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.
We help social entrepreneurs & changemakers change systems and shift mindsets
Change needs to happen, but how do we do it?
Social and environmental change needs new mindsets and models to be effective. And strong leaders.
All across the globe, humans are pioneering and implementing real-life solutions. They do this by redesigning one of the many systems on this planet to better serve the needs of all. To solve complex social challenges at the pace necessary, we need more and more citizens to understand change, take up responsibility – and become create problem-solvers. We call them changemakers.

Changemakers
Changemakers are people who, no matter how old they are or what their profession is, feel empowered to lead a change for the common good. They may stand up to a bully, run a campaign, organize a march, or write a series of provocative articles. Some of them build organizations that deliver services improving the lives of many. They are driven by the desire to make a positive impact on the world and to find innovative solutions to unsolved challenges. For that, they envision a new reality and take action by building a team. They never stop learning.

Social entrepreneurs
Among changemakers, there are transformative guides for society who go beyond building one organization and developing important services. They develop participative, people-centric solutions and undertake systemic measures to address a deep-rooted societal problem. We call these people systemic or system-changing social entrepreneurs. By taking an indirect impact approach such as changing policies, industry norms, power structures, incentives, mindsets and more, social entrepreneurs can shift a system to produce better outcomes itself and as a result achieve a significantly greater and longer lasting change.

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.

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.
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.

The Lego Foundation
LEGO Foundation and Ashoka believe that playful learning can change the world. Together, Ashoka and Lego have begun to identify play-based learning innovations around the world and to re-imagine learning for the 21st century.

Ashoka Deutschland ist Partner der Google Impact Challenge, bei der Projekte gesucht, ausgewählt und gefördert werden, im Rahmen derer mit Technologie das Gemeinwohl gefördert wird.


Boehringer Ingelheim
Die globale Kooperation zwischen Ashoka und Boehringer Ingelheim hat seit 10 Jahren zum Ziel, innovative Lösungen im Bereich Gesundheit zu finden und zu fördern. Als Teil der Zusammenarbeitet hat BI die Stipendien zweier thematisch passender Ashoka Fellows aus Österreich übernommen.
Wir bringen Social Entrepreneurship, betriebliche Talententwicklung und bestehende Netzwerke im Bereich Gesundheit zusammen: Das erlaubt uns auf besondere Weise die Förderung vielversprechender Ansätze für globale Gesundheitsherausforderungen. Mehr erfahren unter www.makingmorehealth.org


Boehringer Ingelheim
Die globale Kooperation zwischen Ashoka und Boehringer Ingelheim hat seit 10 Jahren zum Ziel, innovative Lösungen im Bereich Gesundheit zu finden und zu fördern. Als Teil der Zusammenarbeitet hat BI die Stipendien zweier thematisch passender Ashoka Fellows aus Österreich übernommen.
Wir bringen Social Entrepreneurship, betriebliche Talententwicklung und bestehende Netzwerke im Bereich Gesundheit zusammen: Das erlaubt uns auf besondere Weise die Förderung vielversprechender Ansätze für globale Gesundheitsherausforderungen. Mehr erfahren unter www.makingmorehealth.org
American Express
American Express’s vision is to bring to life the American Express value of good corporate citizenship by supporting diverse communities in ways that enhance the company's reputation with employees, customers, merchants, business partners and other stakeholders.

J. P. Morgan
J. P. Morgan works with community partners to create pathways to opportunity by supporting workforce development, financial capability, small business development and community development in the regions where they do business. They use their strength, global reach, expertise, relationships, and access to capital to make a positive impact in cities around the world. The foundation is supporting Ashoka Switzerland's Impact programme.


J. P. Morgan
J. P. Morgan works with community partners to create pathways to opportunity by supporting workforce development, financial capability, small business development and community development in the regions where they do business. They use their strength, global reach, expertise, relationships, and access to capital to make a positive impact in cities around the world. The foundation is supporting Ashoka Switzerland's Impact programme.
Accenture
Accenture, a consultancy firm specialised in management, technology and outsourcing, supports since 2012 initiatives improving access to employment and skills development through its "Skills To Succeed 'approach.




DIRECTV
DirecTV apoya a Ashoka en la construcción de un mundo de líderes de cambio, para promover, especialmente, una educación transformadora

Forbes
Forbes and Ashoka have a long-standing media partnership in North, Central, and Latin America. Ashoka publishes business-related stories from an Ashoka lens on its own Forbes’ channel, promoting Ashoka Fellows and other social entrepreneurs in our network.


