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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. 

Thinking Differently

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.    

Group of people sitting under a leafless tree together

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.  

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.

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

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. 

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

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. 

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

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.

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

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.