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Ashoka is a great global organization, built on a brilliant

idea. It picks up social innovators when they themselves

dont know what great changes they can bring. Thats

the stage when budding innovators need the support

most. Ashoka helps pool local innovations into global

solutions.

Muhammad Yunus

Founder and CEO

The Grameen Bank, Bangladesh

2006 Nobel Peace Prize Winner

It is hard to imagine another institution that accomplishes

so much with so little. Ashoka is managed very tightly.

Its interventions achieve unequaled social change per

dollar invested.Marjorie Benton

Former U.S. Representative to UNICEF and

Chair, Save the Children

The explosive emergence of social entrepreneurship

over the last several decades is more than a match

for the worlds problems. As an historic force, it is

bigger, smarter, more creative, and multiplyi ng far fast er.

Simply put, Ashoka is a key player in the emergence and

healthy development of social entrepreneurship across

the world.

Lee Hamilton

Former Chair, House Foreign Affairs Committee

Director, Woodrow Wilson International Center

Vice Chair, 9-11 CommissionCo-Chair, Iraq Study Group

HEADQUARTERS1700 North Moore Street, Suite 2000 (20th Floor)

Arlington, VA 22209 United States

T: 703.527.8300 | F: 703.527.8383

www. ashoka.org | changemakers.net

Partnerships in

Collaborative EntrepreneurshipFor centuries entrepreneurship has meant a person with a vision relentlessly

turning the established ways upside down.

In fact, the world has increasingly come to understand that there is nothing more

powerful than a big idea as long as it is in the hands of a great entrepreneur.

However, as the eld of social entrepreneurship has matured, Ashoka and its

community of the worlds leading social entrepreneurs have developed something

that is far more powerful collaborative entrepreneurship. There has never been

anything like it before.

First, Ashoka determines that an issue area is ripe for major change. The bestindicator is that a large number of Ashoka Fellows are betting their lives that they

can bring major change to the area. For example, there are almost 500 Fellows

(roughly 20 percent of the total) focused on youth.

The individual Fellows are very powerful. Half have changed national policy within

ve years of their launch. However, each typically has developed only one insight

and one delivery system.

As Ashoka helps them see one anothers ideas across the globe, the pieces t together

into a giant mosaic, which makes the key forces and most important ideas apparent.

Ashoka is now accelerating and strengthenin g the process. Once it is clear that an

issue is ripe, it will use its global search capacity to seek out the worlds best ideas

and entrepreneurs, quickly getting to the needed critical mass. It will start the

thinking together that leads to identifying key cornerstone transforming principles

and how to make them the worlds new reality.

Investing in collaborative entrepreneurship has three extraordinary levelsof impact:

(1) The 30 to 50 new entrepreneurs launched each year will each have huge and

multiplying impacts. Five years after their start, 97 percent will be continuing

full-time and 90 percent will have seen independent institutions copy their

innovations.

(2) Each of these entrepreneurs will create hundreds probably thousands of

other changemakers. They are role models. Their ideas disrupt the old ways.

And, to succeed, they have to get local people to stand up and champion the

entrepreneurs innovations local ly. These local changemakers in turn become

role models, disruptors, and local recruiters of yet more changemakers.

This multiplication of changemakers goes to the heart of the most critical

transformation of our time from a world of elites into one where everyone

is a contributing changemaker. As the pace of change accelerates, this is the

only way solutions can outrun problems.

(3) Collaborative entrepreneurship will become the core process for the eld of

social entrepreneurship because it brings such great value to both the actors

and the public good. It puts each subject area in full perspective and then

carefully selects and entrepreneurs globally the very best ideas the eld has

produced.

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Please read the attached reprint of the recent N

Kristof. It is about young people being powerful, b

Ashokas Youth Venture. The chief protagonist, Talia

The article also captures something of what it fee

know that any challenge is an opportunity one can

Our Youth Venturers use that power to recruit tea

team), all of whom are learning and practicing the

new world dened by change.

Consider the four degrees of leverage that make

collaborative entrepreneurship very likely. In a m

if Ashokas Youth Venture can help two young p

in the second (one half of one percent per year) to

ve young people will be changemakers for life

the core skills. Five peer groups and over 100 stheir peers to join their organizations and use

powerful enough permanently to transform the y

neighborhoods.

The fourth degree of leverage is helping the b

it is for their and societys well-being that all you

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most critical skill for successful lives going fo

now will become the unremarkable norm.

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A New ArchitectureCollaborative entrepreneursh ip is entirely new and

has succeeded in four or ve cases, it will become away the worlds social entrepreneurs work togeth

of such collaborations. They include: Social Invento

for All, building a wave of Social Finance Innovatio

Knowledge and News.

How can tens of millions of the mentally ill nd

care when there are in effect no psychologists

or psychiatris ts available? Fellows in India,

Brazil, and Mexico have all shown how family,

neighbors, and peers can do 70 to 80 percent

of the job.

How can those with disabilities nd jobs?

Fellows have won door-opening legislation.

Other ideas include lowering the price of

labor and increasing that of natural resources

through tax policy.

In 2007, a group of Ashoka Fellows and staff many

disabled themselves launched a collaborative

effort known as the (Dis)Ability Initiative. Building

on the strength of the Ashoka network, they have

implemented a strategy to promote awareness of

disability issues, share the innovative best practices

of their work, and use their combined expertise to

fundamentally shif t the role of disabled persons in the workplace and society. In just

one year, they launched a book and an International Inclusion Week.

Ashoka now needs to accelerate the growth of this community to critical mass and

to identify the critical principles that will be most transforming.

Young People Must be ChangemakersAshokas biggest single group of Fellows focus their work on children and young

people. As a result, Ashoka began learning collaborative entrepreneurship in this

eld. Here it identied the most historic principles years ago and is now well into the

work of tipping the world.

One of these core principles is that all young people need to be powerful, to be

changemakers at twelve and fourteen and eighteen.

Almost all the Ashoka Fellows (and also our business entrepreneur partners) started

something in their teens. Most of the Fellows working with young people change

them profoundly by putting them in charge.

Once a young person has had a dream (be it a recycle bicycle shop or a tutoring

service), built an organization, and left his/her school or community changed by an

ongoing new program, he or she will be a self-condent changemaker for life . S/ he will

learn (grades go up) and organize whatever s/he needs.

In a world of escalating change, not to be a changemaker increasingly will mean not

being in the game. It is hard to imagine anything more destructive for a young persons

life or for society. Any country that does not sharply increase the proportion

of its young people who are changemakers very shortly will not have the broad

population of changemakers it needs to compete in a world where the proportion ofchangemakers is the only sustainable key factor for success.

That is why Ashoka and its Fellows dealing with young people created Ashokas

Youth Venture. Its goal is to ensure that all young people li ve in environments that

encourage and enable them to be changemakers.

We turn now to three concrete examples at varying stages of development.

We hope soon to launch climate change; disability is a bit further along; and

Youth Venture is very close to breaking through at scale.

Climate ChangeAshoka Fellows have long contributed solutions to climate change. A few examples:

Biomass-based, commercially-nanced rural electrication in Sri Lanka, and

electricity from the ow of irrigation canals in India.

Cutting the cost of solar water heaters 90 percent.

Large-scale adoption of rural solar by allowing poor people to rent/purchase the

equipment rather than having to pay up front.

Preservation of 30 million acres of rainforest so far by shifting land tenure

from one owner to ownership of the overlapping multiple uses that characterize

a forest.

Ashoka is also able to draw on other

strengths of its community, notably

its extensive work at the business/

social frontier.

In November 2008, Ashoka and a

German partner convened a number

of Fellows and 50 of the worlds

leading solar organizations all along

the design, production, and distribution

chain to begin the search for the highest

leverage ideas and begin practical

collaborations.

However, this is but a beginning. Ashoka must now invest intensively in acce lerating

towards full-power collaborative entrepreneurship. The rst step is to seek out many

more of the worlds best social entrepreneurs in the eld, help them get started

and succeed, and then weave them together for mutual support and collaborative

entrepreneurship.

Success will bring a very different and hugely powerful lever to bear.

Beyond Back RoomsA generation after the disability movement set independent living as its goal,

millions of people remain hidden in back rooms and very few have found jobs.

Disability does not go away. The exclusion of and prejudice affecting this 10 percent

of humanity and its consequences for family and friends makes it also one

of the planets most pressing areas of human rights need.

There are now well over 100 Ashoka Fellows bringing innovation and leadership to

the eld. Here are a few examples:

What happens when the parents of a disabled child die? A Canadian Fellow

answers that question by engaging the child in work and life with necessary

ongoing supports.

Rural solar is expanding fast thanksto Brazilian Fellow Fabio Rosa.

US Fellow Amy Barzach foundedBoundless Playgrounds so children

of all abilities can play together.

Youth Venturers Mara, Edith y SilviasTeahutl project in Puebla, Mexico.