Today! Alleviating Poverty Through Entrepreneurship (APTE) at the Wexner Center For The Arts - Ohio State

by Stephanie Anderson

The (APTE) Alleviating Poverty Through Entrepreneurship takes place today at the Wexner Center For The Arts on the Ohio State University Campus in Columbus, Ohio.  APTE a student-led community development organization at the Ohio State University. Our annual Summit is the largest, free, student-run social entrepreneurship conference in the midwest.  Hosted on the campus of the Ohio State University, we aim to work with the Columbus community to facilitate social enterprise development. 

This Years Speakers:

Veronica D'Souza
+ Co-Founder of Ruby Cup, a for-profit social business that provides healthy, high-quality, and long-lasting menstrual cups for women and girls in Kenya and is the only menstrual cup company that specializes in serving the ‘Base of the Pyramid’. Ruby Cups are distributed and sold through a network of female entrepreneurs in order to create local employment and increase education. Veronica studied International Business and Politics with a minor in Sustainable Business at Copenhagen Business School and studied Sustainable Business Operations and Strategies at Columbia Business School. She is a selected United World College student (IT), Humanity In Action Senior Fellow (NYC), and has been invited to speak at several international events such as UN future Earth Conference (Japan), and SoCap 2012 (US).

Sonja Nelson-Jones
+ Founder & CEO of The Firm Development Group, a Columbus-based, community-focused organization established to provide opportunities for individuals to obtain and maintain self-sufficiency. She studied Accounting Information Systems and Business Administration and has helped provide developmental support and resources to over 3,000 people in the Central Ohio area. Sonja is also a graduate of the United Way of Central Ohio - Project Diversity Leadership program.

Jessica Mayberry
+ Founding Director at Video Volunteers, an initiative working in India to empower marginalized communities through the use of media. Prior to her work with Video Volunteers, Jessica worked in television in NY at Court TV, the Fox News Channel, and CNN. She spent a year training rural Indian women in filmmaking as a W.J. Clinton Fellow of the American India Foundation and has been selected as an Echoing Green fellow, TED fellow, and was named Architect of the Future by the Waldzell Institute of Austria in 2009. Jessica received her BA in Modern History and Modern Languages from Oxford University. 

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Neil Bellefeuille
+ Founder and CEO of The Paradigm Project, a social enterprise working to create sustainable social, economic, and environmental value within developing world communities by building last-mile distribution networks and providing socially beneficial products to the base of the pyramid. Prior to The Paradigm Project, Neil worked as a partner and Senior Strategist at Bulldog Drummond, a management and brand consultancy firm. 

Elizabeth Sanders, PhD
+ Founder of MakeTools, a company that explores new spaces in the emerging design landscapes. She is a visionary in pre-design research, having introduced many of the tools, techniques and methods being used today to drive and/or inspire design from a human-centered perspective. Liz has practiced co-designing across all the design disciplines. Her current focus is on bringing participatory, human-centered design thinking and co-creation practices to the challenges we face for the future. Liz speaks about and offers learning experiences in human-centered design research and innovation for clients, colleagues and students around the world. She has a Ph.D. in Experimental and Quantitative Psychology and a B.A. in both Psychology and in Anthropology.

Marika Clark
+ Marika is principal of SOSHL Studio, a firm dedicated to creating social impact through architecture and design, based in Cleveland, Ohio.  Marika works closely with the Nike Foundation in Ethiopia and Nigeria, designing innovative solutions around safe spaces for adolescent girls. 

From 2007 to 2010, Marika was Co-Founder and Managing Director of MASS Design Group, an architectural nonprofit designing well-built environments that aid in the reduction of global poverty. Marika was a lead designer on the Butaro Hospital project in northern Rwanda in collaboration with Partners in Health, the Clinton HIV/AIDS Initiative, and the Rwandan Ministry of Health, and lived on-site in 2008 developing the designs and overseeing construction.

Marika has been the recipient of many awards for her work.  She received a US National Commission for UNESCO Traveling Fellowship in 2008, was an invited Ideas Scholar at the Aspen Institute in 2009, and was selected for the Next City Vanguard in 2012.

Marika received her BA in Urban Studies from Brown University, and her Masters of Architecture from the Harvard Graduate School of Design, where her graduate thesis under advisors Jacques Herzog and Pierre DeMeuron focused on women's use of public space in Cairo, Egypt. In 2011 she served in the first class of global residents at IDEO.org, working on projects in the education, health, and sanitation sectors in the United States and Ghana.

Lindsay Stradley
+ The CEO and Co-Founder of Sanergy, a social enterprise building sustainable sanitation in Africa's urban slums. Previously, Lindsay worked at Google in sales operations and after teaching high school math in New Orleans as a Teach For America Corps Member, served as the founding Assistant School Director of the New Orleans Charter Science and Math High School in the wake of Hurricane Katrina. Lindsay has an MBA from MIT Sloan and a BA from Yale University. 

Get updates from today's APTE Summit, from noon to 5:00pm, on their Twitter account here []

source; https://apte-summit.squarespace.com/#nav