When the Ground Shifts: How Leaders are Building Lasting Impact
Hosted by Echoing Green and McNulty Foundation
How do you build durable institutions in deeply volatile contexts? Across the globe, social innovators are leading in environments shaped by political instability, economic shocks, climate disruptions, and rapid change. In these conditions, launching a bold enterprise is only the beginning. The harder question is how to build enterprises that endure while holding fast to a vision rooted in community and culture.
This interactive session will follow a fishbowl format, where you can engage with leaders designing for uncertain pathways ahead. These leaders' work reflects a deep commitment to community-centered values and goes against the grain to defy conventional wisdom:
Nedgine Paul Deroly, 2014 Echoing Green Fellow and 2024 McNulty Prize Winner, Co-founder and CEO of Anseye Pou Ayiti
Muzalema Mwanza, 2020 Echoing Green Fellow, Founder and CEO of Safe Motherhood Alliance
Khaled Shaaban, 2022 Echoing Green Fellow, Founder of Subul Impact Outsourcing
Through a facilitated, peer-driven conversation, participants will explore how leaders can:
Build organizations designed for long-term resilience in volatile environments
Prototype and navigate change when the path ahead isn’t clear
Hold fast to a bold vision when external pressures push toward compromise
Challenge conventional wisdom about what leadership, scale, and success look like
Designed for ecosystem partners and funders interested in long-term institutional strength and leadership resilience and social innovators working in unstable environments, this workshop offers a space for practical reflection, shared learning, and exchange.
Yordanos Eyoel is an Ethiopian-American democracy entrepreneur who is the Founder and CEO of Keseb. Keseb is a nonpartisan organization building a transnational civil society ecosystem to advance inclusive and resilient democracies.
Yordanos’ expertise lies at the intersection of philanthropy and practice, building and strengthening ecosystems for social and democracy innovation. Prior to launching Keseb, Yordanos was a Managing Partner at New Profit, where she was the first person in the organization’s 22-year history to grow from Portfolio Analyst to Managing Partner.
Yordanos is an Ashoka Fellow, a Civil Society Fellow of the Aspen Institute, and a recipient of several awards including from the Elevate Prize Foundation and Unorthodox Philanthropy. Her work and writing have been featured in TED, Fast Company, Stanford Social Innovation Review, NPR, and Harvard Business Review, among others.
A former Fellow of the SNF Agora Institute at Johns Hopkins University, Yordanos earned a B.A. in Economics and Political Science, Honors, Phi Beta Kappa, from the University of Florida, where she was inducted into the University’s Hall of Fame. She also holds a Master’s in Public Policy from Harvard Kennedy School.
Originally from Haiti and Co-Founder/CEO of Anseye Pou Ayiti, Nedgine has over 20 years of career experience in the education sector with a focus on instructional excellence, curriculum implementation, and leadership development. She earned a B.A. in History from Yale College and an Ed.M. in International Education Policy from the Harvard Graduate School of Education. She was named among the top global social innovators by Echoing Green, among the Forbes Magazine "30 Under 30 Social Entrepreneurs", among the inaugural Obama Foundation Fellowship, and the 2024 McNulty Prize for her work leading Anseye Pou Ayiti (APA) – a movement to equip a new generation of Haitian civic leaders for educational justice in Haiti. APA will equip 50,000 civic leaders, working together to transform schools and communities by re-Haitianization and redefining true leadership as rooted in collective action.
Muzalema Mwanza is the founder and CEO of Safe Motherhood Alliance, a social enterprise addressing maternal and newborn health across sub-Saharan Africa. Her work focuses on providing baby delivery kits and digital health tools to expectant mothers and frontline birth attendants in underserved communities.
Her journey began with a deeply personal experience, being asked to provide her own materials during childbirth at a public hospital, that moment revealed the stark reality facing millions of women and became the catalyst for her mission to make safe childbirth a universal right, not a privilege. With her background in engineering, she is bridging systemic gaps in maternal care as her work draws on deep community engagement and a passion for health equity, blending innovation with local solutions to empower women at the last mile. Under her leadership, she has reached thousands of women and frontline health workers.
She is a 2020 Echoing Green Fellow, an Ashoka Fellow, a Schwab Foundation Award Social Innovator, her work has been featured on the BBC and recognized by the World Economic Forum, UNICEF, and other global health institutions.
Khaled Shaaban is a Social-Tech Entrepreneur utilizing AI and Tech to transform lives. In 2019, he launched Subul, a social enterprise connecting conflict-affected communities to dignified digital work. After seeking asylum in the Netherlands in 2021, Khaled spent 18 months in refugee camps, an experience that shaped Subul's mission to create jobs and resilience for displaced people. His journey and work have been featured by Al Jazeera, Het Financieele Dagblad, OneWorld, and Arab News.
We value inclusion and access for all participants and will do our best to create an accessible event within the provided venue. By registering for this event, you agree to Echoing Green's code of conduct and anti-harassment policy.