All of the cases listed here are from our series on Design and Social Enterprise, funded by the Rockefeller Foundation through a grant to William Drenttel and Winterhouse Institute.
Harish Hande and the company he founded, SELCO, provide solar electricity for lighting and power to India's poor. For his company's work, he has received numerous recognitions and is frequently cited as one of the top social entrepreneurs in India and an example for the entire developing world. But the road to SELCO’s success has not always been smooth.
In the early 2000s, Mayo Clinic physician Nicholas LaRusso began asking himself a question: if we can test new drugs in clinical trials, can we also test new kinds of doctor-patient interactions. Although over the last 50 years there had been enormous advances in diagnosing and treating disease, the health care experience had become increasingly complex.
When Krista Dong and Zinhle Thabethe came to the 2006 PopTech conference in Camden, Maine, they hoped to expand their fight against HIV/AIDS, one of South Africa’s greatest problems. They were the founders of iTEACH, an HIV/AIDS and TB prevention and treatment program in KwaZulu-Natal, South Africa. Impressed by their story, conference organizers and Robert Fabricant of frog design came together with iTEACH to address these real-world challenges through the conference’s vision - accelerating social innovation.
By their November 2011 annual conference in Mumbai India, Teach For All’s network consisted of 23 national partner organizations. Network members came from all over the globe. From tiny Estonia with near universal literacy, to India with over 900 times more people and only 75% literacy, from China with single-party authoritarian rule, to England with hundreds of years of multi-party democracy. Uniting the network, though, was a commitment to building an organization similar to Teach For America in their respective countries. Teach For America was the brainchild of Wendy Kopp.
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