Sara Olsen (Founder, CEO)
Sara is the co-founder of the Global Social Venture Competition, author with SocialEdge, and a globally recognized public speaker. With SVT she has designed systems that today reveal the impact of over $9Bn in over 23 countries. These systems recognize the cross cutting relationships between impact and financial performance in industries including clean technology, housing, public health, the arts, agriculture, social media, and finance.
Sara attended Dartmouth College for her undergraduate work and received an MBA and MASW degrees from UC Berkeley and the University of Chicago. Sara considers her most valuable education, however, to come from teaching public high school in Mississippi and helping start a social enterprise at Shorebank Corporation in inner-city Chicago.
Kirsten Gagnaire (senior consultant)
Kirsten is a pioneer in the social enterprise field with more than 15 years of experience in global concept-to-execution program management, specifically in multi-stakeholder public health and child welfare. She has worked with Ashoka, Grameen, KPMG and numerous others, and founded Social Enterprise Group, where she partnered with Gifford Pinchot III and Bainbridge Graduate Institute to develop Sustayne®, a social venture development methodology, and roll it out nationwide. She is a champion of the mHealth field, and possesses exceptional ability to communicate cross-culturally, manage diverse staff, create commonality between stakeholders, and adapt respectfully to social customs and norms.
Kirsten studied business administration at Seattle University, and has conversational command of French, Russian, and Bambara.
Priya Patil (senior consultant)
Priya is an accomplished social scientist and development professional with deep experience in impact measurement, philanthropy, and social action. She brings 12 years of experience leading social investment and impact efforts in emerging economies for USAID, World Bank, UNFPA, and the Nike Foundation.
Priya received her PhD and masters degrees from Johns Hopkins University, and a bachelors degree from the University of Chicago. Priya also sits on the advisory board for Tipping Point Community, a venture fund focused on poverty alleviation in the San Francisco area.
Erin Rogalski (consultant)
Erin brings expertise in both investor relationships and impact quantification to SVT’s work. Hailing from a corporate finance background, Erin has spent a majority of her career in banking and mergers and acquisitions. She applies those skills to challenges in the identification and measurement of various types of impact, and to the communication of the benefits of such impact to prospective capital sources.
Erin holds a Masters Degree in Business Administration from Northwestern University’s Kellogg School of Management and spent one year as a post-graduate global fellow at The Indian School of Business. Erin received her BS in Management/Finance from Case Western Reserve University.
Alex Levin (marketing and product development intern)
Alex Levin brings expertise in both impact measurement, nonprofit effectiveness, and international development. In addition to his role with SVT, Alex is Enterprise Program Manager at the World Institute for Leadership and Management in Africa (WILMA) where he is constructing a model for Social Enterprise Incubation Centers (SEICs) targeting marginalized rural communities in Africa. His previous work has focused on non-profit operational effectiveness, the use of creative social-financial instruments to drive impact, and the role of social enterprise in big-business CSR/CSI decisions.
Alex studied Geography, Economics, and African Studies at McGill University. He has lived and worked in Boston, Montreal, Cape Town, and Arusha. He is a StartingBloc Fellow and contributor to the SocialFinance.ca blog.
Pin Kwok (Lead, Southeast Asia)
Pin specializes in visioning and development of long‐term strategic partnerships between social entrepreneurs and corporations. She is the co-founder of the BOP Hub based in Singapore. Prior to devoting her career to the social impact space she held various roles in Citigroup – strategic planning, business development, process optimization, and organizational consulting.
Pin received her MBA from UC Berkeley, where she co‐chaired the Global Social Venture Competition. She holds a B.S. magna cum laude from New York University, is fluent in Mandarin and speaks basic French.
Camille Dubois, Lead, Latin America
Camille specializes in international market research and agricultural value chain development. She has conducted field research in Senegal, has worked closely in rural communities of Chiapas, Mexico, and has researched business models that generate positive social impact in Latin America. Camille co-founded Sustentavia with Aruajo.
Camille holds a master´s degree in Euro-Asian Business and International Management from ESCP-EAP. She also has a BA cum laude in Communication & Marketing. Her native language is French, and she is fluent in Spanish and English.
Allies
EcoShift Consulting
helps organizations understand and reduce environmental impact, lower costs, manage regulatory risk, and enhance their brand. EcoShift does the technical planning that enables strategic decision-making to reduce climate impact and increase sustainability. Core services include GHG Inventories, Carbon Reduction Strategies, Life Cycle Analysis, and Energy Assessments. EcoShift consultants also engage in climate policy and program design, as well as provide advising to public and private organizations on greenhouse gas reduction policies.
Advisors
Brett Galimidi (Partner Emeritus and Advisor)
Brett specializes in using information technology, entrepreneurship and innovation to solve environmental and social problems. With the understanding that people and the environment cannot be separated, Brett has led numerous groundbreaking projects in conservation and sustainable business that recognize that people and the environment cannot be separated.
Brett is the co-author of Social Return on Investment: a Guide to SROI Analysis (Lenthe Publishers, 2006), co-author of the Social Edge blog SVT on Impact (produced by the Skoll Foundation) and author of several research papers on development- and environment-related topics. He holds a Master’s Degree in Environmental Management from Yale University and a BS in Anthropology from UCLA.
Bryan Martel (advisor)
Bryan is the Founder and Managing Director of Environmental Capital Group, which works with institutional investors and others to deploy significant investments into environmentally sustainable opportunities. A groundbreaking firm, ECG measures and reports on the net environmental impact and performance of approximately 200 companies in 24 top cleantech funds initially valued at nearly $9 billion.
Before ECG, he was the Founder and CEO of Mobius Technologies, a material science/clean-technology company. At Mobius, Bryan led the development and commercialization of a world scale recycling process with operations in the US, Europe, and Asia. Prior to Mobius, Bryan worked at The Dow Chemical Company and Bechtel. He received engineering degrees from Berkeley and is a registered Professional Mechanical Engineer in the State of California.
Bill Davis (Information Systems and Business Intelligence Advisor)
Bill is the CEO of the GATE. He has earned the “Go-To” label by CFOs and CIOs in organizations that are facing tough decisions, tight budgets and deadlines that have an option or goal to leverage technology. He specializes in business intelligence in the financial services, banking and consulting industries, including major projects with IBM and American Express.
Bill studied Cognitive Science at Cornell University and has extensive experience providing merger and acquisition due diligence, performance management analysis, and other business intelligence services. He brings extensive experience to ensure projects adhere to strict disciplines within the relevant life cycles for minimizing risks and guaranteeing success.