Ashoka Fellow Juan David Aristizábal Ospina: 'If You Are Using Your Talents, You Are Changing the World'
Ashoka Fellow Juan David is a 23-year-old social entrepreneur who founded the organization Buena Nota in Colombia. Juan David recently visited Ashoka's global headquarters in Rosslyn, VA where he spoke about his new book, "Llenando Espacios" (Filling the Void) and about his experiences as a social...
Who Will Win the Duel? - Building Full Information Citizenship
Editor's note: This post was written by Alison Craiglow Hockenberry, contributing editor at Ashoka Changemakers®, and originally featured on the Idea exChange Blog. It's a duel, quite possibly to the death. The bad guys: Censorship, surveillance, sabotage, fraud. The good guys: Freedom, access to...
An Executive and a Student Walk into a Subway Car: Creating a Self-Sustaining Jordan Through Unlikely Teamwork
According to Ashoka Fellow Raghda Butros, there are two types of poverty in Jordan. The first is obvious: financial poverty in low-income neighborhoods. But Butros sees the second—the cultural poverty of more-affluent Ammanis—as an equally serious impediment to social change. While these Ammanis can...
Disability, or super power?
Today, April 2, is World Autism Day. In another month, graduation season will start, and another class of young people with a diagnosis on the autism spectrum will enter the labor market. Those of us who live and work in the Autism Spectrum Disorders (ASD) field know that we are witnessing a tsunami...
Is Optimism Revolutionary? Don't Miss June 17 PBS Broadcast of Revolutionary Optimists To Find Out Why Ashoka Fellow Amlan Ganguly Thinks So
More than 1 billion people (1 in 6 of us) live in an urban slum and this number is expected to double by the year 2030. That is enough to make anyone pessimistic. For one Ashoka Fellow, however, the future is in our hands—we control our own fates. “ Make the surroundings your product,” Amlan Ganguly...
Future Forum Cheat Sheet: The Power Of Brevity And Other Storytelling Lessons
If you want to build a movement, you have to tell a good story. Julie Wiscombe (@jwiscombe) was at the 2013 Ashoka Future Forum; here, she shares her storytelling takeaways from the plenaries, workshops and breakout sessions. When I hear the word veteran, I picture an old man with a beard wearing an...
Future Forum Cheat Sheet: Why Journalism Is Like Really Bad Parenting (And How We Can Fix It)
The face of journalism is changing. The wave of new media has brought with it more chances for us to get involved in our world, whether that’s by signing an online petition, backing a Kickstarter campaign or sharing a news story with our social media circles. For journalists, there’s a new goal: don...
Who Cares
"We are not guests here, we're creators, we create our own life, we create our own world. (…) We must imagine what kind of world we want to create, and start doing that." – Muhammad Yunus, founder of the Grameen Bank (Bangladesh), Ashoka’s Global Academy Member, and Nobel Peace Prize winner. This is...
'Who Cares?': A Film About Social Entrepreneurship Wins the Best Feature Documentary Award at the DC Film Festival
The Portuguese language film “Quem se Importa?”—which translates to “Who Cares?” in English—was written and directed by Mara Mourão and produced by Tatiana Battaglia. Mourão's crew shot the film in a total of 20 locations in just 40 days, capturing the stories of everyday people in Brazil, Peru...