Ricken Patel

Patel was on the cover of May/June 2013 issue of Intelligent Life magazine. The Guardian referred to Patel as "the global leader of online protest" with a "vaunting sense of optimism."

Prior to founding Avaaz in 2007, Patel was the founding Executive Director of ResPublica, a global public entrepreneurship group that worked to end genocide in Darfur and build progressive globalism in US politics, among other projects. The stated goal of ResPublica was to promote “good governance, civic virtue and deliberative democracy”. While in the US, Patel was an online member of the group MoveOn.org, from which he learned the tools of online campaigning.

In 2007, Patel founded the online campaigning organization Avaaz – with the stated goal to “close the gap between the world we have and the world most people everywhere want”. Avaaz campaigns online and off on a number of human rights, social justice, environmental, media freedom and peace and security issues. Avaaz's membership has spread to every country in the world and has more than 44 million members. Patel refers to Avaaz as a community and technology platform which "has merely given voice to a global hunger for greater democracy."

Patel studied Philosophy, Politics and Economics (PPE) at Balliol College, Oxford, where he helped organize against the 1998 introduction of tuition fees. He graduated first in his university class, and held leadership roles in student government and student activism. He has a Masters in Public Policy from Harvard's John F. Kennedy School of Government, where (mirroring his activism at Oxford) he helped lead the campus' highly publicized living wage campaign.

Ricken Patel (born January 8, 1977) is the Canadian–British founding President and Executive Director of Avaaz, a major global civic organization with the world's largest online activist community, including over 43 million subscribers.