Romanus Berg
Romanus is CIO for Ashoka, where his team develops and manages a global operations platform integrating 12 programs that cover over 60 countries. Romanus joins Ashoka from Oceana, where he served as VP of Global Operations. There his team rapidly pushed a fully integrated operations footprint spanning over 10 time zones across Europe, North and South America - all via an initial growth timeframe of under two and a half years. Born in Guatemala to German immigrants, Romanus attended university in France and Germany before obtaining a BS in Computer, Mathematical, and Physical Sciences from the University of Maryland. After graduation, he helped build public-private bridges supporting the successful $1.8 billion privatization of the United States Enrichment Corporation; he continued to work across public, private and social sectors to find his true calling in developing sustainable, competitive advantages for substantive missions at the intersection of communities, practice and technology.

Dr. Iman Bibars
Iman Bibars has a BA and an MA in Political Science from the American University in Cairo, and holds a Ph.D. in Development Studies, with a focus on states' social policies and reform, from the Institute of Development Studies, Sussex University, in the UK. Her recent work examined public expenditures specifically regarding social safety nets. A Regional Expert, she has more than 25 years of experience in strategic planning, policy formulation, community development and project design. She has dedicated her life to working with marginalized and voiceless groups: female heads of households in Egypt's poorest areas, street children, street vendors and garbage collectors. She has also worked with UNICEF, Catholic Relief Services, CARE-Egypt, GTZ and KFW.  Lastly, Iman is herself a social entrepreneur, co-founding and currently chairing The Association for the Development and Enhancement of Women, a CSO providing credit and legal aid for impoverished women heading their households.

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 to 1996, Valeria 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 to 1998 she served as founding Vice-President for Latin America at Endeavor, a foundation specializing in linking entrepreneurs in emerging economies with venture capital investors in the US. Valeria 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 to 2001 she 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. (photo credit: Nana Watanabe)

Konstanze Frischen
(Photo by kratz-photographie.de)
Konstanze joined Ashoka in 2003 to build up and launch Ashoka's program and operations in Germany. She first heard about Ashoka while working as a journalist and researching a story on social change. She quickly became fascinated by Ashoka's concept and its Fellows and thus, decided against merely writing about social entrepreneurs and joined Ashoka instead. Konstanze was born in Germany but spent formative years in Costa Rica and the United Kingdom, a set of experiences which deepened her interest in culture, identity, and international exchange and led her to organize support services for foreign students. She studied politics and social anthropology at the University of Heidelberg, the School of Asian and African Studies, and the London School of Economics, and researched questions of identity, politics, and development in Israel and in Indian shanty towns. Realizing that writing papers for an academic audience was not going to cause the impact she envisioned, she quit her PhD. To reach a larger audience, she started working as a journalist for CNN International in London, Canal Siete in San José, and Die Zeit in Hamburg. She also worked for three years as a business correspondent for the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung, focusing on economic and social change issues. Konstanze now lives in Frankfurt.

Al Hammond
Al Hammond is Senior Entrepreneur with Ashoka’s Full Economic Citizenship program, where he is leading an effort to transform rural healthcare. He is also: a serial social entrepreneur, with five prior start-ups to his credit, now working on a health care enterprise that will pilot in rural India; an author who has published extensively in the scientific, policy research, and business literature and written or edited more than 12 books or book-length reports, including, most recently, principal author of The Next 4 Billion: Market Size and Business Strategy for the Base of the Pyramid; a consultant who has worked with numerous corporations, foundations, government agencies (including the White House science office), and international organizations; a former journalist who went on to found and edit several national publications, win several national magazine awards, broadcast a nationally-syndicated daily radio program for 5 years, and oversee the launch of a prominent blog, www.nextbillion.net.

Dr. Hammond holds degrees from Stanford University and Harvard University in engineering and applied mathematics.

Valeria Merino
Valeria VP for Venture, Fellowship and Integration and with her team she is responsible for over sighting and leading the effort to select Leading Social Entrepreneurs to the Ashoka Fellowship and engage them in this global community of innovators. Also Valeria is responsible for facilitating and coordinating the integration of all Ashoka’s offices and programs worldwide. Valeria Merino is a social entrepreneur who for almost two decades has been involved in the development and implementation of public policies, at the national and global levels, in areas related to strengthening of Democracy, Rule of Law, transparency and civil society participation. Before coming to Ashoka she worked for the Pan American Development Foundation as Director of their Venezuela Office and Senior Civil Society Adviser. Since 1994, she has been an individual member of Transparency International and served on its Board on two occasions; she also founded and directed CLD, then Ecuador’s TI chapter, for fifteen years. She is also a founding member of Participacion Ciudadana and Transparencia Ecuador, two citizen organizations in Ecuador. Valeria was appointed member of the Council of the United Nations University based in Tokyo, from 1995-2001, by the Secretary General of the United Nations and the Secretary of UNESCO.

Lisa Nitze
Lisa Nitze is Vice President for the Global Engagement Team at Ashoka, facilitating connections between social and business entrepreneurs around the world. She spent more than a dozen years as a consultant, often developing public-private partnerships. As Executive Director of the New Jersey Governor’s Commission on the Preservation and Use of Ellis Island, she developed a restoration and reuse plan for the island. Ms. Nitze also created Prosperity New Jersey, a statewide economic development initiative. As Executive Director of the World Trade Center Baltimore and World Trade Center Institute in Maryland, she attracted foreign investments to the state. She worked as a teacher in Lebanon during its civil war and wrote for a business magazine while living in Thailand. Ms. Nitze is on the board of directors of the American University of Cairo. She has received a specialist grant from the U.S. State Department to speak on public/private partnerships throughout India and a grant from Inter-American Development Bank to conduct a workshop for its Latin American managers on partnering with ‘socially inclusive’ businesses.  She is a member of the Committee Encouraging Corporate Philanthropy’s Excellence in Corporate Philanthropy Awards Selection Committee and speaks regularly on why supporting social entrepreneurship is good business for business.  She holds an M.B.A. from Stanford University and a B.A. from Harvard University. 

Lucy Perkins
Lucy has recently been named Ashoka's North America Diamond Leader. Currently, she is a Leadership Group Member, and has played a variety of critical needs roles since she joined Ashoka in 1999. For the last 18 months, she has been acting as Ashoka’s Chief Financial Officer, leading the Finance Department in Washington D.C. through the transformations necessary for Ashoka’s rapid growth. From 2004 - 2007, she oversaw Ashoka’s expansion in Europe, a role she played from Berlin, Germany.

Lucy joined Ashoka in 1999 as Asia Director. She then spent 4 years (2000-2004) leading Ashoka’s Global Venture program, guiding the growth and development of Ashoka’s Fellowship in Africa, Asia, Central Europe and Latin America.
Prior to Ashoka, Lucy spent 7 years developing new infrastructure investment opportunities in Asia for a 4 billion global private equity fund and the World Bank’s International Finance Corporation. Throughout her undergrad 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 traveled extensively throughout most of Asia, the US, and Europe.

Beverly Schwartz
Beverly joined Ashoka as Vice President of Global Marketing from Fleishman Hillard International Communications where she created and managed their social issues portfolio and directed the non- advertising portion of the “National Youth Anti-drug Media Campaign”.  A behavioral scientist and social marketing expert,, Bev has many systems changing innovations to her credit. She helped write and pass the nation's first non-smoking in public places state law in Minnesota, helped design and manage the first national "America Responds to AIDS" campaign and authored the first Surgeon General’s report on HIV/AIDS for the U.S. Centers for Disease Control, developed the National Eye Care Project for indigent elderly at the American Academy of Ophthalmology and worked on  gender and education reform issues while at the Academy for Educational Development.