The global non-profit building an “Everyone A Changemaker” world

Ashoka is the global non-profit organization that has pioneered the social entrepreneurship sector since the 1980s - building the first and largest community of outstanding, systems-changing social entrepreneurs. Now, we’re on an ambitious mission: to change whole mindsets and systems towards an “Everyone a Changemaker”-world. A world where everyone can embrace their agency, live with dignity, has the skills to solve problems, and creates positive change for the common good.

Our vision and mission

Our vision

Ashoka envisions a world where everyone can embrace their agency, live with dignity, has the skills to solve problems, and creates positive change for the common good. Let’s build together a more resilient, regenerative, and equitable society, one where everyone is a changemaker for the good of all.

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.

Bill Drayton believed in 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. He also saw the opportunity and need to help social entrepreneurship become mainstream. So in 1980, he founded the international non-profit organisation Ashoka to pioneer the field of social entrepreneurship. Its approach? Selecting leading social entrepreneurs and accompanying them along their impact journey – with catalytic investments, strategic guidance, and an unmatched peer-to-peer community.

Ashoka created the term of “social entrepreneur” and built the first and largest community for social entrepreneurs, making the world recognize their achievements. Now, after four decades, the community stands at 4000 “Ashoka Fellows” in 90+ countries. This global network ensures that no social entrepreneur feels isolated. Social entrepreneurs today have both a name and a valued place in society, and the field has developed in irreversible ways.

Do you know them and their impact? Here are a few of them.

Portrait of man with rat standing on his shoulder

Baart Weetjens (Ashoka Fellow since 2006, Belgium)

Mozambique’s landmine problem was once one of the most severe in the world. Bart’s APOPO deployed its unique mine detection rats to clean up the country. Rats ignore scrap metal making them much faster at detecting landmines than metal detectors.

Zdjęcie przedstawia różnorodną grupę osób pracujących wspólnie nad jakimś projektem przy stole, na którym są rozłożone kartki i tablet.

Kailash Satyarthi

90,000 children were rescued from trafficking and exploitation in India by a movement built by Kailash. Kailash became an Ashoka Fellow in 1995. Among other initiatives, in 1998, he led a global march against child labor, leading the ILO to adopt its fastest-ratified convention. In 2014, he was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize.

Claire Nouvian

With BLOOM, Claire led a focused, data-driven advocacy campaign against the destructive fishing practice of deep-sea bottom trawling, successfully shifting French supermarket giant and fleet owner Intermarché‘s fishing practices and getting the European Commission to protect a significant area of the ocean.

Jeroo Bilimoria

Jeroo closed her organization, Child and Youth Finance International, in 2019. Her work on financial literacy and financial inclusion policies achieved its mission after she had worked with 64,000 partners in 175 countries. Today, every child can have their own bank account and save up for their future.

Sue Riddlestone

Sue’s Bioregional initiated the BedZED eco-village in London, based on 10 principles to live within the Earth’s boundaries. She systematized its approach by creating a sustainability framework called “One Planet Living”, which has been applied in $30 billion of real estate development, and by local governments and companies worldwide.

Jos de Blok

Jos revolutionized community health and elderly care in the Netherlands. Today, Buurtzorg employs 15.000 nurses, has won “Best Employer of the Year” multiple times, and client satisfaction rates are the highest of any healthcare organization—all that while saving the Dutch social security system hundreds of millions of Euros every year.

These people who help us keep place with global problems deserve support and financing, and our superpower lies in serving them in that. In the past, social entrepreneurs didn’t even have a name, and they didn’t know they were social entrepreneurs.

Till everything changed in 1980.

But wait, why does it need Ashoka?

Social entrepreneurs, whether they see themselves as such or not, don’t have it easy. These are some of the challenges they face:

1) Being lonely: Many social entrepreneurs find themselves answering key strategic questions alone. They often have no peer community or “home” that would allow for continual support and exchange. This can negatively affect their emotional and personal wellbeing.

2) Lacking time: Some social entrepreneurs cannot fully devote themselves to their solutions, as they must earn their living at day jobs not related to their ideas. They see too few opportunities for early-stage, trust-based funding.

3) Missing tools and strategic advice on the way to systems change: Social entrepreneurship is a relatively new field. Quality tools that help increase efficiency and effectiveness are hard to find. Outsourcing tasks is rarely affordable. This can be an obstacle for reaching a certain level of professionalism and building eye-level partnerships with savvy business partners. In many cases, social entrepreneurs also have no partner at their side who can challenge and help refine their strategy towards systems change.

4) Being disconnected: Busy with maintaining operations, social entrepreneurs are often not connected to the key players in business, philanthropy or public sector who are tackling the same social issues and interested in joining resources.

The solution through Ashoka's Fellowship

To increase impact without necessarily increasing the size of organisations, requires new, unconventional know-how and expertise, new business and organizational models, peer and cross-sectoral support. The business infrastructure supporting business entrepreneurs is not enough. In short: we need to build new instruments of support to help social entrepreneurship become mainstream.

We support them to achieve their goals. Social entrepreneurs strive to increase the impact of their solutions. Their main driver is to improve the life quality of more people in wider geographies and anchor these improvements for the future via systems change and mindset shift.

Seasoned social entrepreneurs find that increasing social impact is best achieved by opening up the solution and influencing others to adopt and promote it - through dissemination, replication, public policy. Ashoka directs its efforts to support social entrepreneurs in multiplying their impact without necessarily expanding the size of their organization. In other words, we help our Fellows embark on the pathway of indirect impact and trigger the “ripple effect”.

For decades, we've been electing social entrepreneurs as “Ashoka Fellows”, most of whom receive a 3-year stipend, pro-bono support, an international network of social entrepreneurs and boost for their scaling & internationalisation. But this is only a part of what we do.

Partnerschaften mit gesellschaftlichem Mehrwert

Ashoka arbeitet mit Unternehmen und Organisationen zusammen, die sich ebenso engagiert für die Schaffung einer gerechten Welt einsetzen. Wir arbeiten eng mit unseren Partnern zusammen, um Initiativen mit lokalen und globalen Wirkung zu entwickeln.

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The global non-profit building an “Everyone A Changemaker” world

Our vision and mission

Our vision

Our mission

We help social entrepreneurs & changemakers change systems and shift mindsets

Changemakers

Social entrepreneurs