Kopernik

Ewa is the Co-Founder and COO of Kopernik. Prior to Kopernik, she worked for the United Nations and the World Bank in Timor-Leste, Indonesia, Sierra Leone, Thailand and New York, focusing on the empowerment of vulnerable and disadvantaged groups. She has extensive experience working on human rights and justice and founded the United Nations Development Programme access to justice program in Indonesia. Her work on legal empowerment has been published extensively. Ewa was also the founder of Centro Feto - The Women's Centre of Oecusse Enclave - a women's empowerment organization in Timor-Leste.  In 2011 she was recognized as one of Advance's 50 emerging women leaders. Ewa’s undergraduate study focused on Asian studies, and her graduate specialization was in politics and public policy. Ewa grew up in Poland and Australia and currently lives in Indonesia. When Ewa is not busy running Kopernik, she is a big foodie and loves spending time with her baby daughter. 

Jordi is a software engineer from the Barcelona School of Informatics and holds a postgraduate degree in International Cooperation and Development from the Technical University of Catalonia. He has worked for several companies in France, Germany, India and Spain. His field of focus since he graduated has been designing and developing software and becoming a specialist in the domain of web applications. His interest in international cooperation and development started when he worked half a year for UNDP Vietnam in 2007.

Cindy graduated from New York University with a B.A. (honors) in International Relations and is devoted to working with nonprofits that combine technology and philanthropy. Past experience prior to Kopernik includes internships with TED Conferences and Causecast. Her interest in international development started in 2006 when she volunteered with Shelterbox USA to help the tsunami victims of Pangandaran, Indonesia. She is thrilled to be working with Kopernik to support the implementation and evaluation of projects namely in Indonesia, her native country.

Alex was born and raised in Pontianak, West Borneo. He started working with non-profit organizations in 1996 while based in Kupang, East Nusa Tenggara, Indonesia. Since then, Alex has worked in a variety of project administrator and management positions, and most recently has been working in the field as a community development organizer in Tianyar Village, Karangasem District, Bali. He graduated from Kupang’s Widya Mandira University in Business Management. He is married with two daughters.

Jessica holds a B.A. in International Studies (Honours) from RMIT University, Melbourne. She has worked as a researcher, project officer and community development consultant in various positions at RMIT University with a focus on Indonesia and Timor-Leste. In 2007, Jessica conducted field work in Timor-Leste researching in the area of political decision-making in the 2007 parliamentary elections. She has spent the past two and a half years based in Japan, holding positions with Oxfam Japan International Volunteer Group and Peace Boat, and has most recently been assisting with earthquake/tsunami clean-up and recovery efforts in the Tohoku region.

Rob is a master's degree candidate at Harvard Kennedy School. Fluent in Mandarin Chinese, Rob previously worked at a Washington D.C. think-tank on China and energy policy, and spent 2011 studying and working in Nanjing and Beijing, China. Since arriving in Boston, Rob has participated in events in the cleantech sphere, including volunteering for the Northeast Regional Cleantech Open, MIT Sloan Energy Finance Forum, and study tour of a solar production facility. He recently completed a Kopernik fellowship in Timor-Leste evaluating the d.light S250 solar lantern project on Atauro Island. Rob is passionate about how renewable energy technology can deliver life-enhancing solutions for off-grid rural communities around the world.

Alex joined Kopernik to work on communications and fundraising projects. He has experience with a number of NGOs, including NRDC, the Wildlife Conservation Society, and the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation. Based in NYC, Alex is especially interested in the psychological foundations of charitable giving and how to get donors involved through social media and the web.

Michael is a recent graduate of Tufts University. Over the last four years, he has attended the International Development Design Summit (IDDS) in Ghana, volunteered regularly at Bikes Not Bombs in Boston, and worked on D-Lab projects and attended their classes. Michael is very interested in socially positive business and other activities in developing countries. He believes Kopernik has a strong strategy to produce positive change by leveraging networks of people, organisations and companies in developed and developing countries, to provide communities with support / expertise, funding, and access to necessary and useful technologies.

Abigail Schwartz is the Deputy Director of the Burma Project/Southeast Asia Initiative at the Open Society Institute. She has lived and worked in both Thailand and Cambodia. Prior to joining OSI, she worked for the Asia Foundation's Washington, DC office. She has an MA in Southeast Asian Studies from the University of Wisconsin-Madison and a J.D. from Georgetown University Law Center.

Marc is CEO of Protagoras Capital and the founder and principal shareholder of Blazer & Co., an investment firm with interests in alternative investments and operating businesses in developed and emerging markets. Blazer & Co. is a founding investor in Ahimsa Partners and Ahimsa Brands, which own and operate hospitality brands in India. Previously, Marc was the President of Overture Acquisition Corp, an NYSE/AMEX listed investment company. Prior to this role, Marc was Global Head of Investment Banking at Cantor Fitzgerald from 2000-2007. He previously was a director of ChaseMellon Capital Strategies Group, the advisory arm of ChaseMellon Financial, a joint venture between the Chase Manhattan Corporation and Mellon Financial Corporation. Before that, Marc had a career in politics, advising US Senator John D. Rockefeller IV, and a Member of Congress on banking, securities, and international trade legislation

Sanjay is the President of Oxford Valuation Partners in New York where he works with emerging growth companies (“start-ups”) on matters of valuation, strategy and M&A. He has over 12 years of experience working with global public organizations and private firms as both a consultant and operator. He previously worked with the UN Development Programme where he built an innovative program partnering with businesses and local stakeholders to create new “Base of the Pyramid” business models in fifteen countries across Africa, Asia and Eastern Europe. Prior to UNDP, he was a senior manager with McKinsey & Company's New York office where he was a leader in the New Business Building practice. Sanjay graduated from the University of Oxford in 1997 with a Masters in Law. He also studied law at the University of New South Wales (Australia) and McGill University (Canada) as well as Finance and Economics at the University of Western Ontario in Canada. He is the co-founder of McKinsey Alumni in Development (MAD), a global network of over 1,600 McKinsey alumni engaged with international development issues and also served on the Advisory Board for Business and Ethics at the Wharton School, University of Pennsylvania. He was admitted to the New York Bar in 2001.

Scott Guggenheim is the senior social policy adviser for the AusAID-Indonesia Partnership Program and former lead social scientist for East Asia and Pacific at the World Bank. His main focus during the past twenty-five years has been the use of social policy and analysis to help development agencies improve the quality of their operations.

Scott was instrumental in the shift to better integration of social development in the World Bank structure and the architect of many large-scale community development programs. Of note, these include the Kecamatan Development Program, a $1.3 billion community development program covering 34,000 villages across Indonesia; the National Emergency Solidarity and Employment project in Afghanistan, which was the first community development and emergency public works program after the bombing; and the Empowerment of Female-Headed Household (PEKKA) program which supports advocacy and micro-finance for poor widows in conflict areas across Indonesia. Scott has a Ph.d. in Social Anthropology from Johns Hopkins University. He lives in Jakarta, Indonesia and doesn't sleep much.

Mari Kogiso is a partner at International Management Group where she works as an advisor to various international and bilateral aid agencies mainly on Risk Management, Public Private Partnership, and Corporate Social Responsibility. Prior to IMG, she held several positions in the World Bank group. She worked on infrastructure development, capital market development, and on project finance. Most recent position she held was representative for Multilateral Investment Guarantee Agency (MIGA.) for Tokyo.

In 2008, she spearheaded the CSR and BOP initiative for the WB group in Tokyo, developing several programs to strengthen the ties between Japanese private companies and the WB group, and to discuss how private companies can contribute to developmental issues. Mari graduated from the University of Tokyo with the degree in Economics. She also graduated from the Fletcher School, Tufts University.

David Madden is an entrepreneur who has been at the forefront of using technology for social change. He is a co-founder of Avaaz.org, the world's largest online political movement with more than ten million members operating in 14 languages. David is also a co-founder of Australia's GetUp!, an internationally recognized social movement with more members than all the country's political parties combined. He is also the co-founder of Purpose, a company that uses technology to mobilize citizens and consumers to help solve some of the world's biggest problems. David's work has been recognized in publications such as The New York Times and The Economist and he was, together with Jeremy Heimans, named one of the "Top 10 People who are changing the world of the Internet and Politics" by the World E-Government Forum.

David started his career with Inspire!, the online foundation behind the award-winning service ReachOut.com. He has played executive roles in technology companies dstore, Peek and Jetsetter, and has consulted to the World Bank and the UNDP. David has a Masters in Public Policy from Harvard and degrees in Law and Arts from the University of New South Wales in Sydney. He is the co-author of Imagining Australia: Ideas for Our Future (Allen & Unwin).

Richard Manning is a governance and community development expert and has worked in Indonesia for more than 22 years.   He served as district administrator of 3 districts in Timor Leste with responsibility for the overall management of local government and security services. Richard has extensive knowledge of Indonesian government structures, processes and access to a vast network of government officials at national, provincial and district levels.  He has extensive practical understanding of governance issues (e.g. management of local government, elections, management of security forces, etc) at all levels from communities to national government resulting from work with international NGOs and multilateral agencies.

Nigel is Technical Evangelist and Product Manager with the Microsoft Public Safety Initiative. Prior to joining the Vine team Nigel led Microsoft's research on humanitarian collaboration, working in Afghanistan and elsewhere on innovative collaboration technologies to make communities more resilient and development more effective.

Nigel is an advisor to the ICT4Peace foundation and the Institute for State Effectiveness. Before joining Microsoft Nigel worked for the United Nations, most recently as a global Pandemic contingency planner for the UN System and before that with the UN Joint Logistics Center where he was deployed to Iraq, the 2004 Tsunami in Indonesia, the Sudan and a number of other crises. At UNJLC Nigel managed the mapping and information management teams and led logistics coordination in the field for major emergencies. Nigel has a PhD in Complex Adaptive Systems from the Australian National University, has worked as a researcher and lobbyist, founded technology startups, received a number of patents, and has jumped off way too many cliffs over the years.

Andrea is a development professional, social entrepreneur and writer. Her work focuses on using community participation, social mobilization and technology to enable ordinary people to have greater voice in the decisions that affect their lives, particularly in poor, fragile and crisis-affected environments. She is a co-founder of Avaaz, a global social movement whose 10 million members use technology to take action on global issues, and whose work has been featured in the New York Times, Economist and Guardian. She has worked in many countries experiencing conflict and political transition, including Indonesia, Timor Leste, Afghanistan, Sri Lanka, Nepal and Burma/Myanmar. In Indonesia, she worked on one of the largest anti-poverty programs in the world, whose model of community-driven development and decision-making became the platform for a national program of post-conflict reconstruction and statebuilding in Afghanistan. She also was a founder of the World Bank’s Justice for the Poor program, which takes a community-driven approach to justice and governance reform. She has worked for the World Bank and the United Nations and has degrees from Oxford University and the London School of Economics. She grew up moving between Burma, Pakistan, Zimbabwe and elsewhere, and currently lives in New York with her husband and son.