UNSCHOOL MUMBAI
EMERGING LEADERS FELLOWSHIP PROGRAM
NOVEMBER 11 - 17, 2017
The Unschool's 8th Emerging Leaders Fellowship Program is happening on November 11th!
READ ABOUT OUR INCREDIBLE COHORT THEN STAY TUNED TO HEAR ABOUT WHAT WE GET UP TO DURING OUR WEEK TOGETHER.
MEET OUR MUMBAI FELLOWS
Meet the incredible #UNSCHOOLMB cohort of creative rebels and change agents who will join us in MUMBAI,INDIA from 7 different countries!
COHORT #8
abhinav dey
Abhinav is a maker at heart. He has been running a sustainable livelihoods design enterprise since 2016, Freedesign, based out of rural Bangalore. His design-thinking initiatives include creating and running rural makerspaces, co-creating assistive devices with differently abled, designing water conserving farming methods and designing handicrafts products with vegetables. He has been supported by India Inclusion Foundation, Plus Trust Foundation, International Development Innovation Network, Fab Lab Network, Red Cross (Geneva).
Amy Milhinch
Amy is determined to die well, having lived well. From Adelaide, Australia, she has been a begrudging designer, until just recently where her designer's role seems to have grown some new and interesting arms. Amy's drivers are a commitment to beauty and excellence, a probe for deeper meaning and human/universal connection, and a deep love for nature.
Anupreeta Agate
Anupreeta is a product designer and papercut artist with a passion for problem solving and understanding human behavior. With a degree in Product Design from National Institute of Design, India, Anupreeta is exploring the vast field of interdisciplinary design and how it can contribute to adding value to people’s lives. She is currently practicing as a UX designer and has worked on several enterprise projects belonging to various domains. Having worked on projects with themes such as energy systems and design for differently abled people, Anupreeta’s goal is to utilize her design thinking skills & knowledge as a catalyst for positive, social change.
Camila Olmedo Mendez
Camila is passionate about women empowerment and water, and curious about models that can solve social and environmental issues. She thinks that by connecting the dots of our collective intentions, skills and talents, we can create something of greater impact. Her goal is to bring social business to Bolivia and Latin America by disrupting traditional models and creating sustainability. She believes that human beings never stop evolving and need exposure to environments of continuous learning and growth. Through her work with an Austin, Texas nonprofit that implements integrated community development in rural Ethiopia with water, health, education and micro-finance projects, she has learned the importance of including community participation and the validity of data integrity. Camila currently works as cofounder of the organization, Start Americas Together, with the mission to connect the entire continent of America to empower youth to take action and make social and environmental impact. She is also founder of El Agua Es Oro, a project aimed to bring water to the peri-urban area of Cochabamba, Bolivia by re-inserting women leadership roles in the community.
James da Costa
James is passionate about people, technology and social good. He is a Co-Founder of Mandala Group, where he serves as Head of Community. Mandala Group creates socially beneficial mobile applications, connecting low-income and rural communities to essential services such as finance, healthcare and education. Mandala Group has created six Impact apps, including a marketplace app for coconut farmers in Kenya and an education app that enables illiterate mothers to read to their children in India. James loves traveling to unique locations to challenge his own ideas and perceptions, including his travels to Mongolia, Zimbabwe and North Korea.
Jessica Ede
Jess is a lover of words, science, rationality, ethics, and philosophy. She is a problem solver and and a pragmatic idealist. Hailing from Sydney, Australia, Jess has a background in psychology and interaction design. Five years ago she made a switch from designing digital interfaces to designing services. She has worked as a service designer at Meld studios for the last four years, working on the complex and often intangible issues which large organizations and Government departments are increasingly facing when attempting to improve and develop the services they deliver to customers. Jess has worked on projects across all levels of Government (local, state, and federal), and has worked across a wide range of sectors, including education, health, justice, employment, aviation, technology and communications, and retail. At the core of what Jess does is the aim of helping organizations take a human-centered approach to designing and improving the services they deliver to people as they go about their everyday lives. It involves helping organizations to understand the current experiences, needs, expectations, and behaviors that customers have in relation to a service and its role within their lives, and to then collaboratively explore and define desired future state experiences with customers. Beyond service design, Jess has a deep interest in exploring design and change at a higher, systemic level. Swinging between panic and pragmatic optimism about the state of the world, Jess sees the necessity and urgency of developing new, sustainable futures. Futures which put the systems that humanity operates and organizes itself through, back into a symbiotic relationship with the ecological systems upon which humanity relies. Jess hopes to find opportunities to use her skills and passion in this area in the future.
Kaitlin Hopkins
Kaitlin is an Australian multidisciplinary designer with extensive experience in the education, arts and culture, and not-for-profit sectors. After graduating with a Bachelor of Design (Interior Design) from the University of Technology, Sydney, Kaitlin went on to further specialist studies in visual communication design, obtaining a Masters degree at RMIT University. Her research projects involved using design for good by exploring ways to use spatial design as a tool to better integrate refugees into Australia as well as investigating whether geographic location and socioeconomic status have an impact on a student’s creativity. Kaitlin has worked on a large variety of projects from interpretive and exhibition design, to working with not-for-profit organisations, educational institutions, arts organisations and small businesses that believe in using design for good. She was instrumental in the creation, brand identity and store design for the world’s first pop-up philanthropy store, Impact Giving. Kaitlin is passionate about using design as a powerful tool to enrich, educate and encourage us to lead more thought provoking and socially responsible lives. In 2012 Kaitlin dove headfirst into freelance work (alongside full-time work) on a quest to discover and challenge the power of design in local and regional communities, and hopes to expand this into a full-time career in the near future. Kaitlin also believes in the power of skill sharing and collaboration and dedicates time to mentoring young designers.
Kunal Kanase
"When you change the way you look at things, the things you look at change." - Max Planck. Kunal is a true change agent who embraces challenges and turns them into opportunities. He is a lifelong fanatic learner with eclectic interests. He tries to perceive nature more deeply and in original ways through STEAM learning and strives to cultivate the same approach among students by facilitating learning at the Dharavi Diary learning center. Kunal was born and raised with an alcoholic father and a housewife mother in Dharavi, Mumbai. He was the first generation to pursue engineering studies, however, due to practical reasons and adverse situations in family, he dropped out university education. In those challenging times he discovered learning as a fantastic process to examine and understand the problems he was facing. He developed a passion to find the roots of things through research and critical thinking. Kunal became a hard-core MOOC-learner, and now approaches multi-potentiality through online learning. He is currently involved in the Slum Innovation Project called Dharavi Diary. Kunal enjoys music, art, and philosophy, and loves to find beauty and wonder in the realms of the known and unknown.
Lymun, Loo
Lymun is a lifelong scout, who enjoys the outdoors, exploring new places and building things. For the past 5 years Lymun has been immersed in Ecocentric Transitions a social enterprise focused at raising environmental empathy through experiential workshops and projects. Through Ecocentric, Lymun explores farms, hand building and is in involved with a community movement in his neighborhood. Having experienced how each community of practice can become disconnected to others, Ecocentric aims to socialize the values of sustainable communities and environmental conservation through individual and collective action. Lymun feels strongly that people need to see the big picture and understanding the impact of our consumption on the environment, be equipped to effect change, and work together in developing new positive behaviors. He is exploring the ‘whys’ and ‘hows’ through appropriate technology and community groups.
Phil Michaels
Phil has an MBA from The University of Tampa and currently sits on the HIVE Leadership Board at Harvard University’s Graduate School of Education. He is the co-founder and CEO of Tembo Education and was recently published in Forbes magazine among the top 30 Social Entrepreneurs Under the age of 30. His social enterprise, Tembo, educates 0-6 year old children around the world, via text messages. Tembo sends one activity per day, to parents, via text messages. The parents then educate their children with the activity and are rewarded with free incentives. In developing nations, those incentives are free minutes and texts for their mobile phone. In developed nations, those incentives are Amazon gift cards. For parents in developing nations that are illiterate or uneducated, Tembo provides a trained and certified Home Educator to teach the parent how to perform the activity with the child. For every child educated in America, it allows Tembo to educate more children in developing nations; similarly to TOMS shoes' "1-for-1" model. Tembo started in Africa and is now expanding to new countries, starting with USA. Out of 22,000 teams, Tembo was one of six finalists in Bill Clinton's $1 million Hult Prize. They were the only finalist from the USA and defeated all eight Ivy League universities! Recently, the owner of the Boston Red Sox presented Tembo with the Social Impact Award. With the belief that education is the most powerful weapon to change the world, Phil and Tembo aim to transform early childhood education for the world by making high-quality education more accessible and affordable for millions of children worldwide.
Rudri Mankad
Rudri is a computer engineer from Mumbai. An ardent advocate of sustainability, she has been doing her bit for the field in small ways, but now wishes to dedicate her work for the cause. She loves a good challenge and wants to contribute to building a world wherein living sustainably and ethically is the order of the day. Rudri is an idealist and believes that everyone must be unwaveringly responsible towards any task, however insignificant it may seem, for it is the small things that add up to make a difference. She enjoys numbers, reading, philosophy and badminton.
Shubham Shreya
Shubham is a graduate from the National Institute of Design, Ahmedabad, specializing in Communication Design. She's a Certified Usability Analyst from Human Factors International. Her keen interest in systems and service design lead her to UI/UX. Through design Shubham hopes to impact the lives of people in little and big ways. Her go-to medium of expression is still pen and paper. In her spare time, she enjoys singing and binging on Netflix. She aspires to travel as much as she can and surround herself by dogs, love and beautiful things. Shubham is committed to petting as many dogs as she can find and hopes to set up a foundation where she can help animals and the ecosystem in the future. What gets her out of bed every morning is the belief that things can change for the better and that she can be an integral part of making it happen
Tirtha Gandhi
Tirtha grew up in Gujarat and has a background in visual communication. She is passionate about art, design, new experiences, exploring diverse cultures and loves to visit local museums, exhibitions and conferences in her spare time. As a designer, she is currently working at a Mumbai-based design studio that focuses on working in the cultural, social, medical, educational and environmental zones. In the past 3 years she has contributed to a range of projects of varying scales, including the making of a book documenting experiences and conversations at the Kumbh Mela, the largest faith gathering on earth. The scope of this work involved content structuring, book design, information design interventions and curatorial engagement. Tirtha is interested in sustainable and community driven practices, which she hopes to pursue with the tools and connections she’ll gain at the UnSchool.
Umang Sood
From Mumbai, India, Umang’s passions are centred around helping people find their purpose through community and cooperation. Umang is the co-founder at of10, where he hopes to introduce India to the concept of a connected workspace and to the power of networking by creating a synergistic hub for ambitious freelancers, entrepreneurs and early stage businesses. Interested in design, art, music and technology, Umang, plans on harnessing the inherent creativity in these fields and unleashing new products, services and initiatives. With a passion for driving brands to success, Umang keeps a close watch on the emerging Indian consumer landscape. In his spare time, he watches an unhealthy amount of TV shows and strives to push the sartorial limits for men with his ever-expanding collection of pink apparel.
Xander Ong
Leading through serving communities, Xander has the privilege to provide healthcare solutions for many segments of society. He dives deep into complexities in search of connections that co-create value and identity. He believes that positive change comes from connecting and bridging hearts within and between communities. Currently with a senior care organization, Xander leads internal teams and collaborative partnerships to advance care outcomes and business opportunities. He is also active in the startup scene in Singapore, and mentors at an accelerator program to co-design solutions for the future.
Yesha Shah
Yesha is a 23 year old architect from Mumbai. People, space and design excite her. She enjoys traveling and views it as an opportunity to observe different cities and their social structures and to understand how the cities and their people live. Traveling across the various parts of India and across the world has shown Yesha that technologic advancements, despite their advantages, have negatively affected cities. She finds that cities have become efficient machines but more often than not, have failed to cater to human beings and their desires, while also adversely affecting the environment. This understanding has inspired her to rethink the role of architecture in society beyond that of just designing buildings. She aims to focus her work as an architect to design better social systems, using human-centered design and a design-based approach to create solutions which meet social needs and make cities livable for humans as humans. Yesha aspires to work towards starting a social enterprise which works for and with people to design better places to live, work and to enjoy a public life.
