Rajiv Vinnakota

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1998

Rajiv Vinnakota

The SEED Foundation

http://www.SEEDFoundation.com

Washington D.C., United States

Education & Youth Leadership

The Bold Idea:

The SEED Foundation, Inc. is an organization devoted to bringing outstanding educational opportunities to under served inner city communities. The Foundation's first project is the SEED School of Washington, D.C., the nation's only public access college prep boarding school for inner city children.

The SEED School of Maryland will open in September 2008. Rajiv and Eric have been involved in every facet of the planning and development of the SEED School, including designing the educational program, hiring key staff, raising more than $24 million in private donations, lobbying the federal and D.C. governments for $9 million in annual operating funding, floating more than $14 million in tax free bond financing, and developing the School's 19 acre campus to serve 300 students. Now in its tenth year of operation, the SEED School has already seen impressive academic and social gains in its students, and the School’s first four graduating classes have earned 97% rates of admission to colleges, including Princeton, Cornell, Duke, Georgetown, Ohio Wesleyan, Howard, American, Spelman, University of Pennsylvania, Stanford, and many others.

The SEED Foundation is now working on opening additional similar schools in Washington, DC and elsewhere. SEED has been the subject of much media attention, appearing on ABCNews/Nightline, Good Morning America, PBS, the Oprah Winfrey Show, and in publications including The Washington Post, The Christian Science Monitor, and Time and Newsweek magazines. The SEED Foundation received the prestigious Innovations in American Government Award from the Ash Institute of the Kennedy School of Government at Harvard University, and the 2005 Fast Company /Monitor Group Social Capitalist Award as one of the 25 best social entrepreneurship organizations in the world.

Biography:

Prior to co-founding SEED, Rajiv was an associate at Mercer Management Consulting, where he worked on strategic and financial projects in a variety of industries. He has been involved with programs for inner-city and adjudicated children and served on the board of The Empower Program, which works with youth to end the culture of violence. He graduated from Princeton University with a degree in molecular biology and a certificate of studies from the Woodrow Wilson School of Public Policy. Rajiv is an Echoing Green fellow, an Ashoka fellow and a former trustee of Princeton University. He now serves his alma mater as the national chair for Annual Giving and on the executive committee of the capital campaign. For his work at The SEED Foundation Rajiv was named a Washingtonian of the Year by Washingtonian magazine and has received the Manhattan Institute’s Outstanding Social Entrepreneurship Award, the Princeton Club of Washington’s Community Service Award, and an Oprah Winfrey “Use Your Life” Award. Rajiv is married and has one daughter and two cats.