Pepsi Refresh grant recipient Atlas Corps‘ CEO, Scott Beale, has a plan to refresh the long-running MTV reality show, The Real World. “Let’s film six international Atlas Fellows living together in a house,” he suggests. With fellows from culturally and ethnically diverse nations such as Zimbabwe, Armenia, Ecuador and Pakistan living together under one roof and working at some of Washington D.C.’s most influential non-profits like the International Centre for Missing and Exploited Children and Ashoka’s Youth Venture, MTV’s cameras would certainly catch a slice of the “real world” that’s a complete 180 from their standard fare.

Beale paid the Pepsi Refresh team at GOOD a visit last week and shared the philosophy behind the four year-old non-profit and the progress they’re making towards using their $50,000 grant to double the size of their corps and expand from D.C. to New York City. Instead of sending people to do service in other parts of the world, Atlas Corps inverts the Peace Corps model and brings skilled international professionals with significant expertise to the United States for a one year fellowship. Beale believes that in the non-profit world, “the best ideas and the most talented people need to cross borders and work on critical issues, just like in the private sector and in academia.”

For example, there’s the perception that Africa is overrun with HIV, but in D.C., one in twenty residents is HIV positive, so bringing someone from Africa where they’ve worked on these issues for decades could benefit the United States. Unfortunately, given the difficulty of getting a visa, ”people with expertise can’t come here. You can go to Disneyland or be tourist, but you can’t volunteer.”

Since being awarded the grant, Beale and his staff have been working on hiring a New York site director and they’re looking for New York partner organizations to hire their fellows. Beale says all the groundwork needs to be laid in order to have an inaugural New York corps of five to ten fellows.

Beale’s also struck up a collaborative relationship with fellow Pepsi Refresh grantee World Leadership Corps, a New York City based non-profit that’s focused on building a service corps in New York City. “Now I have an ally in our expansion that’s equally focused on fostering an international network of people focused on solving global problems,” he says. “Without Pepsi, we might not have come together.”