Partnerships in “Ashoka is a great global organization, built on a brilliant

Collaborative Entrepreneurship 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
For centuries “entrepreneurship” has meant a person with a vision relentlessly
most. Ashoka helps pool local innovations into global
turning the established ways upside down. solutions.”
In fact, the world has increasingly come to understand that there is nothing more Muhammad Yunus
powerful than a big idea — as long as it is in the hands of a great entrepreneur. Founder and CEO
The Grameen Bank, Bangladesh
However, as the field of social entrepreneurship has matured, Ashoka and its 2006 Nobel Peace Prize Winner
community of the world’s leading social entrepreneurs have developed something
that is far more powerful — collaborative entrepreneurship. There has never been “It is hard to imagine another institution that accomplishes
anything like it before. so much with so little. Ashoka is managed very tightly.
Its interventions achieve unequaled social change per
First, Ashoka determines that an issue area is ripe for major change. The best
dollar invested.”
indicator is that a large number of Ashoka Fellows are betting their lives that they
Marjorie Benton
can bring major change to the area. For example, there are almost 500 Fellows
Former U.S. Representative to UNICEF and
(roughly 20 percent of the total) focused on youth.
Chair, Save the Children
The individual Fellows are very powerful. Half have changed national policy within
five years of their launch. However, each typically has developed only one insight
and one delivery system. “The explosive emergence of social entrepreneurship
over the last several decades is more than a match
As Ashoka helps them see one another’s ideas across the globe, the pieces fit together for the world’s problems. As an historic force, it is
into a giant mosaic, which makes the key forces and most important ideas apparent. bigger, smarter, more creative, and multiplying far faster.
Simply put, Ashoka is a key player in the emergence and
Ashoka is now accelerating and strengthening the process. Once it is clear that an
healthy development of social entrepreneurship across
issue is ripe, it will use its global search capacity to seek out the world’s best ideas
the world.”
and entrepreneurs, quickly getting to the needed critical mass. It will start the
Lee Hamilton
thinking together that leads to identifying key cornerstone transforming principles
Former Chair, House Foreign Affairs Committee
and how to make them the world’s new reality.
Director, Woodrow Wilson International Center
Investing in collaborative entrepreneurship has three extraordinary levels Vice Chair, 9-11 Commission
of impact: Co-Chair, Iraq Study Group

(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
Partnerships in Collaborative
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.
Entrepreneurship
HEADQUARTERS
(3) Collaborative entrepreneurship will become the core process for the field of 1700 North Moore Street, Suite 2000 (20th Floor)
social entrepreneurship because it brings such great value to both the actors Arlington,VA 22209 United States
and the public good. It puts each subject area in full perspective and then
T: 703.527.8300 | F: 703.527.8383
carefully selects and entrepreneurs globally the very best ideas the field has
produced.
www. ashoka.org | changemakers.net
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-financed rural electrification in Sri Lanka, and
electricity from the flow 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
Rural solar is expanding fast thanks leverage ideas and begin practical
to Brazilian Fellow Fabio Rosa.
collaborations.
However, this is but a beginning. Ashoka must now invest intensively in accelerating
towards full-power collaborative entrepreneurship. The first step is to seek out many
more of the world’s best social entrepreneurs in the field, 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 field. 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.
• How can tens of millions of the mentally ill find
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 find 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 US Fellow Amy Barzach founded
disability issues, share the innovative best practices Boundless™ Playgrounds so children
of their work, and use their combined expertise to of all abilities can play together.
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
field. Here it identified 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-confident 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.
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 defined 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 first year and three
in the second (one half of one percent per year) to launch organizations successfully,
five 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
influential 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 field 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
Youth Venturers María, Edith y Silvia’s
Teahutl project in Puebla, Mexico.
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 five cases, it will become a central, very probably the defining
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 defining new approaches to
Knowledge and News.