Game Changers

Steven Lee and Marje Mellegers

Steven Lee and Marje Mellegers are the co-founders of Wheel Wishers, a nonprofit organization that was established in 2009 that strives to alleviate human, animal and environmental sufferings in the world by helping the public, discover, learn and contribute to solutions to these challenges.

As co-founder and Operations Director of Wheel Wishers, Steven has many years of experience in social enterprises and marketing. He has bachelor’s degree in Mechanical Engineering from Cooper Unio, Master of Aerospace Engineering from Georgia Institute of Technology and MBA from INSEAD. Besides Wheel Wishers, Steven works with LGT bank’s Social Enterprise investment foundation and Shonaquip, a South African social enterprise. His experiences also include the finance, business operations to graphic and media design. He has created complicated online platforms as well as other interactive social features. He has been active in online marketing and is experienced in all the social marketing tools available.

Marije Mellegers, is the Executive Director of Wheel Wishers and has 6 years of experience in the development sector including governmental and non-governmental organizations in Asia, Middle East, Africa and Europe, supporting, initiating and monitoring community-based organizations. Some of the organizations she worked with include the United Nations and the Government of the Netherlands. She is a trained human rights lawyer and has Master’s degree in Humanitarian Assistance. Through her extensive developing world field experience, she has become a true believer of community-based organizations, which are locally created and managed and not foreign donor dependent, to be the most effective way of combating sufferings in the world.

Wheel Wishers was established when Steven and Marje were working and living in Kenya, a country with incredible beauty, but also with immense human, animal and environmental hardship. They felt they needed to share both the beauty and hardship with a wider public and engage people in making it a better world.

Wheel Wishers aims to alleviate human, animal, and environmental sufferings by using electronic, print, and video media as a tool to raise awareness, create public understanding and initiate direct private contributions to effective, transparent and honest community based initiatives around the world addressing these challenges.

Wheel Wishers not only aims to create an online platform to support community-based initiatives, but also aims to educate the public about these local initiatives by actually visiting and documenting them on site carrying all the necessary equipment on four wheels.
Wheel Wishers hopes to achieve this mission by: creating a comprehensive and interactive online platform where the public can discover, study and directly financially contribute to community-based initiatives; marketing, selling and supporting locally manufactured and fairly traded merchandises to the public and use part of the proceeds for the support of community-based organizations and creating a library of educational print and online video contents to educate the public by visiting community-based initiatives around the world.