Keita Demming
Firestarter. Change monger. Idea generator. Keita Demming is passionate about creating positive change, and the enabling systems that support it. Keita is currently working on his PhD in Adult Education. He is not your average PhD student. He runs a company, Village Seed Solutions that helps enthusiastic, caring citizens, individuals, groups, and organisations realise collaborative or multi-sectorial approaches to change intervention.
His PhD work focuses on understanding strategies for social problem solving. At the University of Toronto, he serves as the coordinator for the Social Economy Centre which promotes and disseminates multidisciplinary research and policy analysis on issues affecting the intersection among public, private and nonprofit sector.
During August, Keita leads a camp, Agents of Change where participants learn about social innovation and systems change. As a way of improving the content for the Agents of Change program, Keita also started TheSIDELab, a lab exploring ways of teaching systems, integrative, design and evaluative thinking.
He is also working with Social Innovation Generation on the development and evaluation of their Knowledge Hub, a website designed to provide learning resources about creating conditions for social innovation.
In the spirit of embracing the future as it unfolds, Keita has held the license for TEDxPortofSpain for four years, and has led a team of passionate changemakers through successful events that showcase ideas worth sharing.
Ardene Sirjoo
Ardene Sirjoo gets fired up about finding common ground to mobilize people. Ultimately interested in affecting positive change, she is driven to connect the right people to various causes and audiences. Her 7 years’ experience in radio broadcasting allows her to draw on human and information resources that support her work both on and off-air.
With a solid, postsecondary school foundation in political education and the experience of student activism at the UWI St Augustine campus, Ardene’s foray into radio with i95.5fm at the start of the 2007 general election campaign seemed logical. Since that time, she has cohosted several talk shows, three of which she has helped to establish, including two daily programs. She has taken advantage of opportunities to do live outside broadcasts and onthefield reporting as well as to produce and host diverse panel discussions. Still with i95.5fm, she is into her fourth year of cohosting the weekly current affairs talk show, “The 95 Mandate”.
She has also worked with a number of entities coordinating, curating and supporting projects in areas such as human rights, food security, capacity building, entertainment, culture and social outreach. Her most recent assignment in the Habitat for Humanity T&T communications unit saw her easily embrace and create prospects for collaboration between Habitat and local private, public and nonprofit actors, an approach of which she is convinced.
Always open to new experiences, Ardene has ventured into a startup program as part of a team of i2i awardees with the aim of acquiring new skill sets and applying them to future innovation efforts.