2013 Skoll Awards: World Health Partners and BasicNeeds
Speakers
-
Chris is a global expert in the delivery of mental health and rehabilitation systems, a social entrepreneur, a mentor, a confidential organizational development advisor, trainer in community-based facilitation technique, and regularly speaker on leadership and social entrepreneurship.
A serial entrepreneur, Chris is currently co-founding the Elders Council for Social Entrepreneurs. He has co-founded citiesRISE, a multi-stakeholder initiative to catalyze, connect, and support cities committed to driving change in the field of mental health. Previously he started BasicNeeds, that’s impacted over 800,000 people across 12 countries. He’s also founded Action on Disability and Development and Thrive (Chris’s first charity in 1978 that uses gardening as rehabilitation for people living with disabilities). Chris is a board member of Ashoka UK Trust, a Global Director of Leaders’ Quest and the Chair of Carers Worldwide.
He is a Senior Fellow with the Ashoka Fellowship, a recipient of the Skoll Award for Social Entrepreneurship and was selected as a Schwab Foundation Social Entrepreneur for 2014. In 2000 Chris received an MBE from the Queen for his services to disability and development.
As a global mentor, he works with people in organisational management, models of change in childhood deprivation, human trafficking, the psychology of gangs, Fair Trade, prisons and prisoners, leadership and executive search.
You can find out more on Chris’s journey through his TEDx talk “Bridging the Mental Health Gap”.
-
Gopi Gopalakrishnan has over three decades of experience in implementing large-scale service-delivery programs in low-resource settings. He has founded two large organizations—World Health Partners which focuses on delivering primary health care to rural communities by innovatively harnessing existing resources in the poorest states of India and Kenya; Janani which delivers reproductive health services in Bihar and Jharkhand, two of the poorest states of India. Gopi’s work relates to operationalizing public–private partnerships in which private sector resources are tailored to complement public sector service provision. Increasingly, his recent work has devoted attention to integrate stronger management systems and technologies into public sector programming.
Gopi has been a member of India’s Population Commission and has advised the Ministry of Health and Family Welfare and numerous national and international organizations on large-scale cost-effective service delivery. He has served on the global technical advisory board of the International Finance Corporation, an affiliate of the World Bank, and is currently a member of the Advisory Group on Community Action (AGCA) of the National Health Mission.
During his career, Gopi also worked as the Director of International Programs of DKT International based in Washington DC and as Country Director of DKT Vietnam based in Hanoi. He has been awarded by the Skoll Foundation, the Schwab (World Economic Forum) Foundation and Ashoka Foundation for social entrepreneurship, and is the recipient of a prestigious civilian honor from the Government of Vietnam. Currently, he is focused on repurposing some of the solutions used for healthcare delivery to deliver education to rural students since lack of good quality teachers in the interiors is a major concern.
