Kiran Bir Sethi is the founder/director of the Riverside School in Ahmedabad. She is the founder of Design for Change.  She has a design background, having got her diploma in visual communication from NID. She is also the founder of ‘aProCh’ – an initiative attempting to make our cities more child friendly, for which she was awarded the Ashoka Fellow in 2008. In 2009, she was also presented with the ‘Call to Conscience’ award from the King Centre at Stanford, for the citizenship/liberation curriculum that Riverside School implements. In 2009, she conceptualized and promoted India’s largest Design for Giving contest for school children which got over 100,000 children to design solutions for some of India’s most challenging problems. Currently, she is promoting the world’s largest “Design for Change” contest, which has over 33 countries participating and aims to reach 60,000 schools across India. She was a speaker at TEDIndia in Nov. 2009. She was a symposium member at the Rockefeller Centre, Bellagio – looking at Design for Social Change. In May-June, 2010, she was a Keynote Speaker at the M.I. Symposium in Beijing, alongside Dr. Howard Gardner. In July 2010, she was a Speaker and Panelist at a Conference titled “Where do we go from here: Achieving Global Peace with Justice in a Sustainable Environment?” at The Martin Luther King Jr. Research & Education Institute, at Stanford University. She was a Plenary Speaker at the WISE Summit in Doha in November, 2010, as also at Design Indaba in Cape Town – South Africa, in February, 2011. She has recently been chosen as one of 12 Thought Leaders of the World – an Innovation Knight for the i4P (Innovation for Peace) Society – formed by the Culture of Peace Forum, New York, U.S.A. She was the Inaugural Speaker at “X Entrepreneur Open Day 2011 in Bilbao, Spain in MAY2011and in end JUN2011. she was a Panelist at the “XVI Future Trends Forum – Searching an effective Education for the 21st Century”, held by the Bankinter Foundation in Madrid, Spain.

Websites:

www.dfcworld.com
www.schoolriverside.com
www.aproch.org
www.designforchangecontest.com