One-of-a-kind watch was part of an intense global bidding war
Ashoka Fellow Sanjeev Arora's Project ECHO was one of five runners-up for the $100 million grant from the MacArthur Foundation
“The future is in our hands. Everyone can take a role, no matter your age or where you live.”
Ashoka's Priorities and Theory of Change
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:
Social Entrepreneurship
Ashoka selects world-class social entrepreneurs who are leading the way to an everyone-a-changemaker world.
Learn more
Empathy & Young Changemaking
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.
Learn more
Organizing for Changemaking
Living and working in our changemaker world requires breaking through silos, tearing down walls, and organizing in fluid, open, teams of teams.
Learn more
Ashoka in the United States
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
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 SuzukiProfessor 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. ShriverChairman, 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.
India Today