Bill Drayton, C.E.O. and Founder

Bill Drayton is a social entrepreneur. In elementary school, Bill loved geography and history and was equally unmotivated in Latin and math. His real passion in those years went to sailing, and starting and running a series of newspapers in his school and beyond. In high school he created and built the Asia Society into the largest student organization. By high school he was also a NAACP member and actively engaged in and deeply moved by civil rights work. At Harvard he founded the Ashoka Table, an interdisciplinary weekly forum in the social sciences. While at Yale Law School, he launched Yale Legislative Services which, by the time he graduated, engaged one third of the student body in helping key legislators throughout the northeast design and draft legislation.

He graduated from Harvard with highest honors and went on to study at Balliol College in Oxford University, where he attained his M.A. with First Class Honors.

Bill is also a manager and management consultant - choices that also grow from his fascination with how human institutions work. Although he loves and thinks first in historical terms, he is trained in economics, law, and management, the three key interventionist disciplines. After he graduated from Yale Law School in 1970, Bill began his career as a consultant with McKinsey and Company in New York, gaining wide experience serving both public and private clients.

From 1977 to 1981, Bill served as Assistant Administrator at the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency where he had lead responsibility in representing the environment in Administration-wide policy development, notably including budget, energy, and economic policy. He successfully "intrapreneured" a series of major innovations and reforms in the field, ranging from the introduction of emissions trading (the basis of Kyoto) to the use of economics-defined incentives to remove the advantage of delaying compliance.

After his term at the EPA ended in 1981, he returned to McKinsey half-time and launched both Ashoka and Save EPA (an association of professional environmental managers that helped the Congress, press, administration, citizen groups, and public understand and the block much of the radically destructive policies proposed by the Administrator Ann Gorsuch and others). Bill also founded and led Environmental Safety (which helps develop and spread better ways of implementing environmental laws).

With the support that he received unexpectedly when elected a MacArthur Fellow in 1984, he was able to devote himself fully to Ashoka. Bill is currently the Chairman & Chief Executive Officer of Ashoka: Innovators for the Public. He is also chair of Youth Venture, Community Greens, and Get America Working!

Bill has received many awards for his achievements. He has received Yale School of Management’s annual Award for Entrepreneurial Excellence. The American Society of Public Administration and the National Academy of Public Administration jointly awarded him their National Public Service Award, and Common Cause awarded him its Public Service Achievement Award. In 2005, he was selected one of America's Best Leaders by US News & World Report and Harvard's Center for Public Leadership. In the same month he was awarded Yale Law School's highest alumni honor, The Yale Law School Award of Merit - for having made a substantial contribution to Public Service. In 2006, he was recognized as being one of Harvard University’s 100 “Most Influential Alumni.” In 2007, he was awarded Duke University Center for the Advancement of Social Entrepreneurship’s (CASE) Leadership in Social Entrepreneurship Award, the University of Pennsylvania Law School’s 2007 Honorary Fellow Award and the Goi Peace Foundation’s Peace Award.

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Diana Wells, President

Dr. Diana Wells, President of Ashoka, joined the organization in the 1980s after graduating from Brown University with a degree in South Asian Studies. As an undergraduate, her year-long study abroad in Varanasi, India led her to see the need for local solutions to solve global problems. This insight brought her to Ashoka and inspired her to create one of Ashoka's core programs, Fellowship Support Services, (now Fellowship) which not only supplied Ashoka’s social entrepreneurs with a wide array of information, resources and services, but at the same time connected them to one another and their ideas in a globally expansive context. Taking a leave to pursue a Ph.D. in anthropology, she was named both a Fulbright and Woodrow Wilson scholar. Her ethnographic research focusing on understanding how social change happens as a local articulation of a global social movement resulted in her dissertation: 'Between the Difference: The Emergence of a Cross Ethnic Women’s Movement in Trinidad and Tobago.'

Having her PhD in hand, Diana returned to Ashoka to provide leadership for the worldwide process of sourcing and selecting leading social entrepreneurs as Ashoka Fellows. In addition she was given strategic and operational responsibility for Ashoka’s geographic expansion and the significant increase of Fellow elections; to its current total of 1800. She has contributed to the field of social entrepreneurship by implementing a widely respected tool for "Measuring Effectiveness", which is one of the first standard tools to measure the impact of social entrepreneurship.

She is on the Advisory Board for Center for the Advancement of Social Entrepreneurship (CASE) at Duke’s Fuqua School of Business and on the Board of GuideStar International. Her Ph.D. is from New York University (2000), and her undergraduate degree from Brown University (1988). She has taught at Georgetown University on Anthropology and Development and has both authored and edited numerous journal and book publications including two compilations on social movements in the United States.

Most recently, Diana was celebrated as one of 10 winners of the first annual Women to Watch award, by Running Start, a Washington, DC based organization that empowers young women to be political leaders.

She lives in Arlington, VA with her husband Paul, her son Toby and her mother Elaine.

Sushmita Ghosh, President Emeritus

Sushmita Ghosh completed a five-year term as President and continues as a member of Ashoka’s Leadership Team. She directs the highest levels of Ashoka programs for top business entrepreneurs and leads both the Global Academy for Social Entrepreneurs and Changemakers. Sushmita currently splits her time between Arlington, Virginia and Calcutta.

Sushmita graduated at the top of her class at the University of Dehli. She served as Sub-editor, Research Director and Executive Director of Maneka Gandhi's national Indian news magazine Surya from 1979 to 1982. She then started her family and moved on to a successful career as a freelance journalist. She freelanced for a number of major newsmagazines and newspapers in India, including The Times of India, The Hindustan Times, Business Standard, and Sunday Magazine.

Sushmita served as Ashoka's country representative for India from 1989 to 1997. During that time, she helped Ashoka launch its new programs in Latin America and direct its European fundraising efforts. Sushmita also founded Changemakers, a magazine for social entrepreneurship in 1992, now Changemakers.net website. Subsequently, Sushmita became International Vice President of Ashoka and Executive Director of Changemakers and then Ashoka President. Sushmita is a board member of several non-profit organizations in India, including the Consumer Unity and Trust Society, the Energy Environment Group, and Gender Action and Advisory, and a council member at the American India Foundation.