Valeria Budinich
Valeria Budinich has worked for 20 years in the creation and expansion of business development programs in 22 countries worldwide. At Ashoka, as the Vice-President leading the Full Economic Citizenship Initiative, Valeria focuses on enabling commercial alliances between social entrepreneurs and private companies to deliver products and services to small producers and low-income families. Her main area of professional interest is finding ways to harness the collective power of social and business entrepreneurs.

From 1986-1996, she worked for Appropriate Technology International (ATI), a global non-profit foundation specializing in providing technical and financial assistance to small and medium sized enterprises in rural areas. As its Chief Operating Officer, she assumed a leading role in the development field's thinking about small producers.

From 1997-1998 she served as founding Vice-President for Latin America at Endeavor, a foundation that specialized in linking entrepreneurs in emerging economies with venture capital investors in the US. She also launched Endeavor's first field operations in Chile and was part of the core team that designed Endeavor's search and selection process to identify high yield investment opportunities.

From 1999 - 2001 Valeria served as VP for New Initiatives at BDA, a California-based consulting firm specializing in business process redesign and technology innovations for private sector clients worldwide. At BDA, Valeria developed innovative services for small and medium scale entrepreneurs and launched the first seed capital fund in Chile financing exclusively enterprises at the start-up level. Since 1995, Valeria has also worked as an advisor to groups like Woman's World Banking, the International Fund for Agricultural Development (IFAD) and UNIFEM. She was brought up in Chile and trained as an industrial engineer.

Olivier Kayser
Based in Paris, France, Olivier Kayser is launching Ashoka's program in France and supporting his colleagues in other Western European countries. Born in France, raised in Spain, Olivier graduated from HEC, a French business school in 1979. He lived in a small village in Belize, C.A. for a year before returning to France where he started his own consulting firm in 1980, working for public sector clients. In 1985, he joined McKinsey & Company where he worked in a wide variety of industries in Europe, the US, China, and South East Asia. He initiated several new practices for McKinsey, including the public sector in France, and state-owned enterprises in China. He left McKinsey & Company in 2003 as a Director (senior partner). Olivier brings very solid business experience, strategic thinking, and cross-cultural partnership building skills to Ashoka.

Carol Grodzins
Carol joined Ashoka in 2000 in a senior role integrating the work of Ashoka worldwide. She brings years of experience in international development, higher education, health, and grassroots organizing. Following a B.A. in Russian language and literature from Indiana University, Carol served in the U.S. Peace Corps as a teacher in Sarawak, Malaysia. The Peace Corps experience turned her attention to the challenge of creating healthy populations and so she next studied nursing at the Massachusetts General Hospital.

Carol served as President of a statewide, nurse-led organization promoting and advocating family centered obstetrics and birthing in Massachusetts. In the nineteen-eighties, Carol transformed a concern with the proliferation of nuclear weapons (the ultimate public health threat) into the Massachusetts Committee for a Nuclear Weapons Freeze which educated, lobbied Congress, and organized grassroots support for a comprehensive nuclear test ban treaty and an end to the design, testing and production of new nuclear weapons systems.

Expressing her continued interest in international development, she helped form the Boston Committee for Ashoka (1987) and served as its volunteer Chairperson. Professionally, in 1989, Carol joined the Harvard Institute for International Development's macroeconomic policy group as a Researcher/Program Manager and over the next eleven years enjoyed expanding roles at Harvard, including co-launching the Program on Non-governmental Organizations, directing the Kennedy School's Edward S. Mason Fellows Program for public sector leaders from developing and transitional economy countries, launching the Kennedy School's new MPA in International Development and, finally, directing all International Programs at KSG. Carol received a MPA from the Kennedy School in 1993.

Lucy Perkins
Lucy is the Ashoka Leadership Group Member overseeing Ashoka’s expansion in Europe and is based in Berlin, Germany. From 2000-2004, Lucy led Ashoka’s Venture program globally, guiding the growth and development of Ashoka’s Fellowship in Africa, Asia, Central Europe and Latin America. Lucy originally joined Ashoka in 1999 as Asia Director. Prior to Ashoka, Lucy spent 7 years developing new infrastructure investment opportunities in Asia for AIG and the World Bank’s International Finance Corporation. As an undergraduate at Stanford University and then after graduating in 1986, Lucy worked with and then led the Overseas Development Network, an innovative, student-based international development organization. After growing the organization to 70 university campuses with programs in 9 countries, Lucy left to do her MBA at Wharton. Lucy has lived, worked and/or traveled extensively throughout most of Asia and much of Europe.

Beverly Schwartz

Beverly joined Ashoka as Senior Marketing Counsel from Fleishman Hillard, an international communications agency. At Fleishman, she built and helped manage their social issues portfolio, using her expertise in "social marketing" as the foundation for the portfolio.

Beverly's interest in social issues spans most of her career. In the mid-seventies she was Executive Director of the Minnesota Association for Non-Smoker's Rights and was instrumental in passing the nation's first non-smoking in public places state law.

Subsequently, at the U.S. Center for Disease Control, she helped design and manage the first U.S. education/prevention campaign for HIV/AIDS, "America Responds to AIDS" and simultaneously directed the Office on Smoking and Health's public information function. In other lives, Bev developed an eye care project while at the American Academy of Ophthalmology, with the Reagan White House, Apple Computers and the Mitre Corporation which supplied free eye care to indigent elderly (the project is about to mark its 20th year of operation). She has worked globally on the problem of education reform, with an emphasis on getting and retaining girls in school in developing countries, on civil society issues and changing health and environmental behaviors when at the Academy for Educational Development.

At Fleishman Hillard International Communications she developed and directed their domestic and international social impact portfolio and was Project Director of the non-advertising portion of the Office of National Drug Control Policy's "Youth Anti-Drug Media Campaign". Beverly has published articles and given numerous presentations around the world on social marketing and is dedicated to promoting the field. She is an Associate Editor of the Social Marketing Quarterly and a Steering Committee Member of the annual "Innovations in Social Marketing Conference".

The focus of Beverly's Master of Science degree while at the University of Minnesota and the City University of New York was behavioral science.

Arthur Wood
Arthur is an Englishman educated in the UK [LSE], France [HEC] and Italy [Bocconi], married to a Norwegian, trained by the Americans, who was last to be found working for the Germans - but who is now spearheading the Business Entry initiative as part of the Social Financial Services program at Ashoka. The objective being to engage global financial services firms to enter the business of social investing and ultimately change the way investors view and approach social investing, as well as increasing the flow and efficiency of financing to the social sector (and to our Ashoka Fellows!).
  

Prior to joining Ashoka, Arthur worked for over 20 years in the finance sector having held a number of senior positions in product development, change management, sales, and strategic marketing with companies such as Merrill Lynch and Coutts - the UK's oldest and most prestigious Private Bank. At Coutts in addition to the launching and involvement in "vellum" Investment products he instigated and managed a project (Partners Marsh and Swiss re) for the innovative use of Offshore Insurance products which has now been accepted across the private Banking industry as a key planning tool, as well as the launching an Art Advisory service which was widely profiled in the Financial press on launch. His last job was as a Director of a leading UK bank, Kleinwort Benson Private Bank (Part of the Allianz Group), where he headed up, re-engineered and managed the teams associated with Product Development across the whole range of financial instruments. The core team was subsequently voted the most innovative Product team in an award by Private Asset Management magazine.

He was also made head of e-commerce for the private bank, pioneering a model which was described by McKinsey as on the cutting edge of strategic web development - that was subsequently recommended as an industry standard model by IBM. His experience in both private client and institutional markets has touched on most financial products - both vellum and exotic, including offshore fiduciary structures, alternative investments of all types -from Art, Real Estate to Hedge Funds as well as more commoditized investment products

Gretchen Zucker

Prior to joining Ashoka, Gretchen spent several years with the management consulting firm McKinsey & Co. in its New York, Amsterdam, and Washington, DC offices. She began her career in the Africa Bureau of the US Agency for International Development, primarily focusing on trade and development in East and Southern Africa regions. Additionally, she has worked for the Ethiopian government, both as the information officer in its embassy in Washington, DC and as a consultant in the Ethiopian Investment Authority, based in Addis Ababa. Gretchen also helped launch the Washington office of the Tigray Development Association, a not-for-profit development institution headquartered in Tigray, Ethiopia.

Gretchen was one of the founders of Her House, a project of DC Habitat for Humanity, which designed, financed and built houses by women for single mothers in DC and raised awareness about issues related to women and housing. Gretchen received a BA from Ohio State University, a Masters of Public Policy from the Kennedy School of Government at Harvard University, and an MBA from the Sloan School of Management at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT).