Room to Read is a global nonprofit working to create a world free from illiteracy and gender inequality. Founded in 2000 after a Microsoft executive's trek through Nepal, it partners with communities and governments to build foundational literacy in early grades and to support girls through secondary school with life-skills and mentorship. As of 2024 it reports reaching more than 50 million children across 28 countries.
Jim Garrison is the Founder and President of Ubiquity University, a next-generation global learning platform blending academic rigor with consciousness development, social innovation, and transformative education. Born in 1951 in Szechuan Province, China, to Baptist missionary parents, Garrison holds a PhD in Philosophical Theology from Cambridge and has spent five decades at the intersection of education, diplomacy, and civilizational transformation - co-founding the Gorbachev Foundation/USA with Mikhail Gorbachev after the Cold War, launching the State of the World Forum, and more recently convening Humanity Rising, a global summit initiative launched in 2020 that has engaged hundreds of thousands of activists worldwide.
Sameer Shariff is the co-founder and CEO of Cambly, a San Francisco-based edtech platform that connects English learners worldwide with native-speaking tutors via on-demand video chat. A Princeton and Stanford-educated engineer who spent five years at Google, Shariff co-founded Cambly in 2012 after a trip to Argentina revealed how dramatically conversation practice accelerates language fluency. After a failed Series A attempt, he drove Cambly to cash-flow positivity without touching raised capital - then raised $60M from Benchmark, Bessemer, and others once the company no longer needed it. Cambly has ranked #1 in app stores across 150 countries and reaches an addressable market of 1.5 billion people seeking English fluency.