Our Story
Tony KALM, CEO & co-founder
Tony Kalm, an award-winning social entrepreneur, seeks to serve the most vulnerable, lowest income populations in the world. Prior to founding the LINK Fund in 2019, he spent a decade at One Acre Fund, helping to transform it from a $7,000 pilot into a nearly billion-dollar organization with 10,000 employees, serving over 2.25 million smallholder farmers.
Upon leaving his role as President, Tony designed the LINK Fund as a new model for multilateralism and partnership to meet basic human needs and prove a pathway out of extreme poverty. He reasoned that the same principles that had made One Acre Fund successful - a “farmers first” philosophy, a comprehensive service model, last-mile delivery, financial sustainability, and servant leadership - could help meet all basic human needs, and prove the first-ever climate-smart pathway out of extreme poverty. With LINK, Tony brings his systems thinking to this unacknowledged market.
Tony is a returned Peace Corps Volunteer from Sri Lanka, and has worked for Warren Buffett, Ted Turner, Senator Sam Nunn, and several Nobel Peace Prize winners - Norman Borlaug, Mohamed Mustafa El Baradei, Amartya Sen, and International Physicians for the Prevention of Nuclear War. He was educated at Cornell University, the Johns Hopkins University School of Public Health, Harvard Business School, and INSEAD.
Governing Board
Phumzile XULU - South Africa
Phumzile XULU is a Community Engagement Practitioner at the Durban University of Technology [DUT]. She is also a Founder and Director at HakaConnect.org, a non-profit organization that is supporting vulnerable women and children. Since 2015, Phumzile has served as a Member of the Advisory Committee for the South African Law Reform Commission on Project 143: Extending Maternity and Paternity Benefits to Self-employed people, appointed by the Minister of Justice and Correctional Services. Phumzile is also working as an independent consultant for local and international organizations to support people in informal employment, vulnerable communities faced with the HIV/ AIDS epidemic, and educate communities on democracy and human rights. She is a Board member of the Institute for Professional Legal Training [IPLT]. She obtained a Master of Laws from the University of KwaZulu-Natal [UKZN] and was amongthe top in her class. Phumzile is a member of the Golden Key International Honour Society which recognizes academic excellence.
Robyn TUCKER - United States
Robyn Tucker, JD, MBA, has for the last 30 years offered counsel within public and private industries. Robyn makes her home in San Francisco, CA where her interests range from advocacy and private investing to equestrian pursuits and animal rights.
Jeff WAAGE, OBE - United Kingdom
Jeff holds a part time Professorship at the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine, where he supports programmes that integrate agriculture, environment, nutrition and health research for improving international development outcomes. These include roles in the CGIAR Program on Agriculture for Nutrition and Health (A4NH), the Agriculture, Nutrition and Health Academy, the Sustainable and Healthy Food Systems programme led by LSTHM, and LCIRAH. Jeff retired in October 2016 as Director of the London International Development Centre, where he led development of interdisciplinary research initiatives on the Millennium and Sustainable Development Goals, higher education for development, one health, agri-health, and other areas. In 2010, Jeff helped to establish LCIRAH, which now comprises a large portfolio of interdisciplinary, international research programmes across member Colleges LSTHM, RVC and SOAS and partners around the world. Jeff has served on the DFID Reseach Advisory Group, and the RCUK Global Challenge Research Fund Strategy Group.
Jeff began his career with an AB from Princeton in 1975, followed by a Marshall Scholarship and a PhD from Imperial College London in 1977. Following his academic career he became Director of the International Institute of Biological Control and subsequently Chief Executive at CABI Bioscience where he developed programmes on farmer participatory pest management, invasive alien species management and LUBILOSA, an African-based programme which developed alternatives to pesticides for the control of locust plagues. He returned to Imperial in 2000 to head its departments of agricultural and environmental science. In 2007 he joined SOAS and became first Director of LIDC. He received an OBE in 2008 for contributions to science.
Gokhan MEKIK - Turkey
Gokhan Mekik has launched values-led businesses in multiple sectors on 4 continents. After finishing his degree in textile technologies, he founded an employee-owned garment factory that provided above-market incomes and saw below-market employee turnover. That enterprise today employs 100+ staff. Gokhan went on to found other social enterprises - a community-based service organization for orphans, school that celebrates and preserves culture, community kitchen to improve access to healthy, locally sourced food. He then joined US Airways to focus on innovation. In that capacity, he sought to optimize every aspect of the airline’s operations – from on-time performance, to safety, to in-flight and between flight operations. He has since also launched a nation-wide trucking company, partially for the gap he saw in specialty trucking, as well as the opportunity to increase the social conscience of the industry. It launched at near instant profitability, and surpassed the million dollar profit milestone in 2018.
Abbe I. TEMKIN, JD - United States
Abbe Temkin is a Senior Philanthropic Advisor for The Chicago Community Trust, where she is responsible for working with individuals and families to develop strategic and impactful philanthropy. She works closely with professional advisors to provide resources and philanthropic expertise to help meet their clients’ goals and to assist with legacy and succession planning. Abbe utilizes a broad range of charitable vehicles such as donor advised funds, designated funds, and endowment funds. She has nearly 20 years of experience in charitable giving.
Walter NIRENBERG - United States
Walter has more than 30 years of experience in the payments industry, with his most recent position as Vice President, Partnerships and Business Development for Plastiq, a seven-year-old FinTech company providing essential cash management services to small, medium and large enterprises. Prior to joining Plastiq, Walter held a similar role with Clover, a Fiserv Company. Before that, he served ten years in key management roles in business development for MasterCard Worldwide. At MasterCard, he developed strategic partnerships that helped the company monetize transaction-data. His experience at MasterCard included originating and managing deals with large banks, merchants, leading providers of information services, and payment industry firms worldwide.
Miroslav NORTIK - Switzerland
As an attorney, Miroslav specializes in wealth, estate and tax planning, as well as restructuring companies, foundations and trusts for high net worth individuals and families. He started his career working for the International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC) as a delegate in conflict areas of El Salvador, Nicaragua, Kuwait and several West African countries. Fluent in French, English and Spanish, he has a global network.
Advisors
Jason CHOO - Canada/Singapore
Jason Choo is the Executive Chairman of Lonsdale Capital Pte Ltd, his family office, where he oversees a diverse portfolio of investments world-wide. He has over 20 years of investing and operational experience in public and private equity, technology, venture funding, alternative investments and bond/distressed debt. Jason is Canadian having grown up in Vancouver, British Columbia but has resided in Singapore since 1994. He holds a Bachelors Degree in Economics focused on International Trade and Finance from Colorado College. Jason believes there is a necessity to capitalize on advancements in technologies to efficiently and equitably connect the base of the pyramid markets to the rest of the world. Jason is the founder of Lonsdale Social Innovation Capital. Its mission is to create opportunities for the lowest income families to have sustainable and elevated livelihoods. Its growing portfolio of social enterprises is helping create a sustainable ecosystem, spurring growth in the social economy, raising incomes and alleviating poverty of all forms.
Join Our Team
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