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:
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.
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Living and working in our changemaker world requires breaking through silos, tearing down walls, and organizing in fluid, open, teams of teams.
Ashoka in the Arab World
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. Learn more about Ashoka Arab World
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 links and leverages the most powerful social innovations and innovators.
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.
We recognize a new era is about to start. In this new era, empathy and changemaking skills, which Ashoka exemplifies, would equip our young people to lead the country.
No matter a person’s abilities, if he or she helps others – to that degree he or she will be powerful, happy, and long-lived. That’s why Ashoka’s leadership in building a world where everyone is a changemaker, i.e., a giver, makes it so special and powerful.
Forbes knows that the story is change. No one sees that more clearly than Ashoka. It has an extraordinary ability both to envision the big, new patterns and to engineer their emergence.
Ashoka Arab World Impact
Ashoka Arab World social impact strategies are designed to improve social entrepreneurs' overall mission, not just its personal identity. They serve as concrete and measurable plans that have quantifiable social outcomes and definitive societal impact.
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Our changemaker community consists of 3,500+ Fellows, 250+ change institutions, and 300+ partners across more than 90 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
Sally George
WISE
Women Initiative for Social Entrepreneurship
Led by Ashoka Arab World’s Regional Director and Vice President of Ashoka: Innovators for the Public, Iman Bibars, WISE sets forth a groundbreaking vision for paradigm shift in the social entrepreneurship ecosystem toward recognizing and supporting scaling up and deep impact – a form of impact commonly led by women social innovators where policies are changed and mindsets, social norms, and patterns of behavior are affected.
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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.
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.
Sally George