EMERGING
LEADERS

Erika Andiola is an advocate for undocumented immigrants’ rights. As an undocumented immigrant in the United States herself – a beneficiary of the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals policy – she began her organizing career when in 2006, Arizona’s Proposition 300 required undocumented youth to pay out-of-state tuition to attend college and made them ineligible to receive merit-based public scholarships. A college student at the time, Erika responded to the discriminatory policy by co-founding the Arizona Dream Act Coalition (ADAC). The ADAC is a support system for undocumented youth and a grassroots activist organization that administers educational and civic programs. After organizing the ADAC, Erika worked for Arizona congresswoman Kyrsten Sinema as an outreach director, but left that job when her mother and brother were taken from their home and detained by ICE. Threatened with her family’s deportation, Erika was able to mobilize sufficient online support to stop the process. Motivated by her disgust for the normalized inhumanity of a faulty immigration system, Erika continues to advocate for undocumented immigrants’ rights. She is the Political Director for Our Revolution, a position she took after working as a press secretary for Senator Bernie Sanders’ presidential bid.

Josh Fox, the Founder of Climate Revolution and the Creative Director for Our Revolution, is a film director, playwright, theater director, and environmental activist. Fox has had a multi-faceted career, with a through-line of work dedicated to using cultural expression and audience engagement for social change, primarily in anti-war and environmental causes. As the founder of the International WOW Company – a film and theatre company established to produce works that address national and global political and social crises – Fox produced several films and full-length works dedicated to shifting policy and inspiring citizen action on climate change and environmental issues. His film “Gasland” has become especially influential, and has been directly credited as the leading cause of heightened awareness of the potential risks of the practice of hydraulic fracturing, or fracking, a process to extract oil or gas by injecting liquid at high pressure into subterranean rocks. Fox conceived of the documentary when he received an offer from an oil and gas company to purchase his own land in Pennsylvania, and began investigating the effects of fracking. “Gasland” was released in 2010 and tells the story of communities in the United States affected by natural gas drilling. The film has been a key mobilizer of the anti-fracking movement, with Fox engaging around the United States and the world using and combining both media activism and direct community organizing. Since “Gasland,” he has produced two other notable films about fracking and climate change. Using all of these cultural engagement tools, he tours the country as part of Climate Revolution’s anti-fracking and climate change advocacy, and organizes communities to commit to switching to alternative and renewable sources of energy.

Saif Kamal is the founder of Toru Institute of Inclusive Innovation, Bangladesh’s first independent social innovation hub. Kamal describes his work as an attempt to build “an enabling ecosystem for system thinkers [and] social innovators to be community leaders.” Since 2015, Toru has studied 45 innovations that won global recognitions. Thirty-three of them failed to move beyond idea phase. The innovations that succeeded all had access to supportive ecosystems that incubated their plans and provided administrative and networking support. Toru therefore provides a space for young local entrepreneurs in Bangladesh to network and receive support as they nurture novel ideas and turn them into sustainable social enterprises for the benefit of their own communities. Saif believes that many social problems can be solved through the efforts of a thriving social entrepreneurship sector that innovates and brings successful projects to scale by focusing on local solutions while collaborating with actors in the global marketplace. Toru is a platform designed to put this idea into action. This aim, however, is only a part of what Saif envisions Toru’s role to be: It is important to him that entrepreneurs become community leaders in a broader sense, as participants in society beyond the immediate scopes of their projects. Saif’s approach to social change is to create opportunities for individuals to form supportive networks and to collaborate across sectors towards common ends, and he sees innovation as the key to producing social impact.

Kalsoom Lakhani is the founder of Invest2Innovate (i2i). She began her career at ML Resources, LLC as the Director of Social Vision, where she was responsible for assessing and approving seed funding for early-stage initiatives and social enterprises. This experience helped her develop confidence in “the value of entrepreneurs who provide services and support to low-income communities in… developing countries,” believing that “this type of market-based approach vs. charity can create jobs, generate income, and ultimately alleviate poverty.” At the same time, in response to a Newsweek cover calling Pakistan the most dangerous country in the world, Lakhani had started CHUP (Changing Up Pakistan) to share stories of the changemakers and cultural actors in Pakistan making positive social and cultural change. Motivated by these experiences, Lakhani founded i2i, an organization designed to support startup communities in Pakistan. I2i performs a dual function: it selects promising impact entrepreneurs to be matched with investors and it administers a four-month program that offers business support and access to mentors. She firmly believes that the next great innovators "can and should come out of countries like Pakistan, Iran, and Nigeria. They just need the resources to get there.” Through i2i’s incubation efforts, it has managed to accelerate 21 startups in Pakistan that have gone on to create over 850 jobs. Beyond her work with i2i, Kalsoom is an avid writer on topics ranging from Pakistani news to stories about the changemakers of local communities. Kalsoom is a woman with initiative, and she has earned several acknowledgements that speak to her success as an emerging leader.

Sara Minkara is a disability rights advocate and the Founder and CEO of Empowerment Through Integration (ETI). Sara lost her eyesight when she was seven years old. With the help of a supportive family and education system, she excelled and ultimately attended Wellesley College and then Harvard University’s Kennedy School. Throughout this period, she would visit family in Lebanon, and she came to perceive the stigmatization of disabilities and an attendant gap in services provided to blind and disabled people in Lebanon and the Middle East. This moved her to create Camp Rafiqi, a one-month summer camp designed to help visually impaired youth realize their potential. The success of the first camp, attended by 39 people, led to the program growing into ETI, an organization that now reaches over 3,000 individuals in Lebanon and the United States. ETI’s mission is to develop an “inclusive society by transforming the social stigma against disabilities across the globe” and empower blind youth to create change in their societies. Minkara travels to mosques around the United States to talk about disability and acceptance among the Muslim community, in an effort to make Muslim spaces more inclusive.

Wai Wai Nu is a Rohingya lawyer and the founder of the Women’s Peace Network –Arakan, an organization that provides trainings to promote better understanding between the Rohingya and Rakhine people of western Burma. She is also the co-founder of Justice for Women, a network of women lawyers that provide legal aid to Burmese women, and a prominent human rights advocate. Prior to becoming the advocate and activist she is today, Wai Wai Nu spent seven years in prison in the Insein Prison in Rangoon, between the ages of 18-25. She was pulled out of her law studies and, along with most of her relatives, was sentenced to serve time in prison due to her father’s work as a Member of Parliament representing the political opposition party in Burma. Her time in prison strengthened her resolved to advocate for the rights of the Rohingya and when she was released in 2012, she chose to take up the study of law once more and to work to fight injustice. The ethnic division and violence between the Rakhine Buddhists and Rohingya Muslims of Burma has left nearly 150,000 Rohingya homeless and stateless. Further, the Burmese government limits the movement of the Rohyinga, causing Rohingya youth to feel hopeless and disengaged. With the Women’s Peace Network –Arakan, she strives to ease the dangerous ethnic tension that exists between the Rohingya Muslims and the Rakhine Buddhists of Burma, and to engage women and youth in peace building. Through Justice for Women, she aims to educate women on how to combat gender-based abuse such as sexual harassment and domestic violence.

Robin Reineke is co-founder and executive director of the Colibrí Center for Human Rights. Robin has been involved with identifying the remains of missing migrants since 2006, and Colibrí, based in Tucson, Arizona, addresses the human rights crisis of migrant deaths along the U.S.-Mexico border. Colibrí’s stated mission is to end border death in North America through advocacy, policy shift, storytelling, forensics and data-driven research. Since 2000, over 6,500 people have lost their lives attempting to cross the border by traversing the Sonora desert – an average of 365 deaths per year. Colibrí is dedicated to finding these people’s remains and matching them with a human identity. The organization aids in the search for migrants who have disappeared while making one of the most dangerous journeys in the world. Working in collaboration with international organizations, Colibrí uses cultural forensics for the identification of migrants and repatriation of their bodies back to families in their countries of origin. This latter scope of the organization’s work makes it possible for them to communicate with the families of those who have died or those who remain missing, helping bring closure or at least answers and solidarity to those who have lost loved ones to the harsh conditions migrants encounter on the trail from Central America through Mexico to the U.S. Colibrí therefore also acts as a family advocacy nonprofit. In this capacity, it provides a space for families to build community, share stories, and help raise consciousness about families’ own advocacy capacity concerning this human rights crisis.

Jacques Sebisaho is a medical doctor and the founder and executive director of Amani Global Works (AGW). Sebisaho is from Idjwi, a remote and underdeveloped island in Lake Kivu between the Democratic Republic of Congo and Rwanda. While he was growing up in the 1970s, Idjwi residents were dying at high numbers from preventable diseases because of a lack of available medical care. After receiving his medical degree in 2002 from the University of Rwanda, Sebisaho and his wife, a registered nurse, moved to New York City to work, but they were ultimately drawn back to Idjwi, where they founded AGW in 2010. Prior to AGW’s establishment, Idjwi had only one hospital and four doctors to serve a population of 250,000. Through the efforts of AGW, the island now has a 20k square foot medical and community center powered through solar energy that serves 25,000 patients every year and employs 65 local workers – but of perhaps even more significance, Sebisaho got the center built without any funding from outside donors. He mobilized the community, after having to convince them this was to their benefit, to dedicate their own labor and resources to constructing the facilities. AGW is built as a model for health services, as a trigger for community sustainability, and as an example of how the creation of a medical institution in an impoverished community can both provide essential health services and act as a vehicle for sustainable development.

Rye Young has dedicated his life to the gender justice movement. Beginning his career as an abortion hotline intern at the Third Wave Fund (at that time known as the Third Wave Foundation), he took on several tasks during his early tenure at the organization, including a sustained effort to develop new and innovative systems for grant making. This built the organization’s capacity for unique grantmaking for two often-neglected areas of philanthropic support: first, urgent activist causes year round and second, grants for long-term investment in emerging grassroots gender justice activism. Young moved into the Executive Director position at the Fund and complemented the organization’s grant giving activities with services for leadership development and philanthropic advocacy, with the ultimate goal to leverage philanthropic resources for the benefit of the gender justice movement. As a transgender man, Young brings a lens of lived experience to the movement, but with an acknowledged awareness of his class and race privileges, he has committed to intersectional inclusivity as a core of the organization’s mission and the movement’s activities. Through his leadership, he aims to understand the ways that class, race and other social identities work in conjunction with misogyny, and to use this understanding to help grassroots movements end patriarchy, transphobia, and homophobia.