Fills first-ever Ashoka Fellow seat; representing Fellowship and Latin America

ARLINGTON, Virginia -- November 10, 2005. Ashoka: Innovators for the public, a global organization that pioneered the field of social entrepreneurship, has selected Dr. Vera Cordeiro of Brazil to serve as an Ashoka Board Member. Dr. Cordeiro has been an Ashoka Fellow since 1992. She founded and, with Ashoka’s support, has grown Associanção Saúde Criança Renascer into a Brazil-wide movement that enables poor children to recover safely after hospitalization. Dr. Cordeiro is the first Ashoka Fellow to hold the newly created rotating Fellow seat on the Board.

Dr. Cordeiro will fill an important role on the Board by representing Ashoka’s global fellowship of over 1600 Ashoka elected social entrepreneurs in over 60 countries. Additionally, she is the first Board member from South America, demonstrating Ashoka’s impact in and commitment to helping the citizen sector grow both in South America and around the world.

When announcing her appointment, CEO Bill Drayton commented, “Since her election, Vera has been a highly generous, contributive member of the Ashoka community. She has assisted so many individual Ashoka colleagues, helped formulate new programs (including one for young family members of our social entrepreneur Fellows), and been a force in helping explain our emergent new field to the world. The values that are her inner force and the growing impact of her work makes her a beacon, regardless of her modesty.”

Dr. Cordeiro, a pediatrician who could not stand to see the healing process for children from poor families commonly fail after they left the hospital, is well known throughout Brazil.

Renascer works with the poor families of severely ill children returning from the hospital to ensure them adequate food, sanitation, and psychological support. This requires successfully addressing the root causes that had earlier prevented their families providing adequate care, which in turn has required Vera to mobilize a wide range of professional and community volunteers and resources -- and to do so in a way that one hospital and community after another has been able to copy.

Renascer’s methodology works, is now recognized as a model, and has inspired the establishment of 14 other associations across Brazil (plus three in process of establishment) that are saving children’s lives -- and their families.

The announcement of Dr. Cordeiro’s selection to the Board comes at the same time as the appointment of Anamaria Schindler of Brazil as Co-President of Ashoka. These two senior leadership selections reflect South America’s importance and contributions in Ashoka’s evolving global community.

Ashoka is guided by an international Board of Directors, which sets policy, guides the CEO, ensures that the organization is ethically grounded, organizationally sound and globally operationally integrated, and is actively engaged in all elections to membership in the fellowship.