As I traveled from D.C. to the West Coast listening to a song from one of my favorite Broadway musicals, In the Heights, I couldn't stop thinking about Rebecca Tarbotton. An environmental activist and executive director of The Rainforest Action Network (RAN), Becky was one of the most courageous, inspirational,...

Click here to read an original op-ed from the TED speaker who inspired this post and watch the TEDTalk below.

As a mathematician, Max Little hasn't spent most of his career in a doctor's office or a hospital, but with a pad and pencil or behind...

Barbara's mother was desperate -- there was nothing in the house to feed her children or herself. All that remained was a bag of seed that she'd been planning to sow on her small plot of land. Could the seeds be eaten as food? She could no longer look at...

For Marion, the challenge of starting her own business was not lack of initiative - she had plenty - but rather dearth of start-up capital. At 20 years old, Marion dropped out of school because she didn't have sufficient school fees. In Dar es Salaam, Tanzania, where she lives, this...

One of the most beloved companies to be birthed in Seattle was Home Grocer. You ordered groceries on the internet and a great delivery person arrived, leaving them on your kitchen counter. The produce was beautiful and nutritious. Sadly after trying to expand too quickly in the first dot com...

I worked with Anne-Marie Slaughter when she was at the State Department. She has since written a very thought-provoking and deeply personal piece on whether women can have it all. We got to wake up with her at 4:20 a.m. on Monday to catch the train to DC...

Let's talk deal flow. The top investors from Silicon Valley to New York to London know that deal flow is the secret to getting the best returns. If a boat is financial capital, and deals are the fish, investors want to be floating in a river where the fish are...

India has become synonymous with innovation. Inexpensive mHealth applications. The Tata Nano. Low cost eye surgery. These are just a handful of the frugal innovations that India has developed and is now exporting. With a booming social enterprise sector, a number of the world's leading academics, Nobel Prize winners and...

In the minute or so it takes you to read these lines, 150 new babies will have been born across the globe. For many families, it will be one of the most special minutes of their lives. For many mothers, it's a moment of joy -- but it...

In 2008, the Oscar-winning film Slumdog Millionaire brought the issue of unsafe sanitation to the silver screen. Audiences cringed as young Jamal is forced to jump into the open pit of feces in which he was previously seen relieving himself. But such scenes are not simply fodder for movie-goers and...

Fifty years ago, President John F. Kennedy called for the creation of an agency dedicated to international development. In a new postwar world, President Kennedy recognized that combating hunger, disease, and poverty around the globe would advance America's own values, prosperity and security - that agency is what we now...

Shamim, a proud woman in Pakistan vividly recalls when she received her very first order: A buyer requested several hundred pieces of the handicraft sample she had shown him. She quietly began to cry- tears of joy when tears of fear had dominated the previous six months. Her husband, a...