Ashoka: Venture and Fellowship

Ashoka has pioneered the field of social entrepreneurship, identifying and supporting the world’s leading social entrepreneurs since 1980. Social entrepreneurs are individuals with innovative solutions to society’s most pressing social, cultural, and environmental challenges.
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

1. Social Entrepreneurship – Ashoka selects world-class social entrepreneurs who are leading the way to an everyone-a-changemaker world.
2. 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.
3. 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.
   Social entrepreneurs are ambitious and persistent — tackling major issues and offering new ideas for systems-level change. They model changemaking behavior, and catalyze organizations and movements where everyone can be changemaker.

For its Global Venture, Ashoka searches the world for leading social entrepreneurs through an intensive, human-centered process, selecting them into its global, trust-based fellowship of peers. 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.”