Social Innovation Fellows Class of 2012

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FELLOWS

Jamila Abass – MFarm
As CEO of MFarm, Jamila Abass uses mobile technology to help farmers increase their incomes. MFarm provides farmers in Kenya with real-time market price information and a group selling platform where they can connect with other farmers to jointly market their crops in greater volumes. By giving rural farmers more direct and powerful access to buyers, MFarm is positioned to improve hundreds of thousands – and potentially millions – of lives.
www.mfarm.co.ke/

Lukas Biewald – CrowdFlower
Lukas Biewald is CEO and founder of CrowdFlower, a crowdsourcing internet company that breaks large digital projects into small microtasks and distributes them to workers around the world. CrowdFlower engages a workforce of nearly 3.5 million people to complete more than 2 million tasks every day. In a key example, Biewald helped PopTech Science Fellow Sarah Fortune find new ways to study the bacteria that cause tuberculosis. By sharing the workload, making it fun and insisting on quality results, CrowdFlower provides incomes while speeding the path toward more accurate and scalable results.
crowdflower.com/

Rachel Brown – Sisi ni Amani – Kenya
Rachel Brown founded Sisi ni Amani – Kenya ("We are Peace – Kenya" in Swahili) to pioneer the use of mobile technology to get the right communication capacity into the hands of local peacebuilders, enabling communities to participate in democratic processes and prevent violence. Through civic education, engagement and dialogue, SNA-K leverages SMS text messaging to support the peace efforts of community leaders. As a key partner in the collaborative PeaceTXT project, SNA-K is working to make locally effective tools that can be replicated globally in stopping violence and building peace.
sisiniamani.org/

Bryan Doerries – Outside the Wire
Bryan Doerries is the founder of Theater of War, a project that presents readings of ancient Greek plays to service members, veterans, caregivers and families to help them start talking about the challenges faced by military communities today. He is also the co-founder of Outside the Wire, LLC, a social impact company that uses theater and a variety of other media to address pressing public health issues, such as combat-related psychological injury, end of life care, prison reform, political violence and torture, and the de-stigmatization of the treatment of substance abuse and addiction. A self-described evangelist for classical literature and its relevance to our lives today, Doerries uses age-old approaches to help heal very modern wounds.
www.outsidethewirellc.com/

Toure McCluskey – OkCopay
Toure McCluskey is the founder of OkCopay, a unique search engine for medical procedures that helps Americans with inadequate insurance find affordable local health care. At OkCopay, people can quickly search for the procedure they need, compare local providers, and view actual provider prices and details on the appropriate health clinic. By bringing transparency to healthcare costs, OkCopay is ensuring that those most in need can find effective and reasonable health services.
www.okcopay.com/

Nicholas Merrill – Calyx Institute
Nicholas Merrill created the Calyx Institute to help launch a telecommunications and Internet service provider focused on the right to privacy and freedom of expression. Merrill has personally fought intrusive government demands for private customer information, and he aims to develop, document and publicly release technology to enable private communications that even the service provider cannot decode or eavesdrop upon. Merrill’s goal is to inhibit mass surveillance and to protect the privacy and security of users everywhere.
www.facebook.com/calyxinstitute

Jacobo Quintanilla – Internews
Jacobo Quintanilla joined Internews to bring news and information resources to people in humanitarian crises. As Director of Humanitarian Information Projects, Quintanilla has helped create a two-way dialogue between aid workers and affected communities in countries such as Haiti, Central African Republic and Kenya. Building on Internews’ core mission, Quintanilla’s projects empower local media in crisis situations to give people the news and information they need, the ability to connect, and the means to make their voices heard.
internews.org/

Andreas Raptopoulos – Matternet
Andreas Raptopoulos is the founder and CEO of Matternet, building a network of unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) to transport medicine and goods in places with poor road infrastructure. Matternet’s "drones for good" use small, electric UAVs to transport packages weighing up to 2 kilos and containing items like vaccines, medicines or blood samples, over distances of 10 kilometers at a time. By creating a new paradigm for transportation that leapfrogs roads, Matternet is helping to revolutionize transportation in the developing world.
matternet.us/

Aishwarya Lakshmi Ratan – Global Financial Inclusion Initiative
As director of the Global Financial Inclusion Initiative at Yale University and Innovations for Poverty Action, Aishwarya Ratan focuses on the design and delivery of effective financial services for the poor. GFII seeks to test, evaluate and replicate interventions to improve products, delivery channels and tools ranging from savings products to mobile money and financial literacy programs. The initiative’s rigorous approach to testing and measuring the impact of such innovations aims to ensure that the financial services available to the poor to manage and grow their money are affordable, efficient, secure and welfare-enhancing.
www.poverty-action.org/financialinclusion

Eric Stowe – A Child’s Right / Splash
Eric Stowe believes that every child has a right to clean water—and he has built an innovative, scalable approach to act on that belief. Since founding A Child’s Right (soon to be Splash) in 2006, Stowe has developed a highly effective model to ensure safe water for urban children living at the intersection of these two streets: “greatest degrees of poverty” and “worst water quality conditions.” Leveraging world-class water purification technology, sustainable monitoring and maintenance, excellent people, and a rigorous commitment to transparency, A Child’s Right will soon announce that every orphanage in China has safe drinking water. Stowe’s team will then demonstrate how they are customizing their approach for 15 more countries in Asia and East Africa, using their "Proving It" platform to share both successes and failures at all of their project sites.
achildsright.org/

Eric Woods – Switchboard
Eric Woods is the CEO and founder of Switchboard, which uses mobile phones to create nationwide networks of health workers in developing countries. Switchboard partners with mobile operators to provide health workers with free nationwide calling, a nationwide registry and access to information via bulk text messaging. Having already linked all doctors in both Ghana and Liberia, Switchboard will next connect health workers at all levels throughout Tanzania, working toward the vision of a collaborative network of health advice, referrals and improved care in places where access is most challenging.
www.switchboard.org/

Daniel Zoughbie – Microclinic International
Daniel Zoughbie created Microclinic International to help leverage the power of social network relationships to spread healthy behaviors throughout under-resourced communities. Working in Jordan, India, Kenya, the West Bank and the United States, Microclinic International has begun to show that working through existing social groups of friends and family can significantly help people improve their outcomes in the fight against such diseases as diabetes and HIV/AIDS. The effectiveness of their approach is attracting attention from governments and other large-scale health providers, opening the door to large-scale replication and the broader use of this "contagious health" approach.
microclinics.org/

16 Medi-Cal substance abuse treatment centers are under investigation
Sixteen drug and alcohol treatment centers that provide rehabilitative services to Medi-Cal patients are suspected of fraud and of hiring providers with felonies on their records, officials from the California Department of Health Care Services …
Read more on Los Angeles Times

State: Drug treatment options exist despite local backlog
Department of Health statistics for Vermont show the breakdown of care for 9,401 clients who received substance abuse treatment in 2012. Substance abuse treatment covers alcohol, marijuana/hashish, heroin and other opiates, and other substances.
Read more on BurlingtonFreePress.com

Mercy substance abuse program helps 'Mommy be a better mommy'
Fasano, 39, of Portland, is now in the last months of a two-year treatment program at Mercy Hospital's McAuley Residence, a rare live-in substance abuse program designed specifically for women in which the women's children live with them. Fasano said …
Read more on Kennebec Journal

Recovery Associates Brings Its Leading-Edge Drug and Alcohol Treatment …
Professional substance abuse support for men, women and adolescents will be available in Bay Harbor Islands, which is located in South Florida. Recovery Associates' multiple treatment tracks will be available for all people who are looking to continue …
Read more on PR Web (press release)

16 Medi-Cal substance abuse treatment centers are under investigation
Sixteen drug and alcohol treatment centers that provide rehabilitative services to Medi-Cal patients are suspected of fraud and of hiring providers with felonies on their records, officials from the California Department of Health Care Services …
Read more on Los Angeles Times

California Suspends 16 Medi-Cal Alcohol, Drug Treatment Centers
State officials are temporarily suspending 16 California alcohol and drug treatment centers suspected of violating health care laws — from hiring people who were convicted of abusing patients to bilking Medi-Cal for services they never performed …
Read more on NBC Bay Area

Gateway child care center to help mothers in substance abuse treatment
The Children's Zone is designed to care for children of women who are undergoing substance abuse treatment at Gateway. With the help of the center, mothers can get treatment without losing custody of their children, or without losing daily contact with …
Read more on Florida Times-Union (blog)

Hope House opens 'new chapter' on Laurel's Main Street
This private substance abuse treatment center in Laurel's downtown Historic District, formerly known as Reality Inc., was closed for nearly a year, following a drawn out and very public clash between the facility's board and many of its employees over …
Read more on Baltimore Sun

Juvenile facility in Carroll County could double capacity
The state moved to limit the size of publicly run juvenile treatment facilities in 2007, the year a 17-year-old was killed at what was then Bowling Brook Preparatory School, a private facility in Carroll County. After the boy's death, the facility was …
Read more on Baltimore Sun (blog)

LiheapProtest3.2.2011

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Substance abuse treatment centers, child care assistance are also on the chopping block. Anything that helps low- and middle-income families are disposable, according to the GOP budget. Anything that helps the mulit-billionaires and corporations are essential…

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More treatment centers needed to fight heroin addiction
Sojourner Recovery Services, in Hamilton, is the only residential treatment center in the county, and at most times, there is a waiting list for those seeking addiction treatment, said Darryle Short, director of staff development. He said those …
Read more on Hamilton Journal News (subscription)

Influx Of Addiction Patients Could Stress Minn.
(AP) — Minnesota's network of substance abuse treatment centers could be severely tested by the national health care overhaul. More than 54,000 uninsured Minnesotans with serious drug and alcohol problems will suddenly become eligible for insurance …
Read more on CBS Local