Everyone a Changemaker Ecosystems

This article originally appeared on WISE

Over the last six years, Ashoka has been cultivating a community of change leaders in Brazil to build this new framework. It is comprised of social entrepreneurs, school principals, teachers, and young changemakers. This community finds and engages teams inside more than a dozen strategic partners including governments, schools of education, universities, unions, publishers, and the media.

What these partners have in common is that they understand and can articulate why this new framework is their historical opportunity to play a critical role in reshaping society. They also have movement and market-leading power with major media and political arms. They can thereby multiply one another and change public conversations because they are news. Finally, they have the ethical fiber and credibility to apply all the above to shift social demand towards this new framework.

This Everyone a Changemaker Co-Lead Community is now a constellation of teams-of teams-of teams: an integrated and multidimensional ecosystem that opens the broad societal conversations, activates the strategic partners’ distribution channels, leading to more and more social demand driving forces.

Ashoka insight

Over 300 years, human society has been moving toward a new reality: where everything is changing with greater speed and is becoming more deeply interconnected. With this, comes a risk of a new divide between those who cannot adapt to change and those who do have this ability. This evolution poses the question: how can we prepare young people to thrive in this new world?

We believe the answer is to cultivate changemaker abilities in a learning environment where one can practice conscious empathy, teamwork, creativity, shared leadership and changemaking. Doing so enables all people to realize their fullest potential as changemakers acting for a common good.

Living in an everyone a changemaker world above all is an exercise in honoring otherness. It dwells in discomfort, welcomes the unknown, conflict, and doubt – and does not silence them. It feeds on the art of listening and on the infinite productivity of differences. That is where its transformative power lies: not in the search for a one-off solution to someone else’s problem, but in collective action to create new possibilities of existence.

To get there, we needed to rethink how people grow up; what education is about; and what the role of students, parents, schools, government, and publishers might be in building this new world.