Team
Simon Chadwick is CEO at AVPN. He was previously a partner at a global private equity fund placement group and founded his own private equity advisory firm. Before that he worked for the Schroder Group for 12 years in a range of marketing, business development and management roles.
He worked on a pro bono basis at Impetus Trust in 2005 where he supported the fund raising and business development of this pioneering, London-based venture philanthropy fund. He has previously lived and worked in Asia for 8 years.
He has an MBA from IMD, an MA from SOAS (University of London) and an MA from Oxford University.
Kevin Teo is COO at AVPN. Prior to that, he was a Co-Founder of Volans, a Social Innovation company with offices in London and Singapore. Kevin was previously Head of East and Southeast Asia at the Schwab Foundation of Social Entrepreneurship and Global Leadership Fellow at the World Economic Forum. Prior to that, Kevin had a nine year stint in the enterprise software arena in Silicon Valley, which included work at two Sequoia Capital startups that were acquired by Sun Microsystems and Symantec respectively.
Kevin is a Trustee of the Southeast Asian Service Leadership Network (SEALNet), a non-profit he co-founded with offices in California and Singapore. He is also Adjunct Senior Research Fellow at the NUS Business School’s Asia Centre for Social Entrepreneurship and Philanthropy.
Kevin graduated from Carnegie Mellon University with an MS in Information Networking, and holds a BEng with Honors in Computing from Imperial College, London.
Sohini Bhattacharya is an intrepid intrapreneur and social change enthusiast who has 20 years of experience in the development sector. This has included income generation and micro-credit programmes for rural women in West Bengal with Child In Need Institute and Jeevika Development Society; working with traditional craftspeople with Dastkar identifying their needs and understanding markets and production issues; and helping to set up Sanhita, a gender rights centre, in Calcutta. For the last ten years, she has led institution-building for Ashoka Innovators for the Public in South Asia and identified and nurtured social entrepreneurs and helped in building an eco-system for them.
She is currently helping Breakthrough, a transnational human rights organization using multi-media, popular culture, leadership development and community mobilization to promote values of dignity, equality and justice, establish a strong resource base and scale-up in Asia.
Sohini serves as the president of the board of CREA, an international organization focused on women’s leadership. She is also a trustee for Read India, a sister concern of Read Global, a social enterprise creating self-sustaining libraries in rural India, Nepal and Bhutan. Sohini is the India Strategy Consultant at AVPN.
Ken Ito works for AVPN as Japan Advisor. He has a bachelor degree in economics and MBA in International Management from The American Graduate School of International Management (Thunderbird) in the United States. Ken spent ten years in the private sector, with his last position at GE Capital. He subsequently joined the Institute for Strategic Leadership (ISL) to launch the Center for Social Innovation, to promote social innovation through its leadership training programs. He has also organized the Social Entrepreneur of the Year (SEOY) in Japan award, part of the global SEOY program of Schwab Foundation in Switzerland.
Ken has been a partner at Social Venture Partners Tokyo since 2005, running its venture philanthropy fund to support and nurture local social entrepreneurs. He has been actively promoting SVP’s model in Japan and other Asian countries and successfully supported the launch of VP organizations in Singapore and Hong Kong. He is visiting senior researcher at SFC Research Institute at Keio University since 2007 and also teaches at Graduate School of Media and Governance, Keio University as Assistant Professor from 2010.
Suhaila Ismail is an Executive Assistant at AVPN. She has previously worked with the public sector in Singapore in organizations like the Singapore Police Force and National Council of Social Service before joining AVPN.
Suhaila graduated from Curtin University in 2010 with a Bachelor Degree in Commerce majoring in Accounting and Finance.