Projects designed to directly benefit social, humanitarian, community or environments. Examples of social impact work include: community or environmental impact initiatives, products for underrepresented communities, distribution systems, disaster relief, responses to the COVID-19 pandemic, the fight for racial justice, humanitarian efforts related to war and refugees, and others.
Rebecca is a designer and social entrepreneur who has spent nearly a decade elevating the brilliance of overlooked artists to the global limelight. She started Roots Studio, which digitizes indigenous art into an online library for licensing into fashion and home, with returns of 5 - 20x the status quo price. Her work has ranged from turning heritage tattoos into animations, to producing thousands of notebooks from a scroll painting tradition with fewer than 7 artists left. She has been recognized as a Forbes 30 Under 30 Social Entrepreneur, Echoing Green Fellow, a US Department of State Innovation Delegate, and an Unreasonable Group Fellow. Her work has been written in PBS, TechCrunch, WGSN, MIT Technology Review, and Stanford Social Innovation Review. Rebecca also advises on cultural restoration for post disaster regions and mapping technology with the World Bank and the United Nations. She started her journey as a Fulbright Scholar and National Geographic Explorer on the project, "The Secret Life of Urban Animals".
Antionette Carroll is the Founder, President and CEO of Creative Reaction Lab, a nonprofit educating and deploying youth to challenge racial and health inequities impacting Black and Latinx populations. Within this role, Antionette has pioneered an award-winning form of creative problem solving called Equity-Centered Community Design (named a Fast Company World Changing Idea Finalist). Through this capacity, Antionette has received several recognitions and awards including being named an ADL and Aspen Institute Civil Society Fellow, Roddenberry Fellow, Echoing Green Global Fellow, TED Fellow, ADCOLOR Innovator, SXSW Community Service Honoree, Camelback Ventures Fellow, 4.0 Schools Tiny Fellow, St. Louis Visionary Award Honoree for Community Impact, and Essence Magazine Woke 100.
Within her almost 10 years of volunteer leadership, Antionette was named the Founding Chair of the Diversity and Inclusion Task Force of AIGA: The Professional Association of Design. She’s a former AIGA National Board Director and Chair Emerita of the Task Force. During her tenure, she founded and launched several initiatives, including the Design Census Program with Google, Racial Justice by Design Initiative, Diversity and Inclusion Residency, and national Design for Inclusivity Summit with Microsoft. Additionally, she’s the co-founder of the Design + Diversity Conference and Fellowship and an active member of Adobe's Design Circle.
Antionette also is an international speaker and facilitator, previously speaking at Google, TED, Capital One, Harvard, Stanford University, Microsoft, NASA, TEDxHerndon and TEDxGatewayArch, AIGA National Conference, The Ohio State University, and more.
Daanish Masood Alavi is an investigator at BeAnotherLab, a transnational interdisciplinary group that uses art, science, and technology to promote empathy and perspective taking among diverse communities; thereby facilitating shared civic action across identity fault lines. The group uses virtual reality and techniques derived from cognitive science research in developing critical applications in art, scientific research, social projects, healthcare and education, putting a strong emphasis on the impact of the work in people’s lives. BeAnotherLab’s work is based on an inclusive and distributed model of action-research and collaborative design. From 2014-2015, Daanish was a research affiliate at MIT’s Arts, Culture, and Technology program, which enlists science and technology in cultural production, critique, and dissemination at the civic scale.
Daanish also serves at the United Nation’s Department of Political and Peacebuilding Affairs, where he co-leads the Innovation Team, which focuses on collaboratively using human centered design, new tools and technology (AI and Machine Learning, satellite imagery, XR) to meet on-the-ground needs of UN peacemakers.
Kotchakorn Voraakhom is a landscape architect from Thailand who works on building productive green public spaces that tackle climate change in urban dense areas and vulnerable communities. She created the first critical green infrastructure for Bangkok, the Chulalongkorn Centenary Park, and is currently planning the opening of a 36-acre urban farm rooftop featuring the biggest urban farming green roof in Asia.
Voraakhom was featured in the 2019 “TIME 100 Next” list as one of 15 leading women fighting against climate change and the “Green 30 for 2020” by Bloomberg. She is Chairwoman on the Landscape Architects Without Borders working group of the International Federation of Landscape Architects, Asia Pacific Region (IFLA APR).
Voraakhom received her Master's in landscape architecture from Harvard University's Graduate School of Design. Currently she is also a TED Fellow and an Echoing Green Fellow.