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Global Good Fund's Karen Fujii

Gold Stevie Award Winner 2012, Click to Enter The 2014 American Business Awards

Company: Global Good Fund, Arlington, VA, U.S.A.
Company Description: GGF accelerates the development of young leaders tackling the world’s greatest social issues through entrepreneurship. We achieve this by investing both targeted human and financial capital in these leaders through our 15 month fellowship program. We support Fellows in their natural work environments, craft personalized Leadership Development Plans, and pair Fellows with executive coaches.
Nomination Category: Individual Awards Categories
Nomination Sub Category: Employee of the Year - Government or Non-Profit

Nomination Title: Karin Fujii, Senior Director of Fellowship and Expansion

Describe for the judges the activities and accomplishments of the nominated employee since the beginning of July last year (up to 525 words): TEXT REDACTED FOR PUBLICATION

Motivated to aid in the development of young high impact entrepreneurs, Karin joined The Global Good Fund (GGF), in October 2013 as it’s second full-time employee. As Senior Director of Fellowship and Expansion, Karin is responsible for architecting, implementing and iterating the GGF Fellowship Program, where she currently supports the leadership development of 13 social entrepreneurs throughout the U.S., Latin America, Africa and Asia. Karin’s efforts to design and implement a multi tiered search and selection process has been instrumental to GGF’s success screening and recruiting high potential young leaders. Karin’s ownership of the Fellowship Program in less than a year’s time has resulted in an 800% increase in applicants from 2013 to 2014 alone.

Karin played a critical role in helping The GGF CEO implement the social enterprise industry’s first-of-its-kind 360 tool, which provides behavior-based leadership assessment of skills and values specific to social entrepreneurship. This 360 tool is used by GGF Fellows and has proven to be an invaluable industry resource, as it has been solicited by 90% of the GGF Fellows to implement with their teams - totaling over 280 employees affected. Karin and The GGF team incorporated the 360 tool into the Fellowship’s leadership development model. Each Fellow is paired with a Leadership Development Consultant (LDC) who provides 20 hours of support as the Fellow creates a personalized leadership development plan in sync with business priorities. The Leadership Development Plan is implemented with 12 months of guidance from a hand-selected GGF business Coach - an industry executive.

The GGF is in the process of commercializing the 360 tool which will enable GGF to extend leadership development support to more than 40,000 entrepreneurs who have expressed interest in using the tool. Additionally, Karin partnered with Deloitte D2i to create leadership metrics for tracking and evaluating the Fellows’ personal growth, enterprise growth, and social growth long-term.

Karin is the Fellowships’ chief innovator, engaging with Coaches and Fellows as well as industry experts to continuously iterates the model. Karin spent this past year initiating strategic partnerships for GGF to ensure collaboration and sharing across the industry. She has solidified partnerships with a list of entities including but not limited to Ashoka, Village Capital, Echoing Green, Segal Family Foundation (SFF), Aging 2.0, Unreasonable Institute, Mara Foundation, Harambe Entrepreneurs Alliance, and Draper Richards Kaplan. She’s spoken on panels for both SFF and Inspiring Capital and has helped vet entrepreneur classes for Echoing Green and Unreasonable Institute.

Karin makes it a priority to be on the ground to scout entrepreneurs and conduct due diligence. Her travels thus far have included Colombia, Mexico, Tanzania and Uganda. Most recently in Uganda and Tanzania, Karin conducted site visits with over 30 entrepreneurs applying to the Fellowship. Additionally, to ensure scale, Karin has trained a team of over 10 Search and Selection team members to help identify talent globally.

Karin was awarded American Express’ 50 Under 40 Program, which identified 50 promising leaders at the Social Enterprise Alliance Summit 14 in Nashville.

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Provide a brief biography of the nominated employee (up to 125 words):

A Chicago native, Karin grew up in Bangkok, Thailand where she was exposed to the dysfunction of international development. Determined to address community needs, Karin co-founded a scholarship fund providing scholarships to 300 children from Bangkok’s slums.

Karin spent two years in Cameroon as a Peace Corps Small Enterprise Development Volunteer building a cooperative management model to transform communities into better economic agents. Karin replicated this model with 15 cooperatives and trained 100+ individuals to deploy this in Africa and Latin America. Afterwards, Karin worked at the United States African Development Foundation overseeing a portfolio of entrepreneurs in Nigeria, Ghana and Cape Verde.

At GGF, Karin is dedicated to helping entrepreneurs grow sustainable business models and the necessary leadership skills to enable long-term global impact.