Spark: A space for social innovators to combine ideas with networks

This workshop will focus on finding solutions to the challenge of financing and customer growth.

Areas of discussion:

1. Financing to support growth and scale: angel investors, impact investors, foundations, and business development
2. Customer growth: driving footfall and conversion

About Kangu
Leveraging the power of technology, Kangu is a crowdfunding start-up that aims to reduce the 250,000 women that die each year from pregnancy and childbirth globally. Nearly all of these deaths are preventable when women have access to basic healthcare services. At our website, www.kangu.org, anyone with $10 to give can connect with a specific high-risk pregnant woman in South Asia and sub-Saharan Africa and sponsor her access to care. Kangu is making the world a smaller, healthier, safer place for women and their babies.  In less than 3 months, Kangu brought together 1000 people who funded healthcare services for over 150 women. 

About Casey Santiago
In 2012, after becoming a mother, Casey Santiago founded Kangu to leverage crowdfunding technology to reduce preventable maternal and neonatal deaths and disability. Before founding Kangu, Ms. Santiago worked for fifteen years in global health, innovative finance and technology. As an early staff member at Kiva.org, Ms. Santiago managed a multi-million dollar investment portfolio in West Africa, and led engineers to develop software for 100+ local institutions. She has advised for-profit, nonprofit and social enterprises on strategic planning, new product development and financial sustainability, including Doctors without Borders, Institute for OneWorld Health, Bristol Myers-Squibb, GAVI and USAID, both independently and as a Senior Consultant at Deloitte. She also blogs for Forbes.com, Women 2.0, and the Huffington Post and was recently selected by 85 Broads as a “CEO to watch.” She has worked in Bangladesh, the Dominican Republic, Ghana, Kenya, Mali, Morocco, Palestine, South Africa, Senegal, Tanzania, Togo and Zambia. Ms. Santiago holds a BA from Wellesley College, an MBA from Columbia Business School and an MA in International Affairs from Columbia University.

About Anu Khosla
Anu Khosla graduated Stanford University in 2012 with a BA in Human Biology. She has interned with International Medical Corps, a global health and humanitarian organization. She is keenly interested in leveraging technology for social change and has worked with Donors Choose and with Kiva. She is currently the Marketing and Community Director at Kangu.org, an innovative financing website that raises funds to reduce maternal mortality, initially in India, Uganda and Nepal.

Spark provides Social Innovators with an opportunity to explore resources, connections and potential solutions to help their social ventures, by tapping the collective knowledge within Columbia University, and the larger entrepreneurial and social impact community in the New York area and beyond.

This workshop is open to all who are willing to bring their ideas, experience, and connections to help solve social and environmental challenges that these social innovators aim to address.