The Authors
Roshan Paul and Ilaina Rabbat are co-founders of Amani Institute, an award-winning global social enterprise which has, to date, helped nearly 10,000 people from over sixty-five countries accelerate their careers in social impact. Under their leadership, it has also supported more than 250 organizations around the world, from large global UN departments to small local businesses, and everything in between, to increase staff capacity, motivation, and impact. They stepped down as executive leaders of the organization in 2021, but remain active board members. In 2019, they were both named to the DO School’s Top 25 Influential Leaders in Purposeful Organizations.
Roshan Paul
Prior to Amani Institute, Roshan worked with Ashoka for a decade, where he designed and launched programs that supported over 500 social entrepreneurs (Ashoka Fellows) around the world. Raised in Bangalore, India, Roshan has a master’s in Public Policy from the Harvard Kennedy School and a bachelor’s in International Political Economy from Davidson College. He has guest-lectured or spoken at conferences at over fifty universities and other institutions around the world, including Harvard, Dartmouth, Georgetown, and the World Bank. He has also conducted dozens of workshops at leading organizations from Vodafone to Oxfam, and Deloitte to UNICEF.
Roshan currently serves on the Board or Advisory Council of several innovative educational organizations in the USA, Netherlands, and India. He served a term on the World Economic Forum (WEF) Global Future Council on Behavioral Science (2016–2018), was awarded a Leadership in Education award by the World Education Congress in 2017, named one of the Asia Society’s “Asia 21 Young Leaders” in 2018, and a BMW Foundation “Responsible Leader” in 2019. He delivered the commencement (graduation) speech at the University of San Diego in May 2015 and TEDx Talks at TEDxAmsterdamEd and TEDxBangaloreSalon. His writing has been published in Forbes, the Stanford Social Innovation Review, MIT’s Innovations Journal, India Today, and the India Development Review. He has been interviewed in The Huffington Post, Vanity Fair, Forbes, and CNBC Africa, among others.
Roshan has studied and worked on every continent (bar Antarctica) and is a hopeless junkie of the sport of cricket. He is the author of two books: Such a Lot of World, a novel, and Your Work Begins at No, a collection of essays on social impact education, as well as a book chapter in the anthology Dream of a Nation: Inspiring Ideas for a Better America.
Ilaina Rabbat
Prior to Amani Institute, Ilaina worked actively towards social change across the Americas and Europe for more than a decade, supporting individuals and organizations to increase their impact.
She started her career working at the International Cooperation Department of the Youth Council of Galicia-Spain, supporting relations with the European Union. Since then, consistent with her passion for education and learning from other cultures, she has worked on community-based projects in Uruguay, Ecuador, Bolivia, and Haiti and served on the Open Society Foundation advisory board. Ilaina also worked at Ashoka, as director of a youth program in Argentina, as global campaigns manager in the United States headquarters, as leader of Ashoka’s expansion into Central America, and finally helped build the youth ecosystem in Kenya.
Currently, Ilaina is an advisory board member of Cola-Cola Institute (Brazil), The Bio-Leadership Project (UK), Recipes for Wellbeing (Global), the School of Future (India), and Universidad Camilo José Cela (Spain). She is a certified executive coach by the International Coaching Federation.
Ilaina has two master’s degrees, one in Applied Positive Psychology from the University of Pennsylvania (United States), and one in International Studies and Peace and Conflict Resolution from Torcuato Di Tella University (Argentina). She authored a book chapter in the Brazilian anthology Negócios de Impacto Socioambiental no Brasil, about how social entrepreneurs can move from surviving to thriving, as well as several essays in the Stanford Social Innovation Review.