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

Accelerator 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, President and CEO of the Nonprofit Finance Fund, a national leader in helping nonprofits strengthen their financial health and improve their capacity to serve their communities. With NFF's help, nonprofits build and renovate facilities, fund growth needs, and expand and sustain operations over time.

Clara is currently a board member of GuideStar, GEO, Working Today, Inc. (the Free-Lancers Union) and Community Wealth Ventures, a subsidiary of Share Our Strength. She is Treasurer of the Robert Sterling Clark Foundation Board. She is also a member of the Federal Reserve Bank of New York’s Community Development Advisory Council, and the Independent Sector’s Building Value Together Committee.

Ms. Miller was voted one of 2006's Power & Influence Top 50 by The NonProfit Times. Ms. Miller has written and spoken extensively on nonprofit capitalization, and is the author of a number of articles on the subject including “The Looking-Glass World of Nonprofit Money: Managing in For-Profits’ Shadow Universe, (Nonprofit Quarterly, Spring, 2005);” “Hidden in Plain Sight: Understanding Nonprofit Capital Structure (Nonprofit Quarterly, Spring, 2003),” cited by Jim Collins in his monograph, “Good to Great and The Social Sector.” Recent articles by and about Ms. Miller have appeared in Hispanic Outlook in Higher Education and Worth magazines. Please follow this link to read a selection of Ms. Miller’s articles.

Ms. Miller was appointed by President Clinton to the U.S. Treasury Department’s Community Development Advisory Board in 1996, advising the then newly-created Community Development Financial Institutions Fund. She served until 2002, and was its chair from 1999 to 2002. Ms. Miller was a board member of the National Community Capital Association from 1992 to 2001, and was its chair for six years from 1995-2001.

Before her tenure at NFF, Ms. Miller worked at The New York Community Trust, The National Academy of Sciences, and as an economic development planner in Corning, NY. Ms. Miller has a Masters Degree from Cornell University College of Architecture, Art and Planning, and she completed the Institute for Nonprofit Management at Columbia University.

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.