Bill Drayton founded Ashoka in 1980 based on the idea that the most powerful force for good in the world is a social entrepreneur: a person driven by an innovative idea that can help correct an entrenched global problem.
The world’s leading social entrepreneurs pursue system-changing solutions that permanently alter existing patterns of activity.
Our Mission
Ashoka identifies and supports the world’s leading social entrepreneurs, learns from the patterns in their innovations, and mobilizes a global community that embraces these new frameworks to build an “everyone a changemaker world.”
Read about Ashoka’s theory of change for this historic moment, the new inequality, and the new framework that they require.
Ashoka focuses on three strategic priorities to help people understand and adapt to a world of accelerating change, where everyone is called on to be a leader:
– Social Entrepreneurship: Ashoka selects world-class social entrepreneurs who are leading the way to an everyone-a-changemaker world.
– Empathy and Young Changemaking: Ashoka is leading a movement to transform how young people grow up so they have the power to lead, to contribute — to be in charge.
– Organizing for Changemaking: Living and working in our changemaker world requires breaking through silos, tearing down walls, and organizing in fluid, open, teams of teams.
While there are many models and strategies for social change, sometimes new and creative approaches are needed to tackle the most complex problems. In this context, social innovation is a way of approaching systemic change that includes new strategies, concepts and ideas.
Systemic change seeks to transform social and environmental problems from their roots. It is an approach that works at different levels modifying institutional structures and
social conditions under which a problem is perpetuated over time.
Within the selection and support process for social entrepreneurs, we give priority to entrepreneurs who are working on Planet and climate issues and each year we carry out studies by areas of impact that we share publicly. Starting this year, Ashoka has launched a new program called Next Now, from which we also promote collaborations and systemic projects to solve root causes of climate change.