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Bringing you a certificate of social entrepreneurship: Ashoka Youth Venture & StraighterLine

In an increasingly fast-paced world, many of us are looking to learn the skills of the future. Increasingly, we are called to step into entrepreneural roles to help create better realities. Ashoka's Youth Venture and StraighterLines have partnered to provide future social entrepreneurs with the...

Kid Power! Empowering children to create positive change in their communities

What worries you? This is the question that Ashoka Fellow Dina Buchbinder of Mexico begins all of her sessions with, regardless of whether her audience is an established group of funders or eight-year-old indigenous children from northern Mexico. She asks because she knows that people of all ages...

The Future Calls for a New Paradigm for Growing Up, Education, Management and Leadership

“At various pivotal moments in history, a small group of people see where the world is heading. They help everyone else to see it, urging them to develop a new framework of perceiving, thinking and leading new actions that can have a huge impact on the world.” We are at such an historical pivotal...

Ashoka Fellow Abdul Waheed Killed in Karachi Leaves a Legacy of a "Bright Education"

Ashoka is saddened to report that Fellow Abdul Waheed was killed on May 13, 2013. Abdul was creating opportunities for a modern education in the poor, urban localities in Pakistan, particularly by working with children studying in madrasahs. On May 13th, Abdul was shot dead and then a hand grenade...

The Revolutionary Optimists: A Documentary - Children Making Change in the Slums of West Bengal

“As a girl, I am always being told that things happen because of fate, but it’s the things I do, not luck, that determine my fate.” says Sikha, a young girl from the slums of West Bengal featured in a documentary film “The Revolutionary Optimists”. The film tells the stories of three young children...

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...

Crowd Sourcing for Maternal Health

As mobile and web technologies become increasingly accessible to those living in remote poverty around the world, the potential to expand access to health care to underserved populations becomes ever more real. It’s exciting to see the many ways that innovative people and organizations are able to...

What ever happened to apprenticeships? One Ashoka Fellow is working to bring them back and is reengaging students along the way!

"I didn't learn these things until my first year in college!" Ken Hayes said as he describes his architecture apprenticeship with Carlos, a 7th grade Spark student doing his second apprenticeship in architecture. Ken, of the Ken Hayes Group, has been in business for over a decade and helped Carlos...

Ideas from the Fringe, Front and Center

Atlantic Monthly celebrates Ashoka Fellow Sakena Yacoobi in its Brave Thinkers Edition What do UK Prime Minister David Cameron, Academy Award winner Kevin Costner, and Ashoka Fellow Sakena Yacoobi have in common? They’re all among the nineteen change makers in the annual "Brave Thinkers" edition of...

Interview: Gerald Chertavian on how he made the jump from business to social entrepreneur

Shortly after Ashoka Fellow Gerald Chertavian landed a banking job on Wall Street in the late 1980s, he became a Big Brother to David Heredia, a ten-year old who lived in a low-income housing project in Manhattan’s Lower East Side. Chertavian was moved by David’s ambition and talent, but he knew the...