Have You Ever Watched a Movement Start?
First it begins with one person thinking outside of the box and venturing down a new path. Before you know it, someone else becomes compelled and joins in. And then another. And another. Soon a tidal wave of people have come together to push their idea and vision into the public’s view for all to...
TEDxAshokaU videos now online
On February 19 the AshokaU team hosted TEDxAshokaU, an independently-organized TED event focused on education. The videos are now up on the TEDx YouTube channel and I gave myself the difficult task of choosing three to feature, as they were all moving and insightful and brilliant in their own way...
Youth Venturer featured on Starbucks.com
In 2009 Starbucks partnered with Ashoka's Youth Venture to support 60 new Youth Venturers which involved over 1,000 young people creating change in their communities. Today Starbucks.com launched a video featuring one of those Youth Venturers, Alex Lek from Seattle, and his Blockrockers B-boy crew...
Young changemakers build a global team of teams to promote well-being
All of us are living in a time where mental health and well-being are challenged in unprecedented ways: be it from global economic crises, war, high youth unemployment to the rising tide of cyber bullying and the pressure to succeed in a world where the only constant is unpredictability and change...
A 14-year-old Burnaby teen creates new solution to help schools go green
Is it enough to recycle? Tomas Lang, 14, doesn't think so. As part of Ashoka Canada's Changemaker Challenge, Tomas has created a simple solution to reduce waste at his school. He’s launched a “library” for event organizers to borrow commonly-used materials such as plates and silverware. The Green...
Announcing the Finalists of the @15 Community Impact Challenge
Ashoka’s Youth Venture and Best Buy Co., Inc. today announced the finalists of the second @15 Community Impact Challenge. Five teams of young social entrepreneurs will each receive $5,000 and five teams will be selected to receive $1,500 each from the @15 Fund to expand their local ventures. “Best...
Podcast: DonorsChoose.org Responds to the Scarcity of Public School Learning Materials
As a social studies teacher at a Bronx public high school, Charles Best discovered that teachers who needed learning materials for their students were having to dig into their own pockets to buy them for their classrooms. So he founded DonorsChoose.org, a website for online, citizen philanthropy...
Eating the Elephant
Ashoka Fellow Andrés Martínez Fernández’s organization, Enlace Hispano Americano de Salud (EHAS), is group of brilliant engineers committed to using technology to improve health outcomes for people in very remote parts of Latin America. I have spent the better part of my first month tying to...
The Future of Solar Born from a Lifetime of Innovation
UPDATE: Although it’s been just two weeks since we last checked in on the 19-year-old whiz kid Eden Full, there are a couple of updates to her impact story. TechChrunch gave Full a shout-out for her contributions to the solar industry, and for winning the 2011 Staples/Ashoka Youth Social...
Laura White on the Disruption Needed in Higher Education: Empathy
This is the first of a series of posts featuring Exchange participants discussing “Disruptive Innovation in Higher Education.” This week we feature Laura White, a senior at Tulane University and founder of the nonprofit Swim 4 Success. When you ask Laura White about reforming higher education, she...