 And now we're actually going to bring on nine up-and-coming entrepreneurs to do quick pitches. They are finalists for the Gratitude Awards. And we're excited to have partnered with Randy Haken and the Gratitude Network team this year to bring these awards to the stage. So I'd like to welcome Randy and Lindley Sides and the nine entrepreneurs as we get these stools set for them. And they're going to give you just a taste of what their enterprise is about and then you'll be able to get to know them better at the innovation showcase in the Impact Hub over there during the day and you'll actually be able to vote for your favorite. So this afternoon we'll announce the three category winners as well as the People's Choice winner. So Randy? All right. Thank you, Liz. In the words of a great social innovator that I look up to, Good morning San Francisco! The Gratitude Network was essentially set up to identify, nurture, and then help grow incredible social innovators around the world, both non-profit and for-profit. And so what you're going to hear on stage today is nine incredible, incredible stories. A number of people have asked me where does the name Gratitude come from? And I guess it's borrowed from a book that I know a number of you have read in which it's stated, To whom much is given, much is expected. To whom much is given, much is expected. And so the spirit that we have at the Gratitude Network, our team and all the people that we work with, is about taking what life has given us and giving something back. I think a great example of this is SoCAP in general. And I wanted to thank Kevin Jones and the SoCAP team for making it possible for us to highlight some of the entrepreneurs who are here every year. Some incredible people who are, we now have a chance to recognize and you'll hear from each of them. Lindley? Thank you. And good morning. I'm Lindley Sides and in leading my own social venture, the Glue Network, that is a platform where companies engage their customers and employees in giving to good causes. I work with large non-profits and small social ventures across categories and around the globe. And through that work, I have seen the power of entrepreneurship to create solutions that are innovative, impactful, scalable, and self-sustaining. So I was honored to work with Randy last year to create the Gratitude Awards and then to work with SoCAP this year to expand upon them. So this year's Gratitude Awards were open to organizations that are early and growth stage, both non-profit and for-profit ventures that could be located anywhere in the world. We were thrilled to receive over 500 applications to the SoCAP Scholars and Gratitude Awards programs and we've accomplished the daunting task of narrowing that pool down to 32 semifinalists and then to the nine incredible finalists that are here on stage this morning. And from this pool, four winners will be selected and announced on this stage this evening at 6 o'clock. We first want to thank our panel of expert judges who brought expertise from our three categories as well as from non-profit, philanthropy, social entrepreneurship, and investing. We want to thank them for their time and effort and expertise in narrowing down this pool and choosing our finalists. We also want to thank our screeners who are not on the slide but are listed on the Gratitude Fund website and a few of whom are here, so thank you to all of these participants for your help in this process. So a little bit about our three categories. Last year, in our first year, we focused on education and our three winners are still doing well and growing in Kenya, India, and here in the U.S. Why education? We believe education is truly foundational, that improvements in education result in greater success of all non-profit work that is done in a region. And this category spans primary, secondary, higher, and adult education. And over the last two years, we've seen an incredible variety of creative solutions in this space and have worked with a number of them and are looking forward to adding another one or two to our portfolio this year. This year we've added two new categories. One is health and wellness, which is clearly an area of great need to reduce suffering and cost and deaths due to preventable causes and so forth. This category spans traditional health, health tech, and clean water. And we've seen some very creative models and solutions and we're excited by the ones that we've seen this year, in our first year in this category. We also added the category of community development in keeping with the SOCAP theme. This is a broad category that includes hunger, shelter, substance abuse, microfinance, multidisciplinary programs. The key is that community-led improvements tend to be very positive, effective, and long-lasting. And we've seen a tremendous amount of entrepreneurial spirit coming from individual communities and we're looking forward to supporting a couple of those in the coming year. So, at the end of the day today, one winner will be announced from each of those three categories and then there will be a fourth winner that will be chosen by you, the People's Choice Award. You will hear from the nine finalists here in just a moment. You'll also have the opportunity to talk with them in the innovation showcase in the main hall until 2 o'clock this afternoon. Voting will be open until 3 and the way to vote is go into Pathable, open this session, scroll to the bottom and click session poll and it only takes a couple of seconds to vote for your favorite. So please cast your vote for the venture that you believe is the most innovative, has the greatest potential for impact and where the founder has the skills to scale and grow an organization. So, it's with great respect that I handed off to our nine finalists beginning in the category of health and wellness with Nora Health. I'm Katie Ash and I'm co-founder of Nora Health. We train patient families with health skills to improve outcomes and save lives. The baby in this photo is Anup. I met him two days out of open heart surgery in Bangalore, India. When it was time for him to go home to his rural village, a nurse came over and gave his parents an eight minute shotgun lecture about everything that they needed to know to keep Anup healthy and safe. Keep in mind that they were returning home to a rural village that was two days travel from the nearest health clinic. They only had elementary level education and they returned home from that hospital completely horrified. We saw this situation play out over and over and over again and I had experienced it myself as a caregiver for loved ones feeling completely helpless and statistics say that the majority of people in this room have provided care for a loved one at some point in their lives. We think that this is the largest, one of the largest unmet needs in health care. We take this highly motivated, compassionate resource, the family members and we train them with medical skills to be highly effective at providing care for a loved one. We design and develop mobile tools so that when those families go home they have the support that they need. We started out in one facility in Bangalore, India earlier this year but we're already in nine major urban hospitals in India. We've trained over 9,000 family members and most excitingly we're seeing a 36% reduction in complication rates. The started out as a class project two and a half years ago at the Stanford Design School when we were a team of graduate students. But since then we've built a team that has decades of both health and tech experience. If you're excited about what we're doing, if you want to help us scale if you know an organization that we should be partnering with, come find us. We'd love to work with you. Thank you. Does anyone know what the largest mass poisoning in human history is? It's the arsenic and fluoride water crisis across Indian Bangladesh affecting over 200 million people and leading to one in five deaths in Bangladesh alone. You can't see or smell arsenic but if it's in your water you'll get arsenicosis an incurable cancer causing disease leading to death. My name is Minhaj Chattery and as a Bangladeshi American I always wondered why people like my grandpa passed away to do this crisis. As a Fulbright scholar at Bangladesh I found 60% of all water projects to fail because jobs aren't being created and customers aren't paying to run the systems. I've launched Drinkwell to transform this crisis into opportunity for entrepreneurs living in these affected communities. We've developed the world's first indigitously produced filtration technology capable of cost effectively removing arsenic and fluoride from the source, groundwater tube balls. Unlike reverse osmosis, the current best practice, we reduce waste by six orders of magnitude. Each system doubles an entrepreneur's income, creates three jobs and reduces household medical expenses by up to 85%. Our team has experienced deploying 200 systems across four countries. And most importantly we found that people are paying for our water and it's not because of the massive long-term health and wellness benefits but because in the short term we give people smoother hair, less briny fish, tastier rice and whiter whites. That ladies and gentlemen is vanity and that nuanced understanding is how we drive social impact to these 200 million people. We're Drinkwell. Join us as we make arsenic and fluoride poisoning history. An average Indian lives 14 years less than an average American. I'm Shelly from Sevamab and we address this gap by fundamentally transforming primary healthcare via mobile clinics and an online telehealth marketplace. Our mobile clinics serve low-income consumers in groups on an annual subscription model. For just $10 per year patients get comprehensive primary care, medicines and supplements and most of this is delivered on their premises. We use technology heavily to manage health outcomes. We also operate an online telehealth marketplace through which internet savvy consumers can get video consultations, second opinions and in-clinic appointments from participating healthcare providers. In the platform along with new revenue the providers also get access to the same technology that we use to manage our patients and our health outcomes. We currently have 6,000 annual subscribers all paying from four states in India and in our marketplace we have more than 300 healthcare providers. So if you would like to partner with us please come and find us afterwards. Thanks. 83 days. That's how long it took for my students reading levels to finally catch up to where they had been before the summer. These are my first graders the day it happened. Karina Maya Sanaya Carlos and Travis. My name is Alejandro and I'm the CEO and founder of Springboard Collaborative. I spent two years as a first grade teacher in one of Philadelphia's most impoverished neighborhoods. There I became angry that my kids and millions more in low-income communities face chronic summertime reading losses in elementary school that account for two-thirds of the achievement gap in high school. This is symptomatic of an even deeper problem. Low-income parents have been left out of the process of educating their kids. Children spend 75% of their waking hours outside of the classroom and yet our nation does shockingly little to capture educational value from that time for low-income kids. Springboard closes the reading achievement gap by coaching teachers, training parents, and incentivizing learning. Our primary offering is an intensive five-week summer program that combines daily reading instruction for pre-K through third graders with a weekly workshop training parents to teach reading at home in an incentive structure that awards learning tools to families from books to tablets in proportion to their kids' reading progress. Since launch in 2011, Springboard has grown its reach from 40 to 1200 kids through major vendor agreements in two cities. This summer, our scholars replaced what would have been a three-month reading loss with a 3.4-month reading gain. They'll go back to school this Monday having more than doubled their annual reading progress. In schools with fewer than 10% of parents showing up for report card conferences, our weekly family training workshops average 91% attendance. By training parents and teachers to collaborate, Springboard puts kids on a path that closes a reading achievement gap by fourth grade. In a nation that uses fourth grade reading scores to plan prisons, this changes everything. Parents' love for their children is the single greatest and most underutilized natural resource in education. This is the key to giving all children the opportunity to learn, regardless of whether they're at a school desk or the kitchen table, whether the calendar reads January or July. Join us in changing out of school time from a barrier into a Springboard for our kids. Thank you. Good morning, everyone. My name's Rebecca Harrison. I'm from the African Management Initiative. We provide practical and affordable learning tools for African managers and entrepreneurs. But I want to start this morning by telling you a story about a man named Simeon. Simeon woke up one morning at his home in the rural eastern Cape of South Africa with chest pain. He walked to the nearest hospital, where an excellent doctor immediately recognized the symptoms of heart disease, took him to the ECG machine to run a test. But the machine was out of paper, so she sent him home. This is a true story. I don't know what happened to Simeon. But without wanting to trivialize it, it's quite possible that Simeon died because no one restocked that machine. This is not a health story. It's a management story. It's quite possible that Simeon died because of a basic avoidable management failure. Now, management is not a sexy topic. It doesn't pull up the heartstrings. It's not a very so-cap topic. But it's absolutely critical. Bad management can be catastrophic. Good management can be transformational. The problem is that in Africa, over 90% of the roughly 10 million managers have no access to high-quality training and development resources. At the African Management Initiative, we're working to change that. We deliver practical, accessible, locally relevant learning tools to managers and entrepreneurs. We're developing the first-ever social learning platform in Africa. So think, Coursera meets Facebook with an African twist, designed with mobile in mind, and for an environment where bandwidth is often constrained. We've secured exclusive partnerships with Africa's three most prestigious business schools. Think the harvards of Africa, world-class African management education to potentially hundreds and thousands of small businesses. And critically, we've developed a peer accountability tool that will help those managers apply what they learn on the job. That's the most important part. So we'd love to tell you more about how we're working to unlock the potential of the continent by empowering one million managers over the next decade. Thanks for listening. My name is Brian Hill, and I'm the president of JL Education Solutions. When I was growing up, I had a full-time prison here in California, and at night he would bring home the essays of inmates and he'd read them to us, and I distinctly remember feeling of the hopes and dreams of so many of these individuals and being so disheartened that so much human potential was locked up. By that age, I had no idea that my dad's class was only reaching a small minority of a very large population. 12 million Americans cycle through our system each year, which means that one in 28 children currently have a parent that is incarcerated. This will have devastating effects on our society and financially. The $74 billion that we spend on incorrections in this country somehow leads to a 50% recidivism rate, meaning that half will return a short time after being released. What are we doing with the time that we have for this literally captive audience that is driving such abysmal returns? Right now, we're showing daytime television. Jerry Springer and The Price is Right. This is not a formula for success, especially when we know it works. Educational and vocational training, when provided to inmates, reduces recidivism by 43%, and that's even when controlling for things like background and motivation. Moreover, every dollar we invest in these types of programming reduces the cost of the government and to future expenditures by four to five dollars within the first three years. But it is expensive to do these programs. It is operationally challenging and it is politically difficult to spend money in this space. This is where jail education solutions comes in. They set up secure wireless networks in prisons and jails, provide tablet technology that allows inmates to engage in educational, vocational, and treatment programming on a daily basis. Inmates can rent or earn these tablets and achieve tangible outcomes, like a GED, college credit, and time off of their sentence, all at no cost to the taxpayer. Moreover, they can only begin their progress while they're online, but receive short-term incentives that help them earn entertainment options on the back end as a short-term carrot. Now, this program will reach 20,000 just next year, where my dad's class reached just 30. Moreover, my dad's course was cut back in the 90s and with financial budgets now, it will never come back. Jail education solutions is exactly what America needs right now. We must stop the revolving door. So join us in helping unlock the immense human potential perpetually behind bars. Thank you. Good morning. I am the CEO and co-founder of Sun Culture based in Kenya. We help farmers grow more while spending less. On the left side of the screen, there's a man named Peter. Peter's a farmer and he was our first customer ever. Before meeting us, Peter was like most of the other 450 million smallholder farmers in the world, forced to grow very low-value crops, like beans and potatoes, because he could not afford irrigation systems to grow high-value fresh fruits and vegetables. Irrigation systems are too expensive. And more so, the recurring costs associated with irrigating, like buying diesel for your water pump, was just too expensive for Peter. And because of that, on Peter's one-acre plot of land, he made $600 per year. In one year, Peter made less than half of what each and every one of you paid to be at this conference. Now, this is a problem that's affecting smaller farmers around the world. And we're changing that. Sun culture designs and sells solar-powered irrigation systems that make it cheaper and easier for farmers like Peter to grow food. Our systems combine the cost-effectiveness of solar-powered water pumping with the efficiency of drip irrigation, giving Peter access to an affordable irrigation solution that removes most recurring costs for him. Now, Peter's using our system now, and he's making $18,000 per year. That sort of impact is what we want small-holder farmers around the world to feel, and we can do it. So if you'd like to learn more about our funding needs and working with us to impact the lives of small-holder farmers around the world, we'd love to speak with you. Thank you. Does everyone here remember their first job? For me, it was Starbucks, my senior year of high school. And I didn't know it at the time, but that job actually prepared me for a lifetime of employment. Responsibility and how to show up on time and be a part of a team, and the value of hard-earned money. But what if you never get that first job opportunity, and you're young, you're creative, you're full of ideas and energy, but you're frustrated because the only ways you know how to survive are stealing, selling drugs, maybe prostitution. Well, this is the problem facing over half a million unemployed youth and slums in Kenya. But what if we could find a way to provide that first job opportunity to hundreds of thousands of youth all over the country? What difference would that make? At livelihoods, we've seen firsthand the power of a single job opportunity to change a young person's life forever, and we believe in the power of young people to change the world. We operate a door-to-door distribution service to sell socially transformative products like solar lamps and clean-burning cook stoves, and we use a daily consignment model. So our sales agents get products on consignment and they don't have to take a loan or any financial risk. We can earn an income and learn valuable sales and professional skills. We've already trained over 600 young people and opened and forced them locations across Nairobi, and we're growing. In the first half of this year, we've trained more people than we had in the past three years, and over the next five years, by opening 32 locations and changing hundreds of thousands of lives. A job means hope, purpose, confidence, and that is opportunity and that is powerful. So please come and talk to me and find out how you can take this opportunity to invest in our youth, because they will change the world, but it's our responsibility to make sure they know that they can. Thank you. Morning, everyone. Think about the shirt that you're wearing. Think about the phone in your pocket. These things were made by people, right? They're not made by machines. So what do you know about those people and the working conditions that they face every day? Not much, right? But the brand, and maybe that's okay, but the brands that you're buying those clothes and electronics from also don't have good transparency into what those workers are facing every day, and that's the problem. In April, over 1,100 workers died when the factory they were working in in Bangladesh collapsed on top of their heads. Why? Partly because those workers are invisible, right? They saw cracks in the walls several days before the factory collapsed, but they had no channel to report that to decision makers, to anyone who had the power to stop production. There's a simple solution to this. Lack of information and lack of transparency. Mobile. There are nearly as many mobile subscriptions as there are people on the planet today. So we have this incredible channel to connect the workers that are making our favorite products to the companies that are buying them, eventually to us. LabourLink does that. We use the transformative power of mobile to give voice to workers. Workers trust us with information about child labour, about sexual harassment, about excessive overtime. So they're reporting this information to us anonymously, and through feedback loops, we give that information directly to decision makers, and we've been able to address these issues in real time. In the last four years, we've gone from reaching 100 workers to over 125,000. In the next four years, we're trying to reach over a million because we believe that every worker should have a free and anonymous channel to support directly to decision makers about their working conditions and needs. Please join us, vote for LabourLink, and help us give voice to the global workforce. Thank you. Well, wow. How would you feel if you got to get up every day and work with these nine? I'm like a kid in a candy shop right now. That's what the next year is going to be like for our team. So we are so excited and so thankful for all of you, and also for our 32 semi-finalists who were just an incredible batch. And as I said before, SoCAP attracts just a wonderful mix of people amongst whom we find young people like this who we want to give a voice to. Okay. Final reminder here on the audience vote, if you haven't had a chance to go to your bitly address or unpathable, we'd appreciate your vote. That's a tough call. I couldn't do it. Good luck to you. And thank you. We'll see you tonight for the awards.