Cheryl Dahle is a journalist, entrepreneur and thought leader who has spent more than ten years working at the intersection of business and social innovation. Most recently, she was a director at Ashoka, where she created a consulting practice that distilled knowledge from the organization’s network of 2,500 social entrepreneurs to provide philanthropic guidance to foundations and companies. Prior to that, she was part of the incubation and start-up team to launch the VC-funded online environmental magazine, Blue Egg. She also founded and led Fast Company magazine’s Social Capitalist awards, a competition to surface top social entrepreneurs. As the project manager for four years, she helped design an evaluation methodology and sifted through hundreds of non-profit applications each year to find top performers with compelling models for change. She has written extensively on capital markets for non-profits, sustainability, and social entrepreneurs in the U.S. and abroad. As a consultant, she has served leading organizations in the space of hybrid business/social solutions, including Humanity United, Nike, the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation, the David and Lucile Packard Foundation, and the Center for the Advancement of Social Entrepreneurship at Duke University. Her first book, No Horizon is So Far, the story of the first two women in history to cross Antarctica on foot, was published in 2003 by Da Capo Press.

Michele Kahane (MBA and MIA, Columbia University) is a professor of professional practice at Milano The New School for Management and Urban Policy. She has more than 20 years of experience in the global business, nonprofit, and philanthropy sectors. Kahane was a banker in emerging markets corporate finance and later practiced social investment at the Ford Foundation for a decade. Subsequently, as a senior executive at the Clinton Global Initiative and at the Center for Corporate Citizenship at Boston College, she worked with companies, social entrepreneurs, and the public sector to forge innovative, market-based approaches to global development. She is co-author of the award-winning book Untapped: Creating Value in Underserved Markets (Berrett-Koehler, June 2006), which provides advice to managers on how companies can both implement profitable business strategies and improve conditions in poor communities. In addition to sitting on the Criterion Institute Board, Kahane serves on the board of the Women’s Network for a Sustainable Future, the steering committee of the Institute for Responsible Investment, the NY Regional Association of Grantmakers Task Force on Hurricane Katrina, and the Fast Forward Fund.