality for most people is that they have good ideas, but don’t have grant-writing experience or connections.”

RAJIV VINNAKOTA
Co-Founder and Managing Director, The SEED Foundation, www.seedfoundation.com
    The SEED Foundation is devoted to bringing outstanding educational opportunities to underserved inner-city communities. Vinnakota has been involved in every facet of planning and development of the foundation’s first project, the SEED School of Washington, D.C., the nation’s only public-access college-prep boarding school for inner-city children. He is an Echoing Green fellow, an Ashoka Fellow and a former Princeton University trustee. He was named a Washingtonian of the Year by Washingtonian magazine, received the Manhattan Institute’s Social Entrepreneurship Award, an Oprah Winfrey Use Your Life Award and recently was named the 2009 winner of Princeton’s Woodrow Wilson Award.

How are social entrepreneurs changing the world?
    “[Being a management consultant] was a great job, but that was not the social footprint that I wanted to leave. I really wanted to make a difference in people’s lives.”