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Ashoka is a great global organization, built on a brilliant idea. It picks up social innovators when they themselves don’t know what great changes they can bring. That’s the stage when budding innovators need the support most. Ashoka helps pool local innovations into global solutions.Muhammad YunusFounder and CEO The Grameen Bank, Bangladesh2006 Nobel Peace Prize WinnerIt 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 BentonFormer U.S. Representative to UNICEF and Chair, Save the ChildrenThe explosive emergence of social entrepreneurship over the last several decades is more than a match for the world’s problems. As an historic force, it is bigger, smarter, more creative, and multiplying far faster. Simply put, Ashoka is a key player in the emergence and healthy development of social entrepreneurship across the world.Lee HamiltonFormer Chair, House Foreign Affairs Committee Director, Woodrow Wilson International CenterVice Chair, 9-11 CommissionCo-Chair, Iraq Study Group
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Partnerships in
Collaborative Entrepreneurship
For 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 world’s 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 best indicator 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 another’s 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 strengthening the process. Once it is clear that an issue is ripe, it will use its global search capacity to seek out the world’s 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 world’s new reality.
Investing in collaborative entrepreneurship has three extraordinary levels of 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 locally. 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.
 
Please read the attached reprint of the recent
New York Times
 article by Nicholas Kristof. It is about young people being powerful, being changemakers. It is also about Ashoka’s Youth Venture. The chief protagonist, Talia, is an Ashoka Youth Venturer.The article also captures something of what it feels to be on top of the world, to know that any challenge is an opportunity one can seize for the good.Our Youth Venturers use that power to recruit team members (roughly 20 to 25 per team), all of whom are learning and practicing the core social skills necessary for this
new world dened by change.
Consider the four degrees of leverage that make the success of this example of collaborative entrepreneurship very likely. In a middle school of 500 young people,
if Ashoka’s Youth Venture can help two young people in the rst year and three
in the second (one half of one percent per year) to launch organizations successfully,
ve young people will be changemakers for life and over 100 will be practicing
the core skills. Five peer groups and over 100 students will be at work recruiting their peers to join their organizations and use their services. That is a force powerful enough permanently to transform the youth culture in most schools and neighborhoods.The fourth degree of leverage is helping the broader society grasp how critical it is for their and society’s well-being that all young people, not just the elite, be changemakers. Once young people, parents, and teachers grasp that this is the most critical skill for successful lives going forward, what requires pioneers now will become the unremarkable norm.Building from this base, what does Ashoka’s Youth Venture need to do to tip the world? It needs two to three percent of the
inuential schools and youth programs and
ten to twenty of the key thought leaders in each of the seven to ten big, pace-setting countries to test the idea and then champion it. With hundreds of the world’s best social
entrepreneurs in this eld on the case, this is
highly achievable.If you care about a young person, encourage him or her to go ahead and dream a needed change — and then to make it happen. Ashoka’s Youth Venture will help with advice, seed resources, and networking with other Youth Venturers and with the broader Ashoka community.
A New Architecture
Collaborative entrepreneurship is entirely new and extraordinarily powerful. Once it
has succeeded in four or ve cases, it will become a central, very probably the dening
way the world’s social entrepreneurs work together. Ashoka has a growing pipeline of such collaborations. They include: Social Inventors, Full Economic Citizenship, Law
for All, building a wave of Social Finance Innovation, and dening new approaches to
Knowledge and News.
How can tens of millions of the mentally ill nd
care when there are in effect no psychologists or psychiatrists 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 shift 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 Changemakers
Ashoka’s 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 identied 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-condent 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 person’s 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 of changemakers is the only sustainable key factor for success. That is why Ashoka and its Fellows dealing with young people created Ashoka’s Youth Venture. Its goal is to ensure that all young people live 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 Change
Ashoka Fellows have long contributed solutions to climate change. A few examples:
Biomass-based, commercially-nanced rural electrication 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 world’s 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 accelerating
towards full-power collaborative entrepreneurship. The rst step is to seek out many more of the world’s 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 Rooms
A 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 planet’s 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 thanks to Brazilian Fellow Fabio Rosa.US Fellow Amy Barzach founded Boundless™ Playgrounds so children of all abilities can play together.Youth Venturers María, Edith y Silvia’s Teahutl project in Puebla, Mexico.

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