Founded in 1980, Ashoka is the world’s largest network of leading social entrepreneurs and ranks among the top 5 NGOs of the world. The first-ever social entrepreneur to be selected as an Ashoka Fellow was Gloria De Souza from India, in 1982, who revolutionised the system of learning in classrooms.
Impacting millions of people and communities through their work, our Fellows include people like Nobel Laureates Kailash Satyarthi (Bachpan Bachao Andolan), Muhammad Yunus (Grameen Bank), and Magsaysay awardee Anshu Gupta (Goonj), among several others. Currently, we have over 400 Ashoka Fellows in wide-ranging fields such as farming, education, human rights, finance, local media, and women and youth empowerment, across India.
Ashoka India functions as a collaborative network that supports and amplifies change by bringing together these changemakers.
In the course of our work, having witnessed the changing patterns in society over close to three decades, and the way our problems are increasing at a pace faster than we can solve them, we have realised that to truly make things better for everyone we need to head towards a world where everyone is a changemaker. And just like social entrepreneurs, the world needs everyone to start practising skills like empathy, teamwork, leadership, and problem solving.
To this end, we believe that changemaking has to start young, and through our programs like Youth Venture, Changemaker Schools, and Health and Nutrition, we find, develop, and support young changemakers, enabling them to be role models in their communities, and give them the skills to thrive in our changing world.
Ashoka Changemaker Schools
The new paradigm for growing up and education is: Every child must master cognitive empathy, and every teen must be practicing changemaking.
Ashoka Changemaker Schools is a global network that that aims to fill the gap between universal access to education and real, productive learning. Where the past few decades have shown remarkable progress in getting our children to schools, we also have to equip them to reach their full potential at school.
Changemaker Schools is taking this on in powerful and unique ways, leading innovative solutions that positively change how children learn (through play, peer-learning, arts, etc.) and what they learn (citizenship, changemaker skills, financial literacy, etc.). Changemaker Schools often works with teachers, government officers and children to enable them to play a larger role in the change process.
We run on the understanding that all children should have access to a learning system which is contextual, self-paced and dynamic. An education system which has different approaches, enables connectivity and nurtures basic values.
In India, the Changemaker Schools Program was launched towards the end of 2014 and in almost two years we have a network of 18 Changemaker Schools in India, and one in Nepal. These schools have demonstrated changemaking in their environments and all of them have impacted their communities in some form.
Ashoka Youth Venture
Adults today who started something in their teens are four times as likely to be C-level leaders and five times as likely to be founders. This will become exponentially more so as the world tips fully into an ‘Everyone a Changemaker’ future.
Ashoka India’s Youth Venture program is cultivating and equipping an ecosystem that supports youth to be changemakers. We have helped hundreds of young people (12-20 years old) to have their own dreams, build teams, and change their world (school, community). Since April 2015, we have elected over 140 Youth Venturers across the length and breadth of India.
Through their initiatives, Youth Venturers are role models in their community, proving that it is possible to be actively engaged and to Lead Young. Beyond their immediate surrounding, they also convey their message of change by participating in large outreach events in India.
Ashoka Venture and Fellowship
Venture is the mechanism through which Ashoka searches and selects the world’s leading social entrepreneurs as Ashoka Fellows. It remains the flagship program under which Ashoka was founded and remains at the heart of Ashoka's strategy.
Ashoka supports system-changing new ideas in the hands of entrepreneurial individuals across sectors. Our diverse network of over 350+ Fellows in the region has had significant impact on systems and lives of citizens.
With the insight that the ability to drive transformational impact is directly proportional to the ability to recruit and nurture changemakers, Ashoka India creates online and offline spaces to enable Fellows to draw from their peers and reframe the way they lead, organize and strategize to grow their ideas in a fast-changing world. Our creatively designed ‘Framework Change’ workshops, ‘Reframing Journeys’ and webinars are designed to help Fellows ‘see’ differently, so that they can ‘do’ differently.