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Cultivating empathy and empowering children to become effective changemakers in their communities isn’t an add-on, or a brand-new concept: it starts with simply articulating, and then amplifying, how great teachers build empathy in students. Ashoka has set out to do just that, beginning with five...

A convening of five schools in 2012 yielded these tips on cultivating empathy in your school. The StartEmpathy team gathered together educators from Mission Hill School,Lake Forest Park School, the Center for Inspired Teaching Demonstration School, Georgetown Day School, and Prospect Sierra School -...

Empathy: em·pa·thy [em-puh-thee] It’s a beautiful word, derived from the suffix -em (meaning “to make into, to put into, to get into”) and -pathy (meaning “suffering”). What I consider especially beautiful about this word is that, unlike “sympathy” (which translates literally to “with” + “suffering”...

Earlier this week, reports surfaced about an 11-year-old boy with autism, who was beaten up by a fellow student while waiting at the bus stop. The event was filmed on a student’s cell phone, as his peers egged on his attacker, and subsequently uploaded to Facebook. It later emerged that Kaleb Kula...

Social change isn’t rocket science; it’s just a matter of gumption and drive. Policy-makers, think-tanks, and academics aren’t the only ones with the power and ideas to change the world. Changemaking can belong to all of us. And nowhere is this dynamic potential more evident than among the emerging...

Kids these days—they're doing big things, like turning favorite pasttimes into viable solutions to pressing social issues. Take for example the four winners of the 5th Annual Staples Youth Social Entrepreneur Competition: Karthik Naralasetty, 22, has realized he can harness Facebook to connect blood...

Have you ever felt your politicians don’t actually answer to you? That their rhetoric doesn’t match their behavior and no one holds them accountable? That the sound bites on TV and the form letters don’t get to the substance of the issues? In 2004, Ashoka Fellow Gregor Hackmack recognized that...