The Center for Social Sector Leadership develops cutting-edge thinking on social change by bringing in new ideas and voices through residencies at Berkeley-Haas School of Business for imaginative thinkers. Over the last decade, the Center has hosted innovative thinkers in fresh, just-developing fields: the voices of those subjected to gender violence as a tool of war (focused on India and Kashmir), the power of networks to create social change, artists as social entrepreneurs, multisector leadership and social impact, and democracy entrepreneurship.
Social Impact Fellows
Shashi Buluswar
Dr. Shashi Buluswar is a scientist and a serial social entrepreneur working on a range of areas including global health, energy access, water and food security.
He is the Founder and President of the Institute for Transformative Technologies (ITT), incubated at the Lawrence Berkeley National Lab as a special initiative of the White House Office of Science & Technology Policy under the Obama administration. With a mission to build technology solutions for sustainable global development, ITT launched India’s largest infrastructures for off-grid solar power and natural sanitation, which collectively serve hundreds of thousands of the country’s poorest citizens. In response to COVID-19, Shashi also led ITT’s launch of Oxygen Hub, which has become Africa’s largest medical oxygen franchise with operations in Kenya, Nigeria and Ethiopia.
In 2021-22, Shashi took a leave from ITT to build serve as the founding CEO of Global Health Labs, a new nonprofit created by Bill Gates to develop technology breakthroughs in global health, in partnership with the Gates Foundation. Prior to creating ITT, Shashi was a Partner at Dalberg Global Development Advisors, a mission-driven strategy consulting firm, and served several international NGOs, foundations, governments, social entrepreneurs, the World Bank, and a number of UN agencies.
Shashi is a recognized thought leader in the broader global equity and justice movement.
Holden Lee
Holden Lee has served as Chief Investment Officer and Chief Financial Officer for innovative philanthropic asset platforms for the last ten years, capitalizing on the current $80 trillion in intergenerational wealth transfer to help solve the pressing issues of our times. Holden’s expertise comes from extensive work with companies, asset managers, and mission-driven organizations at the forefront of emerging institutional investing trends. He helped global investment consulting firm Cambridge Associates enter the field of mission-related investing, oversaw infrastructure privatization projects for a $250 million TPG private equity water fund and a $3 billion Asian independent power producer platform that were early models for sustainable asset strategies, and led innovation initiatives at impactful organizations such as Tides and Trust for Public Land. By driving new business models at the intersection of public sector, private sector, and philanthropic markets, he has catalyzed resources in education, sustainability, asset management, real estate, and other industries with strong opportunities for investment and impact.
Alison Lingane
Alison Lingane is a nationally recognized employee ownership expert. A serial social entrepreneur, she
has dedicated her career to leveraging business as a force for good. Alison is the Founder of the Ownership Capital Lab, which focuses on capital as a growth and scale lever for employee ownership. The Lab identifies, pilots, and supports the uptake of strategies for financing employee ownership at greater scale. This work builds on her 10+ years as co-founder of Project Equity, a leader in the movement to harness employee ownership to maintain thriving local business communities, honor selling owners’ legacies, and address income and wealth inequality, and on her role as founder and manager of the Employee Ownership Catalyst Fund. Alison’s successes have been recognized by fellowship invitations from Echoing Green, The Aspen Institute, Rutgers University, the Just Economy Institute, UC Berkeley’s Haas School of Business, and Ashoka, where her work was featured in the book America’s Path Forward. In 2022, with her co-founder Hilary Abell, Alison received the Heinz Award for the Economy, established to honor the memory of U.S. Senator John Heinz and to celebrate the vision and spirit that produce achievements of lasting good. Alison holds a B.S., magna cum laude, from Harvard, and an MBA from UC Berkeley’s Haas School of Business.
Jane Wei-Skillern
Jane is a recognized expert on the topic of collaboration in social enterprises, and she brought her network leadership research into her general social entrepreneurship courses and publications. During her time as a fellow, she narrowed her focus specifically to network leadership, developing research, articles, and cases on the topic. Jane convened groups of dozens of successful network leaders from around the world to share and develop best practices, thus advancing knowledge from the practice of network leadership to inform the theory of same. Jane Wei-Skillern has served as a Haas Senior Fellow since 2015, developing her focus on the practice of network leadership in social enterprises.
Past Visiting Scholars
Laura Callanan
2013-2014 Visiting Scholar
Laura Callanan is the founding partner of Upstart Co-Lab, a national collaboration connecting artists, impact investors and social entrepreneurs to create more opportunities for artists to deliver social impact at scale. As Scholar in Residence at UC-Berkeley/Haas School of Business Laura authored three business school case studies featuring artist social entrepreneurs. She was awarded a Rockefeller Foundation Bellagio Fellowship and invited as a Visiting Scholar to the American Academy in Rome to continue this work. As a visiting fellow, Laura edited the Federal Reserve Bank of San Francisco’s 2015 Community Development Investment Review on the topic of creative placemaking. She was previously a consultant with McKinsey & Company, a Senior Adviser at the United Nations Development Programme, Executive Director of The Prospect Hill Foundation, and Associate Director at The Rockefeller Foundation. Laura Callanan served as a Visiting Scholar at CSSL in 2013-2014, studying the new field of arts as social entreprenership.
Doug Leeds
2017-2018 Social Impact Fellow
Doug was a Social Impact Fellow at CSSL developing ways to incorporate multi-sector leadership and social impact into the curriculum and advance our thinking about executive leadership and social purpose. Doug is now a member of Berkeley Haas’ Professional Faculty, teaching Leadership by Persuasion and co-teaching Creativity and Leadership. Doug is also CEO of EAT Club, the country’s leading B2B food delivery service, and recently led the company’s sale to Compass Group, PLC (LSE:CPG). He has held many executive positions at multiple companies prior to EAT Club.
Jill Vialet
2021-2022 Visiting Scholar
Jill Vialet is a serial social entrepreneur. She is the founder of Playworks, the co-founder of Substantial, and the co-founder of Oakland’s Museum of Children’s Art. Vialet was elected as an Ashoka Fellow in 2004, named by Forbes as one of 30 social entrepreneurs on its ‘Impact 30’ list in 2011, and received a James Irvine Foundation Leadership Award in 2013. Jill joins CSSL as a Fellow in 2021 to develop entrepreneurial ways to strengthen democracy by pairing new democracy entrepreneurs with experienced social entrepreneurs, to accelerate democracy entrepreneurship.