By on May 22, 2017

Claire Fallender

Claire has a deep sense of justice and fairness which has led her towards a career in building systems that support social entrepreneurs and young changemakers driving positive impact in the world.

Claire’s trajectory was highly influenced by supportive parents: A mathematician mother who challenged inflexible gender norms until she chose to pivot all her acumen into community leadership in public education and a business executive father whose work trips abroad taught Claire a sincere respect for a diversity of cultures not her own. They purposefully instilled in her a deep sense of fairness and a sense that she could do anything.

Claire’s changemaking journey started in high school where she became a leader in her school’s social change organization, overseeing a dozen student-led initiatives from housing to health to social justice. This work and early experiences volunteering with a community organization in Honduras exposed Claire first-hand to how well-intentioned people from outside a community could unintentionally do more harm than good.

In college Claire led a number of social justice initiatives. For instance, after witnessing labor violations so close to home as an intern with a leading garment worker’s union in New York, she launched the Students Against Sweatshops campaign at Yale, resulting in the administration approving a Code of Conduct to ensure the university’s ethical sourcing of its licensed goods. While studying in Chile, Claire was inspired by an Ashoka Fellow who demonstrated the kind of systems change impact only possible for someone who lives with the social problem and can skillfully put others into powerful roles. She graduated college and joined Ashoka’s team.

At Ashoka, Claire worked at every level of Venture, starting in D.C. and quickly moving to Brazil where she led the Venture/Fellowship program. She co-designed with a Fellow and launched Ashoka Brazil’s first youth changemaking program. Led by her passion for connecting the impact of social entrepreneurs and public policy change, she left Ashoka in 2004 to pursue a degree in Public Affairs at the Princeton School of Public and International Affairs where she eventually worked with UNICEF to develop the first inter-agency guidelines for supporting adolescent girls across 7 UN agencies.

After Princeton Claire joined the Oikos-Cooperation and Development, a social entrepreneur-led Portuguese organization in Mozambique, as a country leader in 2006. Her work catalyzed innovative approaches to support farmer and fishing cooperatives in their mitigation of the impacts of climate change and the HIV epidemic. Unsettled by the lack of support to Mozambican social entrepreneurs and changemakers, Claire returned to Ashoka to lead the Global Venture Program.

In the last decade, Claire has entreprenerd Ashoka’s LeadYoung initiative to help young people and now everyone to tell their Everyone a Changemaker story. She works across our global team of colleagues to develop tools and systems to align our global youth strategy and bring resources to support our core strategy. For example, she intrapreneured the four super key EACH dashboards.

In Claire’s free time, she loves to hike, make Halloween costumes and windchimes. She is grateful for the support of her husband and two young sons.

Valeria Budinich: Helping social entrepreneurs to access capital and resources to scale their initiatives

ソース: Valeria Budinich

Valeria Budinich is a social entrepreneur and organizational strategist with 25 years’ experience specializing in high-impact business/social entrepreneurship.

Valeria’s pathway as a leading social entrepreneur started with a roulette wheel. When she was ten, she asked her parents for one for Christmas, inspired by her mom’s avid poker playing. It was the beginning of summer vacation and her parents didn’t have money that year for a family vacation so Valeria was determined to do something different and fun. She started inviting kids from the neighborhood to bring their piggy banks and bet on her roulette. Soon she was running a homegrown gambling ring!

Valeria started to win over and over again. Other kids thought it was because she was the dealer so she let them play that role. But the reason was really that Valeria had noticed that some of the numbers she bet on were disproportionately winning numbers. She kept betting on them and winning even more. She knew it was wrong. Valeria’s “Nona Ester”, who started teaching her card games at the age of six, had ingrained in her how important it was to play fair. Valeria didn’t know what to do.

Valeria’s guilt became unbearable so she went to her mom for advice. Without reprimand or taking over, her mother helped her figure out how to set things right. Valeria threw a party for all the kids in the neighborhood and gave back all the money she had won and closed down the casino. Instead of being mad, the kids had had a pretty fun time that summer.

Looking back, Valeria’s roulette wheel experience was critical to her career path for two key reasons. First, it gave her the confidence that she could create something of her own and get others behind it. The casino was the first of many endeavors she launched in her youth from her girl-led lawn mowing business to bicycle repair shop. Second, her experience made her realize that while competition can be fun and motivating, it must be fair. Valeria has spent the last 25 years leveling the playing field for social entrepreneurs to access the kinds of capital and resources needed to scale their initiatives and improve people’s lives. She launched the Full Economic Citizenship Initiative to at Ashoka which links leading social entrepreneurs with business leaders to generate “hybrid” value chains that ensure simultaneous financial, social and environmental gains to benefit low-income families and small producers. At the core of this work is the understanding that markets can be powerful forces for good but only if all can participate and the rules of the game are fair.

In a world of rapid change with technology opening ways for people to participate in new ways, everyone has the opportunity to lead. To do so, one needs to adapt quickly and seize opportunities at a rapid rate. Mobilizing others around an idea, even a roulette wheel, is practice for seizing new opportunities down the line. But this new paradigm for the world requires a new kind of leadership that empowers others and ensures fairness so that benefits from this rapid change do not concentrate in the hands of a few.

Valeria now has three grandchildren. If any of them asked for a roulette wheel for Christmas, she would think twice about the wisdom of this particular “game” for a child. But what she knows all of them to need is the support and guidance to start something of their own and the space to learn and grow from it.

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