Anusha has been a dedicated development sector professional since 2002, with expertise in child and adolescent health, gender issues, public health, and rural development. As the Executive Director of VOICE 4 Girls, Anusha leads an India-wide movement of adolescent change-makers through the Girls-for-Girls approach. This model pairs rural, Adivasi adolescent girls with urban college women, fostering solidarity and creating networks of leaders rooted in feminist principles. This organisation has directly impacted 106,505 adolescent girls, who have in turn catalysed 122,500 peers, reaching a total of
250,000 girls. Anusha is committed to expanding the impact of VOICE 4 Girls and her vision is to eliminate gender inequality and violence by empowering young women to transform their communities and nations.

Meghna Chawla is dedicated to progressive and humanistic education, creating learning environments for diverse age groups. With over 10 years of experience, she enhances curriculums by analysing frameworks and applying continuous improvements.

Meghna is the founder of BookNook, an initiative where children appreciate art and literature through picture books. She is also the co-founder of the Foster and Forge Foundation, which drives lasting change in education. The foundation’s Beacon Educator Fellowship, a two-year program in partnership with the government of Uttar Pradesh, empowers government school teachers to adopt the organisation’s experiential learning model. This model fosters empathy, collaboration, and problem-solving in students. Meghna envisions expanding the Beacon Fellowship to create a national movement of reimagined classroom learning.

Sonal Kapoor is the Founder and a Board Member of Protsahan India Foundation, an intersectional feminist child-rights organization based in New Delhi. Protsahan has rescued and rehabilitated over 1,948 girls from violence and abuse, and it reaches 81,000 marginalized girls annually. The organization's goal is to ensure that every girl has access to safety, education, and opportunities to thrive.

Sonal is an Ashoka Fellow and a World Bank Fellow. She has studied at the Indian School of Business (ISB), the National Law School of India University (NLSIU), and Harvard University.

Nikita Ketkar is the founder and CEO of Masoom. Her journey from journalist to social reformer reflects a profound dedication to addressing educational disparities among marginalised communities and has earned her several awards, including the Savitribai Phule Fatima-Sheikh Award and the Mahila Pratibha Sanmaan Award.

Since its foundation in 2008, Masoom has revolutionised night schools, leading to remarkable improvements in enrollment rates, reduced dropout rates, and enhanced academic achievements. By collaborating with stakeholders at all levels, from government entities to local communities, Nikita ensures the sustainability and scalability of Masoom's initiatives, catalysing lasting change in India's educational landscape.

Ashwini is the founder of Pragati Abhiyan, a Civil Society Organisation focused on improving the delivery of government programs for the poor. Her work
emphasises reframing governmental programs to have a profound impact at the grassroots level. She strengthens local communities and government entities to enhance the efficacy of rural development programs like the Mahatma Gandhi National Rural Employment Guarantee Act (MGNREGA). 

Ashwini aims to incorporate her learnings from MGNREGA into broader economic development programs like the National Food Security Act (NFSA) and Pradhan Mantri Fasal Bima Yojana (PMFBY). With a focus on reviving millets and improving crop insurance implementation, she works towards sustainable agricultural practices and disaster mitigation.

Rajesh R. Trivedi is the Co-Founder and Managing Trustee of ALERT (Amenity Lifeline Emergency Response Team), a volunteer-driven NGO, that empowers anyone in case of an emergency to ensure the ‘Right to Life’ is a reality in India. He is a Management Professional with extensive consultancy experience in IT transformation to global corporate houses. A firm believer in generating value, whether business or social, he has been mentored by the greatest of minds in strategic thinking from the Tuck School of Business, Dartmouth, USA and Sri Sathya Sai Institute of Higher Learning, India. 

With over 3,00,000+ empowered in emergency response management so far, under his leadership, ALERT has forged MoUs with the Governments of Tamilnadu and Karnataka, the Indian Medical Association, The Academy of Clinical Training, Indian Institute of Technology, Tata Trusts and the Apollo Group of Hospitals.

Samina believes in achieving institutional social change through the adoption of policies and programs that promote equitable, inclusive and socially fair society in India. In 2017 she founded RightWalk Foundation (RWF) to ensure the efficient implementation of the law that provides the Right to Free and Compulsory Education (RTE) to children aged 6-14 free and compulsory education in India and requires private schools to reserve 25% of places for low- income children. In Uttar Pradesh (UP), which is the most populous Indian state and where RWF was founded, the organisation has had a massive impact.

Only 50% of public spending on basic services reaches the intended population, and more than 60% of India’s population continues to live under $2 a day. As a result, one billion Indians are vulnerable to being stuck in poverty traps if current inequalities persist. Tarun, though Indus Action, helps the most vulnerable Indian families access legislated benefits and also supports the government in providing those benefits using simple, technology-powered solutions. To date, Indus Action has enabled the enrollment of 580,349 students, has connected 172,446 pregnant mothers to their maternity entitlements and has made it possible for almost 90,000 workers to receive benefits.

Despite the growth in levels of education in India over the last 20 years, rates of upward social mobility remain the same. Ever since Arundhuti founded Mentor Together in 2009, the initiative has been a pioneer in the field of formal mentoring for young, at-risk people in India. To date, the programme has been experienced by over 700 mentors and 4,000 mentees. Given the outstanding results in 2021 the programme received applications from around 8,000 mentees and 4,000 mentors. 

Over two decades ago Meenakshi co-founded Goonj, an initiative that uses urban discard as a tool to alleviate financial poverty and enhance the dignity of communities financially impoverished in India, a country where 35% of its population lives below the poverty line. Goonj has improved and saved thousands of lives over two decades. It reaches out to a few thousand villages where around 10,000 projects on infrastructure, sanitisation or water conservation are carried out. Goonj nowadays processes 40,000 kgs of material every month. 

Dr. Sunderajan Krishnan tackles the contamination of water and its damaging impact on the health of the population in India in an innovative and pioneering way. Sunderrajan, Executive Director of INREM Foundation since 2007, has created a movement that mobilizes citizens as changemakers in the form of custodians of safe drinking water sources, remediators of polluted sources, and sources of new solutions and initiatives addressing the issue. This wide and inclusive participatory network of Water Quality Champions involves Government of India civil servants, local members of the community and school-going youth. 

More than 40% of 800 million rural Indians live on less than $1 a day and they are effectively marginalised with limited access to services and opportunities to break from poverty. Satyan believes that by empowering rural communities it is possible to achieve shared prosperity among all members of the communities involved. He co-founded Drishtee in 2000 and currently directs this organisation that has established a network of 578,449 rural families across 5,765 villages in five different regions in India, where communities and entrepreneurs work towards achieving collective progress. Drishtree aims to reach 4.5 million families in five regions to bring them out of poverty by activating 1,500 community organisations over the next three years (2022-2025). 

Community Action Collaborative (CAC) orchestrates and influences the actions and decisions of 360 partners, governments and other alliances, enabling them to solve issues affecting vulnerable communities in India and ensuring access to critical livelihood, health, social protection and climate impact solutions. CAC works with more than 2,000 volunteers to support 13 vulnerable communities throughout its network across 36 states and Union Territories in India. By 2025, CAC aims to enhance resilience for 10 million vulnerable population and for 100 organisations focused on vulnerable-people in the face of future humanitarian emergencies. Another key objective is the creation of a ready-to-act and resourceful platform to respond to emergencies in key vulnerable districts in India. 

India has the largest child population in the world (400M), 40% of them are in need of care and 8% are orphans. Jithin aims to break the cycle of poverty and abandonment of children and, as a co-founder and director of Make A Difference (MAD), focuses on providing the most vulnerable children with additional care and support systems to ensure they have what they need to live a life free from exploitation, and are capable of managing emotional and financial life crises. Every year, MAD works with 3,500 kids and more than 3,000 pro-bono volunteers, selected from 30,000 applicants, who contribute with 550,000 hours of work across 60 shelters in 23 cities in India. 

In India 20% of the population have at least one chronic NCD (Non-Communicable disease) and 33% suffer from hypertension. Nalini works in scaling up community-based delivery models to strengthen prevention and control of NCDs at population level in India. Nalini is the founder and CEO of Arogya World, an initiative that implements scalable, sustainable and science-based prevention programmes where people live, learn and work, delivering measurable impact. Arogya World has already reached 7.5M people in India and their goal is to impact 50M by 2026. The organisation received the 2022 UN Interagency Task Force and the WHO Special Programme on Primary Health Care Award. 

Poor quality education has a huge negative impact on 100M children in state primary schools in India. Mammohan's goal is to change the way the education system works by providing on-the-ground support and tech-based solutions for teachers, local administrators and policy makers. Aditya is the co-founder of Kaivalya Education Foundation, an institution that works on the transformation in 13 estates across the country, 140 districts and 120,000 schools. The Foundation has had a significant impact over the last 20 years: 5,023 schools have been completely transformed, 115,000 students have enrolled back in schools and 40,000 teachers and heads and 22,400 middle managers have been fully trained.   

Despite a 95% government school enrolment rate, the highest ever recorded, academic performance still ranks low and drop out rates are high in India. Saransh, co-founder and director of Saajha, works closely with parents, as he believes that parents can positively impact the education and lives of their children. Since Saajha was established in 2014, it has worked across more than 2,000 schools in Delhi, Maharashtra, Jharkhand and Karnataka. During 2020-21 more than 65,000 families received support from Saajha and its stakeholders and more than 7,000 parents were supported with home schooling. 

Priya is taking at-risk children - school dropouts or potential dropouts in urban slum communities, juveniles in conflict with the law and those engaged in the informal, exploitative sector - through a transformative journey that enables them to articulate their desired career paths, set goals and chart a realistic course of action.  Her work is ensuring that children from this underprepared space who would otherwise not even be able to consider formal employment options get an opportunity to do so. Through her organization, Priya is breaking stereotypes around job opportunities for children from low-income backgrounds, moving them from exploitative workspaces and preparing them for the growing organized sector in India. The foundation has managed to impact the lives of more than 82000 students through CareerReady and CareerAware.

As a founder of Healing Fields Foundation, Mukteshwari Bosco (Mukti) has utilized her profound understanding of rural communities and their need to develop a series of community-driven innovations in health, in India. Healing Fields launched a micro health insurance program at a time when the majority of Indians were not insured, leading to its national and international recognition.   

The lessons learnt, led to the germination of another highly impactful program, the Community Health Entrepreneur Program. The model is grounded in empowering women as health agents of change to create health awareness in rural communities. Based on the feedback from the participants, the program has expanded to bringing health products and services to last-mile communities while creating livelihoods for the health agents.  Today, this preventative health education program reaches over 6 million families in India.   

Mukti’s passion for community empowerment helps her to see every new challenge as an opportunity for new learning and growth while mentoring and inspiring those around her.  Her aspiration is to empower women with digital tools to amplify access and hold health systems accountable in order to achieve the well-being of 300 million marginalised people in India by 2030.

To create an environmentally aware and active generation, Kuldeep is designing and promoting hands-on and participatory learning about environmental issues. He takes children through a cycle of “why” (a problem exists), “how” (to create a solution), and “what” (are the expected outcomes and what needs to be done to achieve them). The children learn to co-create among themselves—as well as with adults—on a wide range of solutions, from simple actions such as fixing leaking taps to more ambitious projects, like creating biogas plants for their school. Reap Benefit has contributed to the creation of 337 civic innovations, which some of them have saved 4,60,00,000 litres of water and diverted 6,65,000 tonnes of waste from landfill.

Susannah created Generations of Leaders Discovered (GOLD) to develop social capital in African youth. By employing a structured three-year curriculum, GOLD trains and educates potential young leaders and role models in schools and communities who educate, guide and mentor their peers. These young leaders urge their peers to adopt a positive way of thinking about their lives and encouraging their peers to overcome the social challenges they face. It is an evidence-based youth peer education model which has reached over 71,000 young people in 123 communities in 4 countries and seen concrete results in social behaviour change, education and job creation.

Dr Manu Gupta, Co-Founder of SEEDS, believes that every community has the right to dignity, well-being and control over their own lives. As a child, Manu exhibited a love for fixing problems in the field seeing his father, an engineer. His mother, a geography teacher, nurtured his interest in the natural environment.  

Through his organization, he empowers local communities to be better prepared for natural disasters and recuperate from them. He bridges the needs and concerns of people affected by disasters with national and international governments to create effective policies towards mitigation, relief, recovery and reconstruction.  His approaches are inspired by indigenous traditional knowledge. To date, SEEDS has assisted over 3 million people helping prevent losses, and rebuilding lives and assets. It has rebuilt over 100 schools and assisted in rebuilding 45,000 houses in South Asia.    

Manu is now focused to scale its mission of a community-owned disaster management approach from Asia-Pacific, globally. SEEDS’ 2030 strategy is to ensure the safety, security and wellbeing of the bottom 1% of families - the 15 million men, women and children suffering losses from floods, cyclones and extreme heat reducing losses by 90 % in the most climate-vulnerable 151 districts of India.

Here is the story about Manu's journey during the Accelerator.

Working closely with inmates as a clinical psychologist, Marjan realized how limited their opportunities for change were. To ensure her efforts would work, she involved prison workers, welfare institutions, artists, athletes, journalists, lawyers, politicians and founded Touché.     

Marjan and her organization, Touché, seek to inspire society to deal with aggression in a constructive way and work with people who are vulnerable because of it. Touché (re-)integrates people with aggression-related problems creating opportunities for them to co-create their own and each other’s solutions together.  They create new roles for (ex-)prisoners and shaped a favourable and inclusive perception of (ex-) prisoners at the same time. By transforming aggression into a positive force, the number of violent incidents decreases, and the number of successful re-integration increases.   

Touché is now building a societal platform to translate anger into untapped energy that can be redirected and utilized in a positive manner. The mission is to catalyse daily positive aggressive choices globally, to see as many people as possible in different parts of the world being more positive and hopeful, seizing opportunities, pursuing equality, finding solutions to their problems, and being more empathic towards each other, especially to those who make us angry. By redefining, sharing and distributing positive aggressive management practices, we change the relationship we all have with anger and the way we interact with each other in and around tense situations.

Sascha is creating mechanisms to spread innovation into cities, improve governance, and radically alter the way cities deliver much-needed services. With the use of new technology application concepts—a city as a lab—he is mobilizing a new community focused on making cities more functional for citizens. Sascha is creating a new space for government, corporations, and public sectors to engage for larger social impact.

Jessica sees marginalized communities not only as recipients of information but also as active creators of content. As local people have been subject to discrimination and have a firsthand perspective, she believes they are uniquely suited to be innate correspondents. Being a reporter also improves livelihood opportunities. By utilizing the skills of empathy, teamwork, leadership and change-making, Jessica is tapping into the unique potential of marginalized citizens and pushing them to go beyond their own stories to become the voices of their communities. Video Volunteers has involved 249 correspondents and generated more than 6291 videos.

Here is the story about Jessica's journey during the Accelerator.

Sarah is a conservation scientist working to rebuild forests and protect endangered wildlife in the tropical dry forests and coastal wetlands of Central America. Her firsthand experience as a young researcher in Nicaragua had a profound impact, convincing her that nature protection must come with opportunities for local people and respect for their culture. This led her to launch Paso Pacifico 15 years ago. Over this time, the organization has effectively averted the local extinction of several species while also building an ethos of nature stewardship within local communities. 

 Today, the climate emergency is upending progress in biodiversity conservation while also threatening the security and well-being of humans. This situation keeps Sarah awake at night.  

 Thus, her current ambition is to elevate traditional forestry knowledge and tools of indigenous and peasant farmers through a technological platform. Her hope is finding ways in which technology and platform thinking will give agency and dignity to people through forest restoration while also reducing greenhouse gases and increasing biodiversity

Ashraf's organization ComMutiny works on building leadership for social change with young people by creating vibrant ecosystems and youth-centric spaces.  It focuses on transforming young people by engaging them in deep self-exploration and supporting their social action experiments to become changemakers and awakened active citizens (Jagriks) of their communities, their nations, the planet and the larger Universe. This helps nurture social inclusion, holistic development and fosters social hope by promoting feelings of freedom, ownership, love and learning and growth.

Biplab has created an irrigation system to address water shortage and land dryness by reintroducing the technology of Bhungroo (meaning straw in Gujarat). This concept does not warrant famers to do any upfront payments, instead, they agree to a five-year contract where they can repay the service of waterlogging and irrigation with their crop production. This project is largely used and run by women. 132 units of Bhungroo emancipated more than 6100 farmers from yearly migration to cities, as a result, they regained their land, many for the first time after India’s independence.

Shanti is employing a business-school approach to disabled employee training that emphasizes problem-solving, team building, and other soft skills. She shares these new methodologies with other training organizations and uses them as a tool to professionalize and pool trained candidates for strategic job opportunities that she identifies. Rather than answering individual job advertisements, Shanti uses her high-level contacts to conduct corporation-wide assessments in order to identify strategic areas to which she can introduce disabled employees. She then shares her diagnostic approach and results with other organizations that train the disabled and encourages them to approach companies in a similar manner.

Jack’s formidable strategic question is how to transform the dysfunctional market for sanitation into a full, dynamic & beneficial one. The key is to stimulate demand for better toilets, there is an actual need for: “first toilets” among people without any access to proper sanitation; better toilet facilities in urban areas worldwide; and for capital to expand existing services. Jack is now shifting his attention and energy to generating mass-production of sanitation products for low-income groups. He reckons that although poor people cannot afford expensive toilets, their numbers are large enough to command well-designed products at low prices: two and a half billion people mean that more than 500 million toilets need to be supplied.

By bringing together industry associations, municipal corporations, NGOs, informal sector waste pickers, collectors, citizens and responsible recyclers, Pranshu is creating a value chain of stakeholders that can meaningfully and successfully shift perceptions and the management of e-waste. By integrating existing informal practices into legitimate, systemic and transparent channels, Pranshu is constructing a much-needed framework for governments and multilateral organisations (such as the World Bank) to replicate this model and to take it to other countries. In 2017, Karo Sambhav through its transparent system of recycling has been able to keep 300,000 kg of e-waste out of landfills and into formal recycling channels.

Here is the story of Pranshu's journey in the Accelerator.

Thorkil Sonne founded Specialisterne after his young son was diagnosed with autism. The family had to address several difficult questions and the answers would not only prove valuable for Thorkil’s son, but also the millions of people on the autism spectrum across the world. 

When realizing the impact could benefit beyond autism, he founded the not-for-profit Specialisterne Foundation to enable inclusive employment for one million neurodivergent people across the world through social entrepreneurship, corporate sector engagement and a global change in mindset.  Thorkil and his teams have established a proven track record of inclusive employment. 

Thorkil's ambitious vision is to restore agency at scale for neurodivergent citizens by leveraging platform thinking and technology, to educate volunteers and professionals in neurodiversity inclusion to catalyse decent work and economic growth in communities across the world. 

Kinari has introduced a program that combines healthcare, medical training, environmental conservation and education; to improve people’s health as well as the state of the environment. Through her organization, people living in the buffer zone around the Gunung Palung National Park may access affordable high-quality healthcare in return for serving as defenders of the rainforest. For example, Villages with fewer illegal-logging cases receive a 70 per cent discount on health services. Her program has received 9,000 patients in 2018 and has allowed for a 67% decline in infant mortality. Environmental wise, Borneo’s Gunung Palung rainforest contains the equivalent of 14 years of San Francisco’s CO2 emissions thanks to the tree plantation and caring program from Health in Harmony.