United States

Ashoka Venture and Fellowship

Since Ashoka’s founding in 1981, Venture & Fellowship has been the core of our work, developed and refined to identify leading social entrepreneurs with transformative ideas and provide them with the support and community they need to thrive. Ashoka’s role is to bet on these entrepreneurs at a key time in their trajectory when minimal resources have maximal leverage. In this way, year after year, we seed ideas that represent potentially groundbreaking paths forward for society. In the process we collect insights and spot patterns that guide the rest of our work and that enable our partners—and society at large—see with more clarity the direction the world is moving.

Many of the 230 U.S. Ashoka Fellows who have come through this process have gone on to get to get second and third-tier growth investments from major foundations and philanthropists as they scale nationally.

Our Fellows are:

Building entirely new fields—like P articipatory Defense—to give communities most affected by mass incarceration the avenues to influence the court process and case outcomes;
Leveling the educational playing field via organizations like Donors Choose, Beyond 12 and the New Teacher Centre;
Drafting legislation and changing policy at the state level—like the groundbreaking Domestic Worker’s Bill of Rights in New York and California—and at the federal level too, as Paul Reickhoff and his Iraq and Afghanistan Veterans of America were instrumental in the US Senate’s unanimous passing of the Clay Hunt Bill in 2015 to provide better help for veterans with serious mental health issues;
Enabling millions to access critical benefits: Jennifer Pahlka’s Code for America used mobile technology to reduce the application time for California’s CalFresh nutrition program from 45 to 8 minutes;
Shaping a more welcoming country via David Lubell’s Welcoming America, which reduces the barriers that immigrants face to fully participating and builds bridges between newcomers and long-time residents;
... and much more!

I have been constantly blown away by the generosity and vision of Ashoka. They have been unmatched as a thought partner, helping me and my organization to see connections in our work that transcend geographic boundaries and the usual discipline silos. And they have been unparalleled as a connector. My own experience as an Ashoka Fellow has been nothing short of transformational.

- Jill Vialet, Ashoka Fellow and founder of Playworks

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Ashoka Changemaker Schools

The Changemakers Schools Program is called Start Empathy in the US.

Start Empathy is an initiative of Ashoka U.S. that launched in 2012 as a community of individuals and institutions dedicated to building a future in which every child masters empathy.

Despite how fast the world is changing, most of our educational priorities have remained the same. Only a handful of children are consistently provided with the learning environments and opportunities to develop into empathetic changemakers. We must shift this pattern. Ashoka’s Start Empathy Initiative expands and leverages Ashoka’s network of social entrepreneurs to drive a movement that makes empathy a priority skill for all children. We seek to accelerate society to a tipping point where this idea becomes inevitable because a new framework has taken hold.

A key strategy for doing so is working with our growing network of Changemaker Schools across the country. These schools are living models of transformative approaches to education and showcase an incredible range of how-tos that any educator can learn from in her efforts to bring empathy and changemaking more fully inside school walls. With them we are moving closer to a world where all young people have the skills and confidence to change the world for the good of all.

Ashoka Youth Venture

Over the last 20 years, Ashoka’s Youth Venture (YV) Initiative has supported more than 18,000 teams to practice changemaking through its “Dream it, Do It Challenge” methodology, which takes a young person through the process of dreaming, developing, launching and sharing a youth-led social venture. Worldwide, YV has impacted 360,000 young people in more than 50 countries.

In the United States, YV has worked with about 4,000 teams of young changemakers to launch ventures in all 50 states, with major hubs in St. Louis, Seattle, Washington D.C., New York City, Boston, Silicon Valley, Concord (N.H.), North Central Massachusetts, San Francisco, Miami, and Minneapolis.

Our mission is to cultivate an ecosystem that values and supports young people to be changemakers by:

Investing in young people to have the transformative experience of launching and leading their own lasting ventures.
Creating a critical mass of young people who collectively redefine the youth years as a time of positive contribution.
Spreading our message that investing in young people to become changemakers is the key factor for success in every part of society; and
Connecting our Venturers to a global network of changemakers.

Ashoka U

Ashoka U collaborates with colleges and universities to break down barriers to institutional change and foster a campus-wide culture of social innovation. Ashoka U empowers emerging leaders with the freedom, confidence, and support to address social problems and drive change. The initiative connects these Changemakers with other students, faculty, administrators, and community leaders to share inspiration, ideas, and resources.

Presently, we have 27 Changemaker Campuses in the United States.

Ashoka U also produces The Commons a virtual, semester-long accelerator for cohorts of institutions that are working on specific building blocks of social innovation education. Participants draw on Ashoka U’s experience working with more than 250 higher education institutions globally.

Ashoka U Exchange, a three-day annual event in the United States with hundreds of higher education innovators who are reimagining how to utilize colleges and universities as platforms to catalyze long-term change and social impact. Here, inspiration is sparked and deep connections are formed with peers who share a passion for higher education and who are devoted to advancing key conversations in the field.

Ashoka Support Network

The Ashoka Support Network (ASN) is a community of successful leaders in their own fields based in the US helping Ashoka US build to an everyone a changemaker world. The ASN the US supports our 200+ Fellows working across the country, as well as our work with changemaker schools and universities.

Once I began to meet with Fellows and experience their passion and dedication, it became an easy task for me to get more involved and contribute in any way that I could to help their work. What I tell to other ASN members that I’ve recruited is that there are so many opportunities to make a contribution to people who are on the cutting edge of social entrepreneurship. That is what drives me, and I invite them to join me in that pursuit."

- Jose de la Torre, US ASN member

“If you only have a few hours to provide to philanthropic endeavors, this is going to be the highest return you will ever get on those few hours”

- Olivier Kayser, founder of Ashoka Support Network and Hystra

Ashoka Changemakers

Changemakers builds the foundation for Ashoka's vision of an Everyone a Changemaker world by activating a global network of social entrepreneurs, innovators, business leaders, policy-makers, and activists in more than 100 countries.

Using a three-step process—frame, convene and ignite—Changemakers works with other Ashoka teams and its global network and partners to build open competitions that celebrate the best ideas and exponentially accelerate social change. Changemakers also delivers ground-breaking analysis in the form of social innovation mapping reports and creates long-term partnerships with corporations and organizations to drive the movement forward.

In the US, Changemakers has produced about 100 successful challenges with companies like GE, Google, Rockefeller Foundation, Intel, Unilever and the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation.

Staff