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2011 was a big year for Ashoka Changemakers. Take a quick look at the milestones that amped up the momentum for Changemakers and our community

If you’ve been around these parts, you’re familiar with APOPO’s HeroRATs — the carefully trained, classically conditioned rodents that are bringing peace and security to countries with landmine legacies. HeroRATs founder Bart Weetjens and his talented critters have recently been featured at events like the 2011 Ashoka Globalizer and Skoll World Forum, heard over airwaves worldwide, and even captured on film in the field.

APOPO has successfully cleared more than 2,000 landmines and unexploded ordnances from land along the Thai-Cambodian border and in Mozambique. But what becomes of the reclaimed land after the HeroRATs head home?

Earlier this month, we announced the winners of the Making More Health competition, sponsored by Boehringer Ingelheim:

• ColaLife (Zambia)
• United for Sight (Ghana)
• Saúde Criança (Brazil) 

While we learned a great deal from (and about) these incredible innovators through the competition, we wanted to learn more. And what better way to learn, than to speak directly with the brains of the operations themselves?

Changemakers brought together the three winners of this competition on Google+ Hangout to hear more about their work, and to give them an opportunity to connect with each other. These teams have been doing incredible work -- take a listen:

Editor's note: This post was written by Vanuza Ramos, a Brazilian journalist and collaborator with Ashoka Changemakers.

In 1991, Dr. Vera Cordeiro realized that the real cause of most pediatric visits to a public hospital in Rio de Janeiro wasn’t illness or accident: it was the children’s living conditions.

“When the patient is discharged, they normally return to their homes, to a social context of vulnerability where they lack conditions to continue treatment,” Cordeiro said. “This makes the condition worsen and the patient must return to the hospital, which is yet another problem for a family already weakened by adverse economic and social realities.”  

With other professionals from the Lagoa Hospital technical staff, Dr. Cordeiro set out to break the cycle of hospitalization, discharge, and readmission by transforming the lives of the children and their families. They founded the Saúde Criança Association (ASC) to promote the physical, mental, and social health of children who were patients that were recently released to their families living below the poverty line. 

The holidays is the perfect time to join Ashoka in supporting remarkable social entrepreneurs who are changing the world one idea at a time.

Support outstanding people and their ideas by giving a gift that gives back, entrepreneurial style. From our editors, some ideas:

* Give insight. In 2011 alone, several books by Ashoka Fellows and staff have been published. Here are just a couple:

Nearly 40 million people worldwide are needlessly blind and another 240 million have low vision. Virtually all of the world’s 285 million visually-impaired persons live in developing countries, suffering from uncorrected refractive errors and cataracts.

But Unite For Sight, a social enterprise headquartered in New Haven, Connecticut, is empowering communities worldwide to improve eye health and eliminate preventable blindness. The organization guarantees eye treatment—whether it’s medication, a $150 sight-restoring surgery or even a first pair of glasses—for patients living in poverty in Ghana, India, and Honduras, as well as the United States and Canada.

More than 1.3 million people worldwide have overcome barriers to eye care through Unite For Sight services, whether they can afford to pay or not—the bill is always covered by the nonprofit.

Riders for Health courier, Piero Sakala (center), delivers blood samples sourced from rural health centers to a medical lab in Zambia's Chadiza district. After testing, the results are transported back to clinics along the country's southeastern border, enabling medical staff to more effectively diagnose diseases (including HIV and tuberculosis) and treat patients.

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This isn’t intended to ruin your holiday cheer, but it definitely caused me to think twice before buying big-brand chocolate for an upcoming holiday fête: Much of mainstream chocolate contains cocoa produced by child slaves.

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Editor's note: This post was written by Kate Petty, writer and editor at Ashoka Changemakers.

There’s nothing like the holiday season: Attending parties with friends, spending quality time with extended family, preparing 500 personalized letters to ask your donor list to make a year-end pledge to your social venture…

If that last item didn’t seem out of place to you, keep reading. For too many social entrepreneurs, the holidays are just another time of the year when you work hard for a great idea to save the world.

But taking time to vacation, spend time with family, and generally unplug is vital. Just ask the Mayo Clinic, which cautions on its web site against working long, stressful hours without a break: “When you’re tired, your ability to work productively and think clearly may suffer — which could take a toll on your professional reputation or lead to dangerous or costly mistakes.” 

A citizen journalist interviews a woman for a story in Chhattisgarh, a primarily rural state in Central India. Photo courtesy of CGNet Swara: Voice Portal For Community Media In India.

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While working as a social worker at a refugee resettlement agency, Beth Farmer saw that mental health support was a major gap in the services accessible to refugees.

“When you’re driving a client to a job interview, and they’re crying and telling you that they lived in the woods for three years, sucking water from mud, and that their newborn baby and wife were killed in front of their eyes — of course, you start to think that this person needs some extra support,” she said (in an understatement).

Even after fleeing unimaginable circumstances like terror, murder, rape, or torture, refugees face extraordinary challenges. There are about 15.4 million refugees worldwide (not including 27.5 million internally displaced people); and less than 1 percent eventually qualify for resettlement with the UN after a rigorous application process.

Refugees who do make it to the United States are immediately under pressure to quickly gain economic self-sufficiency.

On November 28, 2011, Ashoka Changemakers® will host a multilingual #SocEntChat about Making More Health through innovations that are sustainably increasing the health of people around the world. Join @changemakers from 3 to 5 p.m. EST to participate in a Twitter-based discussion with innovators, social entrepreneurs, and enthusiasts on the next generation of health solutions. This chat will be multilingual, with simultaneous facilitation in English, Spanish, and Portuguese.

Want to brush up on the latest innovative health models ahead of time? Check out the finalists of the Making More Health competition. Then join the #SocEntChat to share your thoughts and ask leading innovators your most burning questions!

Should we be celebrating the fact that Wal-Mart is considering joining the health care industry? The retail giant made big news last week when NPR learned that it was seeking partnerships with health firms for a major expansion of its in-store medical clinics. According to Wal-Mart’s request, the retail giant wants to “dramatically: 1) lower the cost of health care while maintaining or improving outcomes, and 2) expand access to high-quality health services by becoming the largest provider of primary health care services in the nation.”

Most of the commenters that weighed in for NPR’s article expressed doubts. Ann O’Malley, physician and senior health researcher at the Center for Studying Health System Change, said:

"Maybe Wal-Mart can deliver a lot of this stuff more cheaply because it is an expert at doing this with other types of widgets, but health care is not a widget and managing individual human beings is not nearly as simple as selling commercial products to consumers.”

I admit, my first reaction to the news was also skepticism. Wal-Mart’s abysmal reputation for “rolling back” employee health benefits doesn’t seem to make it a frontrunner for becoming the savior for America’s worsening health care crisis.

Victoria Grant, a member of the Ashoka Team and the Changemakers Initiative “Inspiring Approaches to First Nations, Metis and Inuit Learning,” attended the Aboriginal Literacy Symposium in Winnipeg on November 1 and 2 at the invitation of Bruce Lawson, Executive Director of The Counseling Foundation of Canada and the Canadian Education and Research Institute for Counseling. She found it an amazing opportunity to meet, interact with, and learn and share with people engaged with Aboriginal literacy.

Ovide Mercredi, a former national chief and the opening speaker at the Aboriginal Literacy Symposium, challenged his audience with this question: What does Aboriginal literacy mean? He spoke deliberately, and his thoughts, which were well organized and researched, were the perfect introduction for the symposium that followed.

Questions that I kept in mind were: Is literacy about understanding what binds us together? Is literacy about participating fully as a good human being with the potential to take care of one’s own needs? Is literacy about the individual spirit to achieve? Is Aboriginal literacy about all of the above, as well as being proficient in one’s own language?

Eight winners have been selected from the Partnering for Excellence: Innovations in Science, Technology, Engineering, and Math (STEM) Education competition, a search for the most innovative ways to inspire STEM-rich learning in our nation’s classrooms (particularly in high-need communities) by connecting students with STEM professionals.

The competition was hosted by Ashoka Changemakers, with support from Carnegie Corporation of New York and The Opportunity Equation. Winners were selected by a combination of open voting on the Changemakers.com website, the recommendations of competition partners, and a rigorous assessment by a distinguished panel of judges including Dr. Bruce Alberts, Tim Brown, Michele Cahill, Caroline Kennedy, Dr. Ioannis Miaoulis, and Dr. Robert Moses.

Let’s meet the winners!

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THIS THURSDAY November 17^th from 2:30am – 4:30am EST (1pm - 3pm IST) the #socentchat focuses on citizen media in the Middle East, Africa, Southeast Asia, and the Far East.

Our citizen media colleagues from Asia get their chance to be heard! So… innovators, citizen journalists, online activists, content-creators, communicators, online media gurus, and lovers of all things technology:  If you are in the Middle East, Africa, South Asia, or the Far East and have been unable to join previous #socentchats because of time differences – this is your chance.

This chat will build on the previous conversations about the status and future of citizen media. In previous #socentchats, we discussed the general state of affairs, challenges, and success stories. This week, we want to a explore timely and exciting topic: the relationship between citizen media and mainstream media – especially in areas impacted by protests and crisis.

Are you a part of the rooftop revolution? It’s never been easier, explains Ashoka Fellow Billy Parish. (Video after the jump.) He is the co-founder of Solar Mosaic, a marketplace that simplifies the clean energy movement by helping communities create and fund their own solar projects.

Join Parish in celebrating Community Solar Day in your neighborhood on November 20.

Occupy a rooftop near your home as a first step into a future where solar investments can create green jobs and local prosperity. Or find a building you’d like to see powered by solar energy and gather a community solar team to make sure your dream becomes a reality.

Eleven finalists have been chosen for Citizen Media: A Global Innovation Competition, supported by Google. The competition had a strong turnout of 426 entries from 75 countries, with more than 100 entries submitted in languages other than English.

The finalists represent the most promising innovations for boosting media access and participation around the world. They were selected by Citizen Media’s panel of expert judges, which included Michael Maness, vice president at the Knight Foundation; Esther Wojcicki, vice chair at Creative Commons; and Jared Cohen, director of Google Ideas. Now, your vote will determine the four winners of the competition.

Anyone can vote by logging-in to changemakers.com/citizenmedia/vote and learning about the entries. You can also browse the Citizen Media Toolkit, where the work of the finalists and other top entries will be showcased. Or, you can hear directly from the innovators on video.

The top 11 finalists are:

Recently, I’ve been posting about innovative gadgets (health-related devices last month and fresh water yesterday). We’re experiencing a unique and exciting cultural moment: while design and innovation once trended towards the production of sophisticated, expensive technology, innovators are now creating elegantly simple and inexpensive solutions that have the potential to make a big impact on the world’s problems.

But it’s important to remember that creating lasting social change takes more than just a gadget or technology, no matter how revolutionary. The infamous PlayPump fiasco illustrates the potential pitfalls of models that rely on a new device without seeing the bigger picture. 

One-third of all albatross chicks die on the Midway Atoll, often as the result of being mistakenly fed plastic by their parents.

Editor's note: This post was written by Alison Craiglow Hockenberry, contributing editor at Ashoka Changemakers®.

As the G-20 summit meeting gets underway and mainstream media coverage inevitably focuses on the economic woes of the developed world, we’re going to focus on some good news. We want to celebrate the members of the Changemakers community who took center stage at last year’s G-20 summit to show the world how to build strong economies through the support and financing of local, small businesses.

Winners of the G-20 SME Finance Challenge, which prompted the G-20 to invest more than $500 million in their projects and others like them, are demonstrating that in a global economy run amok, the investments that do well are likely to be the ones that also do good.

Check out this brilliant video from one of the winners, Peace Dividend Trust, which is revolutionizing the way international aid works by investing on the ground: “What's Wrong with Aid? It's not Local.”

The 2008 James Bond film Quantum of Solace introduced a different kind of villain to popular audiences: Dominic Greene, the ruthless capitalist with a sinister scheme to take control of Bolivia’s water supply and, under private contract, provide that precious resource to the public—at double the rate.