Founder and Director, Going to school
Founder and director of Going to School, a creative nonprofit trust that makes magical movies, books and radio for children and young people in India..
Lisa is a global person, part of a generation that understands the world as a truly interconnected system. She has been on a life-long journey to explore communication as a preparation for change, for solving problems. She is determined to continue her quest in India, where she has lived and worked for the last six years. During that time she worked for UNICEF and came to see that their materials were more prescriptive than the stories she was beginning to conceptualize. She also edited a magazine with a miniscule budget and learned how to work with advertising sponsors—the ones who made production possible. As her idea crystallized, she found a photographer and set out on months of travel all over India, including Kashmir, seeking out schools and children whose words and experience she could present in stories. The result offers something new and fresh. Parents have told her that they are so happy to have something like her stories to read to their children and to tell them about other places in their vast country.
At the age of 23 in 1998, Lisa moved to India where she worked for a bridal magazine and a non-profit also concerned with the education of children in India. From the former she learned how to work with an almost non-existent budget, while the latter showed her that change in regards to school attendance would be more likely to happen if the children, rather than the donors, were directly inspired. Lisa longed to publish real stories, and thus, like THE FUTURE MAKERS, her initiative began with twelve months of travel culminating in a book, Going to School, that was released at the organization’s launch.
“Imaginations can change the world,” and India can thank Lisa’s imagination for kindling a widespread passion for learning and creation (see the facts & figures beneath). For her current venture, Be! An Entrepreneur, she gathers her own social-entrepreneurial resourcefulness to create a new generation of pioneers: “In an emerging market, education must be relevant to employment, and we can’t teach kids skills for jobs that do not exist yet. We can teach them how to identify problems, to become leaders, to use their team work skills to change the world.”
