Our Mission
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."

Read about Ashoka's theory of change for this historic moment, the new inequality, and the new framework that they require.

Our Priorities
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

Social Entrepreneurship
Ashoka selects world-class social entrepreneurs who are leading the way to an everyone-a-changemaker world.

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.

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.

What We Do
Ashoka supports an "Everyone a Changemaker" world through its programs in more than 90 countries, building and amplifying this global movement in three stages:

Identify and support the world's leading social entrepreneurs
We find and cultivate social entrepreneurs in every corner of the world, whose system-changing innovations solve deep-rooted social problems. After a rigorous application process, we invite them into the Ashoka Fellowship - providing early stage financial support and a lifetime membership into an expansive network of peers and partners - enabling them to achieve their vision and have even greater impact. Ashoka sets its strategic priorities by drawing on the insights of a core group of Fellows whose work reveals an opportunity for catalyzing transformative change. These Fellows serve as co-leaders of a movement that contributes to an "everyone a changemaker" society.
Venture & Fellowship
Ashoka Support Network
Ashoka Globalizer
Ashoka Executive in Residence
Ashoka Wellbeing

Accelerate the "Everyone a Changemaker" world
For each of Ashoka's strategic priorities, we mobilize a network of organizations to join us in shifting mindsets and reshaping how we learn, work, and live together to catalyze changemaking for the good of society. We partner with schools, universities, corporations, citizen sector organizations, media, and other influencers to co-lead this movement with us.
AshokaU
Ashoka Changemaker Schools
Ashoka Social Financial Services
Organizing for Changemaking

Equip Everyone to be a Changemaker
Working with our movement co-leaders and partner institutions, we inspire and enable changemaking in the public-at-large, and work to give all citizens the confidence and tools to solve problems for the good of all.
Ashoka Young Changemakers
Ashoka Changemakers
Ashoka Youth Venture

Ashoka's History
Bill Drayton founded Ashoka in 1980 based on the idea that the most powerful force for good in the world is a social entrepreneur: a person driven by an innovative idea that can help correct an entrenched global problem. The world’s leading social entrepreneurs pursue system-changing solutions that permanently alter existing patterns of activity.

The world is defined by change and requires a new mindset.

Ashoka envisions a world in which everyone is a changemaker:
a world where all citizens are powerful and contribute to change in positive ways.