SOCAP12 will gather 150+ panelists for this year’s event. See our full list of panelists here, and our mainstage plenary speakers bios below.

 

Jeff Raikes
CEO, Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation

Jeff leads the foundation’s efforts to promote equity for all people around the world. He sets strategic priorities, monitors results, and facilitates relationships with key partners for all three of our program groups. Before joining the foundation, he was a member of Microsoft’s senior leadership team, leading a variety of divisions and groups within the company. He joined Microsoft in 1981 as a product manager. Promoted to director of applications marketing in 1984, he was the chief strategist behind the company’s success in graphical applications for the Apple Macintosh and the Microsoft Windows operating system and the creation of the Microsoft Office suite of productivity applications. Before joining Microsoft, he was a software development manager at Apple Computer Inc. Jeff, a Nebraska native, holds a Bachelor of Science degree in engineering-economic systems from Stanford University. He also serves on the board of directors for Costco Wholesale Corp. and the Microsoft Alumni Foundation, where he is chair of the board. In June 2008, the Board of Regents at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln renamed the J.D. Edwards Honors Program in Computer Science and Management to the Jeffrey S. Raikes School of Computer Science and Management.

Dr. Judith Rodin
President, Rockefeller Foundation

Judith has been president of the Rockefeller Foundation since 2005. She was previously president of the University of Pennsylvania, and provost of Yale University. During her first four years at the Foundation, she recalibrated its focus for the 21st century. Today, the Foundation helps ensure that more people can tap into the benefits of globalization while developing stronger resilience in the face of risks, affirming its mission, since 1913, to promote the well-being of humanity. Judith serves on several boards, including those of the Brookings Institution, Alliance for a Green Revolution in Africa, Global Humanitarian Forum (founded by Kofi Annan), and Clinton Global Initiative’s poverty alleviation track. She is also a director of AMR Corporation, Citigroup Inc. and Comcast. She graduated from the University of Pennsylvania, earned her Ph.D. from Columbia University, and has since received 17 honorary doctorate degrees. She has authored more than 200 academic articles and has written or co-written 12 books, including her most recent, The University & Urban Renewal: Out of the Ivory Tower and Into the Streets.

Majora Carter
Center For the Greater Good

She’s probably the only person to receive both an award from John Podesta’s Center For American Progress as well as a Liberty Medal for Lifetime Achievement from Rupert Murdoch’s New York Post. Fast Company Magazine named her one of the 100 Most Creative People in Business. The New York Times described her as “The Green Power Broker”. And the Ashoka Foundation’s Changemakers.org recently dubbed Majora Carter “The Prophet of Local”. She hosts the Peabody Award winning public-radio series: The Promised Land, and serves on the boards of the US Green Building Council, and The Wilderness Society. Majora has a long list of awards and honorary degrees, including a MacArthur “genius” Fellowship.

She founded and led Sustainable South Bronx, from 2001 to 2008 – when few were talking about “sustainability”, and even fewer, in places like the South Bronx. By 2003, Majora coined the term: “Green the Ghetto” as she pioneered one of the nation’s first urban green-collar job training & placement systems, and spearheaded legislation that fueled demand for those jobs. Her 2006 TED talk was one of 6 presentations to launch that groundbreaking website. Since 2008, her consulting company has exported Climate Adaptation, Urban Micro-AgriBusiness, and Leadership Development strategies for Business, Government, Foundations, Universities, and economically under-performing Communities.

Matt Bannick
Managing Partner, Omidyar Network
Matt leads all aspects of Omidyar Network’s operations and strategy. He brings a wide range of executive, international, and multi-sector experience to his leadership of Omidyar Network. From 1999 to 2007, he was a member of eBay Inc.’s executive staff and served in a number of senior executive roles. Prior to joining eBay, he served for four years as the North American president of NavTeq. Prior to joining NavTeq, he was a management consultant with McKinsey & Company. Matt also served as a United States diplomat in Germany during the time of the fall of the Berlin Wall and German unification. He currently serves on the boards of Bridge International Academies, Endeavor, and Landesa. He earned an MBA with distinction from Harvard Business School and a bachelor’s degree, Phi Beta Kappa, in international studies and economics from the University of Washington.

Paul Polak
Founder, Windhorse International, IDE, and D-rev

Paul is the co-founder and CEO of Windhorse International, a for-profit social venture with the mission of inspiring and leading a revolution in how companies design, price, market, and distribute products to benefit the 2.6 billion customers who live on less than $2 a day. Windhorse International combines radically affordable, life-saving, or income-generating technology with radically decentralized supply chains to earn profits serving the bottom billion customers. Prior to founding Windhorse, in 2008 Paul founded D-Rev, a non-profit that seeks “to create a design revolution by enlisting the best designers in the world to develop products and ideas that will benefit the 90% of the people on earth who are poor, in order to help them earn their way out of poverty.” He is best known for his work with Colorado-based International Development Enterprises (IDE), a non-profit he founded in 1981. IDE has ended poverty for 19 million of the world’s poorest people by making radically affordable irrigation technology available to farmers through local small-scale entrepreneurs, and opening private sector access to markets for their crops.

Luther Ragin, Jr.
Chief Executive Officer, the Global Impact Investing Network (GIIN)

Luther M. Ragin, Jr. is the Chief Executive Officer of the Global Impact Investing Network (GIIN), a nonprofit organization dedicated to increasing the scale and effectiveness of impact investing. Prior to joining the GIIN, Luther served as Vice President for Investments at the F.B. Heron Foundation from 1999 to 2011. Mr. Ragin oversaw the Foundation’s endowment, building a portfolio of more than $260 million, steadily increasing the impact investing allocation to more than 40%. Prior to joining the Foundation, he was the Chief Financial Officer of the National Community Capital Association. Other significant experience includes eight years as Chief Financial Officer of Earl G. Graves, Ltd. and seven years with Chase Manhattan Bank. He holds a BA and Master of Public Policy from Harvard, and is a graduate of Columbia University’s Executive Program in Business Administration. He is a member of the board of directors of Social Finance U.S., the GIIN and the Threshold Group. He is a lecturer in Public Management at the Harvard Kennedy School and a senior research fellow at the Hauser Center for Nonprofit Organizations.

Álvaro Rodríguez Arregui
Co-Founder Managing Partner, IGNIA Partners LLC

Álvaro is the Chairman of the Board of Directors of Compartamos Banco, the largest microfinance institution in Mexico and Latin America. He also served on the Board of Directors of Accion International, a non-profit organization pioneer in microfinance and leader in the emerging world, located in the United States. Before founding IGNIA, he acted as CFO of Vitro, one of the largest glass manufacturers in the world. In 2005, Álvaro was nominated “Young Global Leader” by the World Economic Forum. Álvaro has a master’s in Business Administration from Harvard Business School and a degree in Economics from the Instituto Tecnológico Autónomo de México (ITAM).

Sylvia Earle
Oceanographer

Sylvia is called ‘Her Deepness’ by the New Yorker and The New York Times, ‘Living Legend’ by the Library of Congress, and the first ‘Hero for the Planet’, is an oceanographer, explorer, author, and lecturer with experience as a field research scientist. She also is executive director for corporate and non-profit organizations, including the Aspen Institute, the Conservation Fund, American Rivers, Mote Marine Laboratory, Duke University Marine Laboratory, Rutgers Institute for Marine Science, the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution, National Marine Sanctuary Foundation, and Ocean Conservancy. Former chief scientist of NOAA, Sylvia is founder of the Mission Blue Foundation and chair of the Advisory Council for the Harte Research Institute for Gulf of Mexico Studies. She has a B.S. from Florida State University, an M.S. and a Ph.D. from Duke University, and 15 honorary degrees. She has authored more than 150 scientific, technical, and popular publications, lectured in more than 60 countries, and appeared in hundreds of television productions. Earle is the author of many books on the ocean, including Sea Change: A Message of the Oceans and, Ocean: An Illustrated Atlas, with Linda K. Glover.

Don Shaffer
President & CEO, RSF Social Finance

Don is President & CEO of RSF Social Finance. Prior to joining RSF, he served as Executive Director of the Business Alliance for Local Living Economies (BALLE), developing it into an alliance of more than 15,000 independently owned businesses across the U.S. and Canada. He has also served as Interim Executive Director of Investors’ Circle, a network of angel investors, professional venture capitalists, foundations, family offices, and others who invest private capital into companies addressing social and environmental issues. His experience includes over 15 years in senior management positions building social mission companies, including Comet Skateboards, a designer and manufacturer of premium skateboarding products committed to local and sustainable business practices. Don has served and led sales, marketing, business-development, and general-operations teams in the education and software sectors. He serves as a Board Member of B Lab, Comet Skateboards, BALLE, and Social Venture Network. He participates in an advisory capacity with Entrepreneurship@Cornell and Slow Money. He also co-chairs the Roots of Change Business Leaders Council. Don graduated with a degree in American History from Cornell University.

Kevin Starr
Managing Director, Mulago Foundation

Kevin directs the Foundation and the Rainer Arnhold Fellows Program. He had a perfectly good career in medicine when he stumbled into philanthropy in 1994. His friend and mentor Rainer Arnhold died suddenly when they were working together in Bolivia, and the Arnhold family asked Kevin to help carry on Rainer’s work through the Mulago Foundation. He spent the next decade working with projects from Afghanistan to Zambia, trying to figure out what makes for real impact at big scale. At the behest of the board, he established the Rainer Arnhold Fellows Program in 2003 to apply Mulago’s principles and tools to help social entrepreneurs turn good ideas into lasting change at scale. Kevin went through medical school and residency at UC San Francisco and has lived in SF ever since. He teaches and mentors fellows in other programs for social entrepreneurs and still practices medicine (very) part time.

Katherine Fulton
President, Monitor Institute

Katherine is a partner of Monitor Group and president of Monitor Institute, the Group’s social enterprise dedicated to helping innovative leaders develop and achieve sustainable solutions to significant social and environmental problems. She has spent more than three decades chronicling and catalyzing social change as a leader, strategist, teacher, editor, writer, speaker and advisor. Her experience involves work in and around all three sectors – civil society, business, and government. Katherine is particularly known for her expertise on the evolution of philanthropy and the emergence of impact investing. She is the co-author of Investing for Social and Environmental Impact: A Blueprint for Catalyzing an Emerging Industry and also What’s Next for Philanthropy: Acting Bigger and Adapting Better in a Networked World. She has served on a number of governing boards, including the global board of Monitor and the founding board of the Global Impact Investing Network.

Gar Alperovitz
Lionel R. Bauman Professor of Political Economy at the University of Maryland

Gar is co-founder of The Democracy Collaborative and a former Fellow of the Institute of Politics at Harvard and King’s College of Cambridge University. He served as a Legislative Director in the U.S. House of Representatives and the U.S. Senate and as a Special Assistant working on United Nations matters in the Department of State. Earlier, he was President of the Center for Community Economic Development and of the Center for the Study of Public Policy. His writing has been published in a wide range of academic and popular journals, including The New York Times, The Atlantic, and The Journal of Economic Issues. His latest book is America Beyond Capitalism. Gar also authored Unjust Deserts (2008); Making a Place for Community (2002); and The Decision to Use the Atomic Bomb (1995).

Antony Bugg-Levine
CEO, Nonprofit Finance Fund

Antony has been the CEO of Nonprofit Finance Fund since October 24, 2011. Prior to NFF, he served as a Consultant at McKinsey & Co and served as Country Director of TechnoServe for Kenya and Uganda. He serves as the Chairman of Global Impact Investing Network. He also serves as an Adjunct Professor at Columbia Business School and teaches business and international development. He served as the Managing Director of the Rockefeller Foundation in New York since 2007. His responsibilities included leading the Harnessing the Power of Impact Investing Initiative. He has deep experience in nonprofit management. Antony is a Co-Author of the book, Impact Investing: Transforming How We Make Money While Making a Difference, launching at SOCAP12. He is a graduate of Yale College and earned an MPA focused on Economic Development from Princeton’s Woodrow Wilson School.

Joy Anderson
Founder & President, Criterion Ventures

Joy Anderson, founder and president of Criterion Ventures, landed on Fast Company’s 2011 list of ‘100 Most Creative People in Business’. Through her leadership of Criterion and its initiatives that shape markets to create social and environmental good, Joy is a visionary force to change the rules of our economy. As faculty on the leading social innovation award programs, she advises the next generation of leaders. Her insights have shaped hundreds of ventures, including Good Capital, a social investment firm she co-founded in 2006, and Village Capital, where she chairs the board. A political science major at Wesleyan, Joy earned her Ph.D in American History from NYU.

Sasha Dichter
Chief Innovation Officer, Acumen Fund

Acumen invests patient capital in businesses that deliver critical, affordable goods and services to the world’s poor, improving the lives of millions. Sasha speaks and blogs (sashadichter.wordpress.com) about generosity, philanthropy, and social change, is the author of the Manifesto for Nonprofit CEOs and helped create Generosity Day. Sasha’s Generosity talk was featured as a TED Best of the Web last year… talk about spreading an idea! Before Acumen, Sasha worked at GE Capital, IBM, and Booz | Allen | Hamilton, and also had stints in Indonesia working for one of the world’s largest microfinance institutions (Bank Rakyat Indonesia) and at the venture-backed startup, Navic Networks. He has a dual degree from Harvard Business School and Harvard Kennedy School in International Development.

Michelle Long
Executive Director, BALLE

Michelle was BALLE’s first co-director, and she transitioned to serve on the BALLE board starting in 2003, and later returned as executive director in 2009. BALLE identifies and promotes the most innovative business models for creating healthier, sustainable, and prosperous communities. With a growing network of 22,000 local entrepreneurs spanning 80 communities, BALLE is leveraging the collective voice of this movement to drive new investment, scale the best solutions, and harness the power of local, independently owned business to transform the communities where we work and live. Before going to BALLE, Michelle co-founded and was executive director of Sustainable Connections in Bellingham, Washington. Michelle was named one of the West Coast’s ‘top five leading ladies of sustainability’ by the Sustainable Industries Journal. A regular keynote speaker, she is also the co-author of Local First: A How-to Guide and the author of the new Building a Community of Businesses: BALLE Business Network How-to Kit.

Jackie VanderBrug
Gender Lens Investing Catalyst

Jackie is a leader in the emerging global field of gender lens investing and the founder of the Women Effect Investments Initiative. Jackie works with both investors and investment vehicles to develop the gender lens investing market. Jackie’s approach to social change blends her experience as an entrepreneur, analyst, and strategy consultant. She was instrumental in the establishment of the pioneering social investing fund, Good Capital, and is deeply immersed in networks reimagining the purpose of capital. Jackie serves on the Advisory Boards of the Social Venture Fund at the Ross School of Business and of the social enterprise, Prosperity Candle. Jackie holds a mathematics degree from Calvin College and an MBA from the University of Michigan.

John Fullerton
Founder and President, Capital Institute

John is the founder and president of Capital Institute, a collaborative space working to transform finance to serve a more just, resilient, and sustainable economic system. Through the work of Capital Institute, his syndicated ‘Future of Finance’ blog, regular public speaking engagements, and university lectures, John has become a recognized thought leader in the New Economy space generally, and the financial system transformation challenge in particular. John is also a recognized leading practitioner in impact investing as the principal of Level 3 Capital Advisors, LLC. Through both Capital Institute and Level 3 Capital, John brings a unique theory and practice approach to financial system transformation. Previously, he was the seed funder and CEO of Alerian Capital Management, now a multi-billion dollar investment management firm that invests in midstream energy infrastructure. Prior to Alerian, John was a Managing Director of JPMorgan, where he worked for more than 18 years.

John Kohler

Director, Impact Capital, Center for Science, Technology, and Society

John has more than 30 years of technology industry and business experience. He has been heavily involved in technology product formation and has been concentrating on Internet and Life Science startups since 1994. John’s background includes twenty years of executive level positions in sales operations, product division general management, and worldwide customer support at technology corporations including Hewlett Packard, Silicon Graphics, and Convergent Technologies/Unisys. He was one of the founding executives at Netscape Communications and original founder of Redleaf Group.
John is currently on the board of Redleaf Group, chairman of the board at Entrieva, and serves as board member and CEO of Lumicyte. John is a managing member of the UCLA Venture Capital Fund and serves on the UCLA Sciences Board of Visitors. He has also served on the Advisory Board for the International Institute of Multimedia (IIM) at Leonardo di Vinci University in Paris. John received his bachelor’s degree from UCLA and has served on advisory committees to the U.S. Department of Commerce and the Council on Foreign Relations. He is also a nationally accredited soccer coach, an avid skier, sailor, and a member of the Santa Cruz Yacht Club.