Bio
Known to talk significantly faster than I can negotiate a keyboard (auto-correct being my favorite feature), I am the proud author of Rippling and for the past 10 years have been the VP for Global Marketing at Ashoka, the world's largest association of social entrepreneurs.
By discipline, I'm a behavioral scientist and prior to writing RIPPLING a significant portion of my career has been dedicated to "social marketing" - the application of marketing techniques to influence behavior change for social good and to the benefit of society. With a background in advertising and communications, I have devoted my career to working on some of the world’s most challenging domestic and international social issues. They range from drugs, children’s health, gender equity, girl’s education in developing countries, environmental reform and HIV/AIDS to smoking prevention.
My work has taken me around the world multiple times. I am fascinated by why people do the things they do and what makes certain people step out of the norm and do what others do not. So it was predictable that social entrepreneurs, who are catalysts for wide scale social change, would be a subject of behavioral intrigue for me from the moment I became acquainted with them. They still are.
RIPPLING is my first book and I am thrilled that it has won the Nautilus Book Award for Social Change and Axiom Business Book Award for Philantrophy in 2013. RIPPLING has already been translated into Korean and Japanese.
In my spare time, I am a Board Member of the Harwood Institute for Public Innovation and for APOPO (known as HeroRats), that trains African pouched rats to sniff out landmines. When I am not writing or working on other projects, you will find me traveling the globe, but preferably somewhere in or under the ocean - happily scuba diving. You can follow @beverlyschwartz on twitter and like Facebook.com/Ripplingthebook.
