Ashoka

Ashoka identifies and supports the world’s leading social entrepreneurs, learns from the patterns in their innovations, and mobilizes a global community that embraces these new frameworks to build an “everyone a changemaker world.”

Ashoka focuses on three 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 and Young Changemaking. Ashoka is leading a movement to transform how young people grow up so they have the power to lead, to contribute — to be in charge. 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

Our Mission

Ashoka identifies and supports the world’s leading social entrepreneurs, learns from the patterns in their innovations, and mobilizes a global community that embraces these new frameworks to build an “everyone a changemaker world.”

Read about Ashoka’s theory of change for this historic moment, the new inequality, and the new framework that they require.

What We Do

Ashoka supports an “Everyone a Changemaker” world through its programs in more than 90 countries, building and amplifying this global movement in three stages:

• Identify and support the world’s leading social entrepreneurs
  We find and cultivate social entrepreneurs in every corner of the world, whose system-changing innovations solve deep-rooted social problems. After a rigorous application process, we invite them into the Ashoka Fellowship – providing early stage financial support and a lifetime membership into an expansive network of peers and partners – enabling them to achieve their vision and have even greater impact. Ashoka sets its strategic priorities by drawing on the insights of a core group of Fellows whose work reveals an opportunity for catalyzing transformative change. These Fellows serve as co-leaders of a movement that contributes to an “everyone a changemaker” society.

• Accelerate the “Everyone a Changemaker” world
  For each of Ashoka’s strategic priorities, we mobilize a network of organizations to join us in shifting mindsets and reshaping how we learn, work, and live together to catalyze changemaking for the good of society. We partner with schools, universities, corporations, citizen sector organizations, media, and other influencers to co-lead this movement with us.

• Equip Everyone to be a Changemaker
  Working with our movement co-leaders and partner institutions, we inspire and enable changemaking in the public-at-large, and work to give all citizens the confidence and tools to solve problems for the good of all.

Ashoka