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Long-time advocate for the health of young girls and women Catalina Escobar was recently recognized as a CNN Hero. Escobar works as a "community crusader" in Cartagena, one of Colombia's largest cities where one-third of residents live at or below the poverty line, and, to complicate matters even...

Dr. Firman Lubis, a social innovator, public health expert and long-time friend of Ashoka, passed away last month in Jakarta, Indonesia. He was 66 years old. “His is the sort of story Ashoka should always be about,” Bill Drayton said, remembering Dr. Lubis. “In every way he was one of us: a...

A convening of five schools in 2012 yielded these tips on cultivating empathy in your school. The StartEmpathy team gathered together educators from Mission Hill School,Lake Forest Park School, the Center for Inspired Teaching Demonstration School, Georgetown Day School, and Prospect Sierra School -...

Ashoka Senior Fellow Dr. Sakena Yacoobi has been working to provide Afghans with basic human rights in the area of health care in a country torn apart by war for the better part of two decades. Since she founded The Afghan Institute of Learning (AIL) in 1996, the organization has touched the lives...

Among young people in the United States, the current state of food-culture and nutrition is bleak. Childhood obesity rates have tripled in the past 30 years, and more than one-third of the nation’s kids are clinically overweight or obese. But through a sustainable business model, the organization...

Social benefits are on the chopping block—with the United States’s unsustainable deficit, cutbacks are almost guaranteed. But for many preventive programs, cuts will end up costing society more money in the long run. What if there were better tools policy makers could use to determine which programs...

Last month, President Obama appointed former Ashoka Senior Health Advisor Todd Park as the second person ever to hold the position of U.S. Chief Technology Officer (CTO). The 39-year-old entrepreneur has spent the past two decades providing efficient technological solutions to improving access to...

The Ashoka community is mourning the loss of Ashoka Nigeria Fellow Isaac Durojaiye, an icon of the Ashoka Fellowship who was elected in 2005 for his innovative contributions to the fields of health and environment. Durojaiye founded DMT Evacuation Service, the first mobile toilet initiative in...

Editor's note: The following is adapted from Civic Ventures founder and Ashoka Fellow Marc Freedman's latest book, The Big Shift: Navigating the New Stage Beyond Midlife. With the first of 78 million baby boomers turning 65 this year, Freedman challenges an aging society to reimagine the decades...