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Accelerator Advisors

The PopTech Accelerator is proud to count the following leaders in social innovation among its advisors:

Bunker Roy

Bunker Roy is one of the world’s most accomplished social innovators, working to improve the lives of thousands of India’s rural poor.

Inspired by Gandhi and moved to respond to India’s 1967 famine, Bunker Roy moved from the affluent suburb where he grew up to Rajasthan, India, to help rural villagers improve their lives. The organization he founded in 1972, Social Work and Research Centre, came to be known as the “Barefoot College” because its clients are poor, rural, often semiliterate villagers. Communities from all over India have sent representatives to work and study to become “barefoot” health workers, teachers and engineers. Once they return to their villages, they use their knowledge of water engineering, solar power, income generation, medicine and other topics to improve their own communities. Some launch their own Barefoot Colleges.

The organization has trained hundreds of technicians—women, dropouts and unemployable youths—in remote villages in 13 Indian states over the past 30 years through a self-help model that respects local knowledge and capability and promotes local organizations to make community decisions. Skoll’s grant will help Barefoot College bring the “Barefoot Approach” to 30 communities in five countries.

Bunker has received numerous awards recognizing his work in social innovation, including the St. Andrew’s Prize, Britain’s largest prize for environment; the Swiss Schwab Foundation Award; the Aga Khan Award for Architecture, the German Nuclear Free Future Award and a Skoll Foundation award.

Clara Miller

Clara Miller is President and CEO of Nonprofit Finance Fund (NFF), a national leader in nonprofit, philanthropic and social enterprise finance. NFF, which Ms. Miller created and has run for over 25 years, serves as a “philanthropic bank” serving both social sector organizations and their funders. A 2007 Fast Company Social Capitalist award-winner, NFF has helped thousands of nonprofit organizations strengthen their financial health and improve their capacity to serve their communities. NFF is a federally certified Community Development Financial Institution (CDFI). Directly and with others, NFF has leveraged $1 billion of capital investment into nonprofits, and also has provided over $ 200 million in direct loans. Other products available to both nonprofits and funders include workshops, business analyses, loan guarantees and multi-year contracts to build balance sheet strength.

Ms. Miller was named among The NonProfit Times “Power and Influence Top 50” in 2006, 2007, 2008, and 2009. She is a board member of GuideStar, Grantmakers for Effective Organizations, Enterprise Community Loan Fund and is Treasurer of the Robert Sterling Clark Foundation Board. She serves on the Independent Sector’s Nonprofit Programs and Practice Committee. Ms. Miller was a Clinton appointee to the U.S. Treasury’s Community Development Advisory Board, initially as a member and later as its Chair. She chaired the Opportunity Finance Network board for six years.

Ms. Miller speaks and writes extensively about nonprofit capitalization and finance and has been published recently in The Financial Times, The Chronicle of Philanthropy, Community Wealth Vanguard, Stanford Social Innovation Review, The Nonprofit Quarterly, and Worth Magazine.

Kevin Starr 

Kevin Starr runs the Mulago Foundation and is the founder and director of the Rainer Arnhold Fellows Program. Mulago works like a social impact venture fund to seed and grow the most promising solutions in health, development, and conservation in the Third World. The Rainer Arnhold Fellows Program is an outgrowth of the Foundation’s work, and recruits some of the best social entrepreneurs working in the Third World to maximize their impact through a systematic process of design and evolution.

Kevin has been doing this work since 1996 and is currently involved in >20 projects around the world – from forest conservation by monks in Tibet to micro-franchise clinics and one acre farm businesses in Kenya. He originally trained as a physician and continues to practice medicine (very) part-time and teach a course on health project design at UCSF School of Medicine.