“Everyone a Changemaker”

Founded in 1980 by Bill Drayton, Ashoka relies on an entrepreneurial model to promote development and a participatory society.  Using a venture capital model similar in philosophy to microfinancing,  the organization provides fellowships to entrepreneurs involved in activities ranging from the creation of dialogue groups to strengthen democracy in central Europe to efforts to partner small businesses with social service agencies in South Africa to a program to promote child health education in the United States.  On the most basic level, the three year stipend that accompanies each fellowship frees participants to focus all of their energies on strengthening local communities.  The support also gives fellows the chance to increase the scale of existing programs and the resources needed to forge bonds with other community groups.  This approach nurtures flexible, grassroots, solutions to local problems, encouraging the development site-specific programs that prove more responsive (and effective) than projects offered by national governments or large bureaucracies.

The idea has proven tremendously successful.  More than 90 percent of the programs funded by Ashoka have been adopted by other nonprofit groups or government agencies, and over 70 percent of the fellows have seen their ideas lead to changes in national policy.  While fellows serve as the public face of the program, Ashoka hopes to increase the synergy of social change by promoting reform-oriented knowledge networks.  Fellows share their ideas and models, creating a repository which others can reference, and participate in direct collaboration with other reformers.  Ashoka uses these efforts to find new models of change, synthesizing new approaches to social problems:

As a result of global collaborations, Ashoka is able to distill the most effective patterns and unify them into a “mosaic”— a synthesis of the commonalities and intersections of key principles that guide Fellows’ individual solutions. These overarching mosaics are then disseminated globally, and form the basis of our programmatic initiatives specific to each field of work, such as youth development or the environment.