At least five Indian American and South Asian American emerging leaders were among 35 individuals named by Echoing Green June 12 as 2018 Fellowship award recipients.

Among the Fellows, who are working on everything from harnessing artificial intelligence and data to tracking police interactions with communities of color in the U.S. to reducing plastic in the environment through innovative chemical processing techniques that allow the re-use of previously-unusable plastic waste, include, Purvi Shah, Sibjan Chaulagain, Shubham Choudhary, Atif Javed and Aziz Alghunaim.

The fellowship for the nearly three dozen for-profit and nonprofit entrepreneurs, who are tackling the world’s most pressing issues, provides seed funding, training and programmatic support, and access to a large network of investors, supporters and thought leaders.

The winners, who were chosen from a pool of nearly 3,000 applicants from 155 countries, come from across the globe, working in eight different countries and 10 different cities and states, including Brazil, India, Kenya, Oakland, Detroit, St. Louis and more, Echoing Green said in a news release.

Each Fellow has an innovative and promising solution to address urgent social and environmental challenges worldwide, it said.

“We believe in supporting not just the big ideas for positive social change, but in investing in the bold and talented people behind them. That’s why Echoing Green is creating an ecosystem to support our past, present, and future Fellows with the tools they need to thrive,” Echoing Green president Cheryl L. Dorsey Dorsey added.

Shah is the founder of Movement Law Lab and was named a Black Male Achievement Fellow. Her bold idea is to build power in black and brown communities by incubating legal projects that combine law and community organizing to protect, defend, and embolden racial justice movements.

Shah, an experienced racial justice lawyer, founded Movement Law to seed a new generation of legal problem-solvers to tackle America's toughest racial justice challenges. One of the nation's premier thinkers on law and social movements, the Indian American activist has been training, teaching, mobilizing and inspiring young movement lawyers for over a decade, her bio said.

She is co-founder of Law For Black Lives, a national network of 3,400 lawyers founded in the aftermath of the Ferguson uprisings to support the growing Movement For Black Lives. From 2012 to 2016, she directed the Bertha Justice Institute at the Center for Constitutional Rights, where she trained thousands on movement lawyering and built a global network of movement lawyers in sixteen countries.

Shah started her legal career litigating on behalf of taxi drivers, tenant unions, public housing residents, and immigrants. She has won many awards for her work, including a Soros Equality Fellowship, Harvard Law School Wasserstein Fellowship, and a New Voices Fellowship. She is a graduate of Northwestern University and the Berkeley School of Law at the University of California.

Choudhary, the founder of Safe Access and a Global Fellow, had the bold idea to reduce health disparities among the LGBTQ population in India by providing health professionals with sensitivity training and facilitating access to health care using web-based technology.

Choudhary, who also serves as the executive director of Safe Access, is a Rise Up Youth Champion working in the area of sexual reproductive health and rights, his bio said.

The Indian American served as a Gandhi Fellow for two years in indigenous regions of Rajasthan in India, where he worked to transform the public education system by improving student learning outcomes. During his time at the Fellowship, he initiated Mahavari se Yaari, a grassroots-level rural campaign aimed at educating women and girls about menstrual health and hygiene. The campaign is now a livelihood project, with women's self-help groups making and selling reusable cloth menstrual pads to surrounding villages.

He holds a bachelor's degree from Delhi University and a diploma in women and gender studies from IGNOU. He is also a certified sexuality reproductive health and rights trainer and consultant.

Chaulagain is the founder of ICT for Agri Pvt. Ltd. and was named a Climate Fellow. According to the Echoing Green Fellow site, the bold idea of the Nepalese American is to ensure food security in Nepal by providing localized crop information to farmers and connecting them to suppliers, traders, experts and farmer cooperatives through mobile technology.

Chaulagain, the managing director of ICT for Agri Pvt Ltd., founded the company in 2014 after spending two years as a computer teacher and a farmer in his rural village after his graduation.

The need in his own village to combat pest and disease, and increase yield, motivated Sibjan to develop a mobile-based platform to help rural farmers.

He was selected as one of eight social entrepreneurs to attend the Social Entrepreneurship Forum in Stockholm in 2016.

Javed and Alghunaim are co-founders of Tarjimly and both were named Global Fellows. The duo had the bold idea of eliminating language barriers between refugees and NGOs in Europe and North America by making it easy for bilingual people to volunteer as remote real-time translators.

Javed, an MIT alumnus, was awarded the MIT Martin Luther King Jr. Service Award, was named one of Silicon Valley Business Journal's 40 Under 40, and was featured in Forbes and TechCrunch after launching Tarjimly with Aziz in Y Combinator, Echoing Green noted.

Alghunaim leads the technical product development efforts of Tarjimly, a tech nonprofit that enables bilinguals to volunteer as realtime translators for refugees. He leverages the latest technologies in social messaging and machine learning to provide a translator for every refugee in need.

Alghunaim received his bachelor’s and master’s degrees in computer science, with a focus on machine learning, from MIT in 2015.

Echoing Green is a global organization that identifies social entrepreneurs with the greatest potential to make lasting change and invests deeply in their success. The organization embraces “smart risks” by providing seed funding of up to $90,000 for two years to accelerate the growth of high-potential leaders and their organizations, it said.

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