When writing our brochure in summer 2020, we found ourselves in unprecedented times. The global Coronavirus pandemic, the Black Lives Matter protests as well other movements like the Friday for the Future marches that mobilised millions of young people this year are all an outcry and symptom of social and environmental injustice. This has been deeply rooted in society for too long.
Ashoka has spent 40 years supporting social entrepreneurs who have been using the tools of innovation and entrepreneurship to fix broken social and environmental systems. Originally outliers, these leading innovators have emerged between the cracks of the traditional institutions of government, NGOs and businesses, and have become inspiring agents for change.
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:
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.
Living and working in our changemaker world requires breaking through silos, tearing down walls, and organizing in fluid, open, teams of teams.
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.
Carol BellamyFormer Executive Director, UNICEF
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 HuffingtonFounder, The Huffington Post
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.
Kan SuzukiJapan State Minister of Education, Culture, Sports, Science, and Technology
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.
Forbes
