Eisenhower Fellowships recently announced plans for a memorable and inspiring evening surrounding the presentation of the 2025 Hovey Award on Wednesday, November 12, at the Liberty View in Philadelphia. The event will celebrate the co-recipients of the 2025 James and Carol Hovey Eisenhower Fellowships Impact Award, established in 2023 to honor an Eisenhower Fellow or group of Fellows for outstanding achievement in generating positive impact in their society.
This year’s recipients are Dr. Magaly Blas (Peru 2018), founder and director of the Mamás del Río (Mothers of the River) program providing maternal health care in the Amazon River Basin, and Shridhar Venkat (India 2014), Chief Executive Officer of the Akshaya Patra Foundation, for their work providing meals to impoverished schoolchildren in India.
Dr. Blas developed an innovative program to enhance maternal and child health in remote Amazonian areas, empowering community and traditional birth attendants through the use of mobile technology, safe birth kits, and culturally grounded health education. She expanded the program with her Eisenhower Fellowship from Peru to Colombia, reaching more than 100 remote Amazonian communities belonging to ten different indigenous groups, and training more than 600 community health workers, traditional midwives, and frontline health personnel.
Through Dr. Blas’ efforts, prenatal care visits have increased from four percent to 63 percent of expectant mothers in the isolated and underserved region, while improving nearly all essential newborn care practices. The program has supported more than 7,000 women with safe childbirth and postnatal services, dramatically improving maternal and neonatal outcomes.
In India, Venkat leads the Akshaya Patra Foundation, which is the world’s largest non-governmental school lunch and breakfast program. In 2000, Akshaya Patra began with a modest goal to serve 1,500 children across five government schools in the Indian state of Bengaluru. Today, the Foundation has grown into a pioneering social impact organization, operating 78 state-of-the-art kitchens that provide more than 2.35 million midday meals and one million morning nutrition servings daily.
Under Venkat’s leadership, Akshaya Patra has pioneered innovative, scalable solutions that combine nutrition, education, and women’s empowerment to feed millions of children across 16 Indian states and three union territories who would otherwise go hungry. Requiring the children in impoverished areas to eat their meals in local schools also ensures they attend classes and get their education. His program has inspired a similar school lunch program in Kenya, Food for Education, which has collaborated with Akshaya Patra to feed nearly 350,000 children daily, advancing the impact of Venkat’s work well beyond his native India.
“Half a world apart, the tireless work of Magaly Blas and Shridhar Venkat has dramatically improved the quality of life for impoverished mothers and their children in their nations,” said Eisenhower Fellowships President George de Lama. “By reaching out to provide essential, life-sustaining health care and food in some of the most remote and long-neglected corners of their countries, their inspiring work exemplifies Eisenhower Fellowships’ mission to create a world more peaceful, prosperous, and just.”
Noted for the wide-ranging impact in their nations, the impressive growth in the reach of their organizations, and the sustainability of their work, Blas and Venkat were chosen from a field of 26 project submissions from around the world by a distinguished panel of Eisenhower Fellowships Trustees, Fellows, outside experts, and senior staff. They will each receive a $10,000 prize to support their continued work.
The ceremony will also mark the end of this fall’s 2025 Southeast Asia Program and Zhi-Xing China Program. The Southeast Asia Program is a group of dynamic leaders from Indonesia, Malaysia, the Philippines, Singapore, Thailand, and Vietnam who drive change in fields ranging from public policy and artificial intelligence to music, medicine, and climate innovation. The Zhi-Xing Fellows, nine rising American leaders who visited China for four weeks in June, focused on projects ranging from preventing disease transmission to designing more bike-friendly and accessible urban environments.
Purpose and Perspective of The Eisenhower Foundation
The Eisenhower Foundation was presented to President Eisenhower as a birthday gift in a ceremony at the packed Sports Stadium in Hershey, Pennsylvania, on the eve of his birthday. Eisenhower famously said, “I hate war as only as only a soldier who has lived it can.” Looking back on WWII, during which 50 million people died, and the 1953 Cold War, which Eisenhower feared would wipe out the human race, he had a vision of how person-to-person diplomacy could ease tensions and create a safer, more secure world.
Chairman, Thomas B. McCabe outlined the organization’s founding principles, “to help promote understanding between the United States and other nations…The organization must be non-political and not subject to political attacks. The fellowships must be the most desired in the world and fit Eisenhower’s basic philosophy, available to all regardless of race, creed, color, sex, or politics…and must be worthy of the name, ‘Eisenhower Exchange Fellowships’.”
Since its inception in 1953, Eisenhower Fellowships has brought to the United States or sent overseas more than 2,700 midcareer leaders from 119 countries. They currently operate in more than 60 nations through an influential active network of leaders from government, business, civil society, science, health, education, the arts, and journalism. EF’s distinguished Board of Trustees is led by Chairman and former U.S. Secretary of Defense Dr. Robert M. Gates, Vice Chair and the former two-term New Jersey Governor Christine Todd Whitman, and includes nine-term former U.S. Representative Jane Harman, and other prominent U.S. and international leaders from the private and public sectors.
This network of person-to-person understanding and cooperation creates global alliances of soft power that crosses borders and promotes people coming together in a safe space to solve difficult global issues. For a more complete picture of the impact and the progress of Eisenhower Fellowships, watch 70 Years of Building Bridges One Leader at a Time. For more information about who is involved, how you can get involved, and the Foundation’s scope of support and activities, check out the Eisenhower Fellowship website.
To attend the celebration of the 2025 Hovey Award on November 12, in Philadelphia, you can save your spot here. It promises to be an inspiring evening showcasing the energy and optimism Eisenhower Fellows generate when they come together.