Ashoka

Ashoka is a global organization founded by Bill Drayton in 1980 that identifies and supports leading social entrepreneurs — individuals with innovative solutions to social problems and the vision to transform entire systems. Ashoka Fellows are selected through a rigorous process and receive financial support, professional services, and access to a global community of peers. Today the Ashoka network includes thousands of Fellows across more than ninety countries.

Ashoka's foundational insight — that the most powerful lever for systems change is the individual with a pattern-changing idea — has shaped the field of social entrepreneurship globally. Beyond supporting individual Fellows, Ashoka works to build what it calls an Everyone a Changemaker world, cultivating the capacity for empathy and collaborative action across education systems and institutions.

Ashoka's contribution to the transition is structural: it has spent four decades mapping and supporting the people who work at the edge of what systems can currently accommodate. Its Fellows are frequently the first to demonstrate that a different way is possible — in healthcare, education, agriculture, justice, and governance. For wealth holders and institutions looking to understand where systemic change is actually happening, the Ashoka network is among the most reliable maps of genuine innovation.