Design for Change Receives Innovation Award from The Rockefeller Foundation

NEW YORK, June 25, 2012 /PRNewswire/ -- The Rockefeller Foundation, celebrating 100 years of global innovation, today unveiled the names of the individuals and institutions that will be honored as part of its second annual Innovation Awards ceremony on June 26, 2012 in New York.

India's Design for Change, the largest global movement designed to give children an opportunity to express their own ideas for a better world and put them into action, will receive an Innovation Award from the Foundation for developing innovative financing models for social programs. Other award recipients include Mr. Ratan Tata, Chairman of Tata Sons, Ltd.; Sir Ronald Cohen, Chairman of The Portland Trust and Big Society Capital and Director of Social Finance US; and J. Carl Ganter, Director and Co-Founder of Circle of Blue.

Design for Change first began in 2009 at the Riverside School in Ahmedabad, India, and has grown to more than 300,000 schools throughout the world in just over three years.  Since its inception, Design for Change has empowered 25 million students in 35 countries to improve their communities and believe in the phrase "I can."

"The Rockefeller Foundation has been following the innovative work of Design for Change for many years, and we applaud the organization's efforts for empowering children around the world to design and implement projects that have the ability to transform whole communities," said Dr. Judith Rodin, President of The Rockefeller Foundation. "It is a great honor to present an Innovation award to Design for Change for the remarkable results its chapters have achieved in such a short period of time."

Some of the projects that students participating in Design for Change have conducted include teaching their parents to read, stopping child marriages, cleaning up their neighborhoods, fixing potholes on the street, advocating for bike paths as a way to curb obesity and developing a program to reduce their use of throw-away packaged food in schools.

On hand to receive the award on behalf of the organization will be Kiran Sethi, the organization's founder, and student representatives from schools in Guadalajara, Mexico; Taipei, Taiwan; and Pearl River, NY.

Design for Change will receive this award at the Foundation's annual Innovation Forum, to be held in Manhattan on June 26, 2012. As part of this recognition, Janvikas, an Indian NGO serving as a sponsor for the program with the Riverside School, will also receive a $100,000 grant from The Rockefeller Foundation to support Design for Change's future innovative work with young students around the world.

Past recipients of The Rockefeller Foundation's Innovation Award include President Bill Clinton, Dr. Sania Nishtar of Heartfile, an NGO and think tank in Pakistan and Jane Weru of the Akiba Mashinani Trust in Kenya.

For a live stream of The Rockefeller Foundation Innovation Awards dinner, please visit: http://centennial.rockefellerfoundation.org/events/entry/innovation-forum-2012if

The Rockefeller Foundation

The Rockefeller Foundation's mission to promote the well-being of people throughout the world has remained unchanged since its founding in 1913. Today, that mission is applied to an era of rapid globalization. Our vision is that this century will be one in which globalization's benefits are more widely shared and its challenges are more easily weathered. To realize this vision, the Foundation seeks to achieve two fundamental goals in our work. First, we seek to build resilience that enhances individual, community and institutional capacity to survive, adapt, and grow in the face of acute crises and chronic stresses. Second, we seek to promote growth with equity in which the poor and vulnerable have more access to opportunities that improve their lives. In order to achieve these goals, the Foundation constructs its work into time-bound initiatives that have defined objectives and strategies for impact. These initiatives address challenges that lie either within or at the intersections of five issue areas: basic survival safeguards, global health, environment and climate change, urban economic security, and social and economic security. For more information, please visit http://www.rockefellerfoundation.org

The Rockefeller Foundation Innovation Forum

The Rockefeller Foundation's annual Innovation Forum convenes some of the most creative and inventive minds from the worlds of business, government, civil society and journalism to bring innovation to bear on urgent challenges facing poor or vulnerable people around the world. This year's Innovation Forum will focus on one of today's most pressing issues – how to ensure that the benefits of new technologies do not bypass the world's poor.  The Foundation will seek to address this issue by showcasing some of the latest cutting-edge technologies and inviting participants to imagine how these technologies might benefit people around the world. The Foundation will then leverage some of the ideas and recommendations discussed at the Forum to search for new ways of ensuring rapid advancements in technology help those who are most vulnerable.

SOURCE The Rockefeller Foundation