Ashoka is a living encyclopedia of social innovation across the globe.
We pioneered the field of social entrepreneurship and are now building toward an "Everyone A Changemaker" world: where all of us have the confidence and support to contribute to the common good.
Join us in shaping this more resilient, inclusive, equitable future.
As we work to find more social entrepreneurs addressing
systemic racism and its effects, we look to veteran Ashoka
Fellows closest to the issues – for perspective, insight, and
wisdom rooted in lived experience and decades of work.
Tap the world's best social entrepreneurs for what works, what's next, and why these innovators are hopeful. Join live conversations from across the Ashoka community of 3,500+ Fellows in 90+ countries.
With Ashoka’s “Carry for Good” Pledge, you commit to making a small annual contribution and donating a self-chosen percent of your personal carried interest at the time of your exit to high impact social innovation for the common good.
Ashoka believes that preparing young people to thrive in a deeply interconnected and constantly accelerating world requires us to design learning communities and ecosystems with a focus on empathy, teamwork, creativity, shared leadership, and changemaking
Building a diverse, equitable and inclusive Ashoka
To support an Everyone a Changemaker vision in which everyone is powerful, Ashoka has launched a holistic Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion (DEI) initiative. In the journey towards a fully diverse, inclusive, and equitable world, we acknowledge that change starts with us to embody our own values.
Social entrepreneurs are first responders to the COVID-19 crisis. This is why they need support.
Ashoka joins with the 60 members of the COVID Response Alliance for Social Entrepreneurs to provide interventions that support social entrepreneurship during COVID-19
Check out our 'Becoming a Changemaker Institution' Guidebook
Becoming a Changemaker Institution is a guidebook with strategies and actions for campus innovators to transform their institution. It provides the needed inspiration and best practices to spark institution-wide change drawing on insights from more 600 higher education institutions around the world.
Every year, we highlight the most inspiring social entrepreneurs in Ashoka's worldwide network that are central in transforming their home cultures and fields of work.
Ashoka Fellows around the world are working in the field of Planet & Climate, distilling decades of experience and spotting patterns between their diverse approaches
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 three strategic priorities to help people understand and adapt to a world of accelerating change, where everyone is called on to be a leader:
Social Entrepreneurship
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.
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 Bellamy
Former 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 Huffington
Founder, 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 Suzuki
Professor at Tokyo University and Keio University
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.
Timothy P. Shriver
Chairman, the Special Olympics
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
The results of Ashoka’s shared leadership with the focus on solving social challenges is clear: 74 percent of Fellows have managed to change the legislation or have influenced public policies.
La Vanguardia
[Ashoka] functions as a collaborative network that supports and amplifies change by bringing together changemakers.
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
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.
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.
