Ashoka builds and cultivates a community of Fellows, Young Changemakers, Changemaker Institutions, and beyond who see that the world now requires everyone to be a changemaker – a person that sees themselves as capable of creating large-scale change.
Together, we mobilize (and accelerate) a movement to build an "Everyone a Changemaker" world where everyone has the right and ability to transform their societies for the better, directly addressing the new inequality facing our societies worldwide.
From the beginning, measuring the impact of our efforts has been a top priority for Ashoka. We define impact as systemic changes – affecting large numbers of people – that flow from our network of...
Ashoka’s country and regional offices around the world co-create and co-lead Ashoka’s programming. This enables our global changemaker community to capture and act upon emerging insights, knowledge, and talents of innovators from a wide range of cultural and regional contexts. See a full list of country offices
Ashoka focuses on four 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.
Ashoka is leading a movement to transform how young people grow up so they thrive in today’s rapidly changing world where everyone must be a changemaker. Changemaking starts with empathy.
The Ashoka community is an extensive one. . . . The reward for me to be engaged in this way is many dimensional, it gives me a great feeling of hope, my world has really changed being engaged with Ashoka.
Peter Mortifee
Ashoka Support Network member since 2010
Ashoka's vision is where "everyone is a changemaker." Ashoka's Fellows have dramatic (often national and global scale) impact in their specific fields. And yet the biggest impact social entrepreneurs can have is not necessarily their solutions to problems; it is their recruiting thousands of local changemakers to give their ideas wings in community...
World Bank
Through its vision of Everyone a Changemaker and its renowned selection process, Ashoka is filling a crucial need in Canada for direct, lifelong support for social entrepreneurs. I see Ashoka Canada building on global Ashoka’s strengths and history by growing a strong Canadian fellowship that will collaborate with social entrepreneurs worldwide...
Bill Young
Ashoka Support Network, since 2007
Bill Drayton emphasized to us [that] empathy is increasingly becoming our primary resource for dealing with the exponential rate of change the world is going through.
Arianna Huffington
Founder, The Huffington Post
How society helps children grow up needs fundamental innovation at least as urgently as in how it produces computers. That is why Ashoka is so important. It finds, helps launch, and then link and leverages the most powerful social innovations and innovators.
Our changemaker community consists of 4,000+ Fellows, 250+ change institutions, 100+ Young Changemakers, and 300+ partners across more than 95 countries. Together, we form a strong, diverse and vibrant ecosystem of change agents collaborating and co-leading to positively transform societies and cultures around the world. Learn more about our changemaker community
Donating to Ashoka enables us to elect new social entrepreneurs into our fellowship, provide support services to existing Fellows, and launch collaborations between Fellows, corporations, and citizen sector organizations to promote continued innovation in areas of pressing global need.
Ashoka recognizes that it cannot possibly source the world’s leading changemakers on its own. Good nominators ensure that Ashoka receives a constant flow of promising candidates as well as an invaluable perspective on the current innovation in the sector.
You have arrived on the Canada view of Ashoka.org. Canada has a website devoted to their initiatives in Canada. Ashoka.org shows information about Ashoka globally.
