Akash Patel

Akash Patel is the Chairman of the UN Association of USA at the UN Foundation. Patel is a TIME Innovative Educator of the Year, Founder of Happy World Foundation Inc and serves on the diplomatic board of the Council of Global Change. He speaks five languages and has traveled to over 60 countries.

He advises the Faces of Impact Foundation on education, with a deliberately narrow brief: counsel on where the Foundation's education work should go and what is actually worth doing.

He began teaching in small rural districts in Oklahoma, where he built lessons out of his own travel — using fieldwork with elephants in South Asia to teach children to make paper from elephant dung and to map DNA against poaching patterns. He has since taught fourth grade in Oklahoma City and Spanish in the Dallas Independent School District. He currently teaches ESL at Oklahoma City Community College and serves as Math+ instructor and ELL liaison at Epic Charter Schools.

He founded Happy World Foundation after the death of his twin brother, Anand Happy Patel. Its Global Connect database links more than a thousand volunteers across over 150 countries to American classrooms by video call — a programme he scaled to tens of thousands of calls during the pandemic, and has since trained over 100,000 teachers to use.

He was shortlisted among the top fifty teachers worldwide for the Varkey Foundation's Global Teacher Prize in 2017, named to the International Literacy Association's 30 Under 30 in 2021, and elected president of the American Council on the Teaching of Foreign Languages in 2022.