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Ashoka and Artemisia Partner to Promote Social Entrepreneurship
February 15, 2008
SAO PAULO, Brazil and ARLINGTON, Va. — Artemisia and Ashoka: Innovators for the Public have forged an innovative partnership to recognize and provide support to leading social entrepreneurs and young entrepreneurs throughout the world. The partnership is the result of years of collaboration between Artemisia founder Kelly Michel and Ashoka offices around the world.
Ashoka, a global citizen sector organization that invests in social entrepreneurs, and Artemisia, which supports the next generation of entrepreneurs, share a common goal: to promote social change and ventures that integrate financial sustainability into their core model for social and environmental change.
Artemisia will fund 14 Ashoka Fellows with programs and products that improve people’s lives in Latin America and around the world, and support Ashoka’s Group Entrepreneurship programs in Latin America to increase the impact of sustainable ventures, including collaborations among Ashoka Fellows. Artemisia is also adapting, expanding and incorporating new content into the training materials from the landmark business competition at the Ashoka-McKinsey Center for Social Entrepreneurship. By reinforcing Ashoka’s Youth Venture program in Brazil, Artemisia will strengthen the pipeline for its Young Entrepreneurs program. Leveraging its existing partnership with AIESEC, the world’s largest student organization, Artemisia will place AIESEC students in internships with Ashoka Fellow organizations to help develop innovative market-based solutions for social and environmental problems.
“It is a great pleasure to extend the Ashoka-Artemisia partnership and to increasingly capitalize on synergies between the two organizations. I’m sure that in the near future a growing number of innovative, sustainable ventures led by young entrepreneurs will emerge as case studies for the world,” said Kelly Michel, founder and Executive Director of Artemisia.
Sharing a vision for sustainable social change, Ashoka and Artemisia will work to grow their programs to new countries and markets, and view their partnership as an opportunity to build capacity within both organizations, share knowledge, and spread best practices for the citizen sector.
“Artemisia and Ashoka both know that, in a world where the rate of change is accelerating even more rapidly, the key factor that will define a country or city or company or group’s success is the proportion of its people who are changemakers,” says Ashoka founder and CEO Bill Drayton. “We are therefore working together, first to enable all young people to be changemakers now (essential if they are to spark change later), and, second to help the most powerful social entrepreneurs launch major pattern changes for the good and, in the process, encourage hundreds of others to follow their examples and step up to become local changemakers.”
About Ashoka
Founded in 1980, Ashoka is the world’s working community of more than 2,000 leading social entrepreneurs. It champions the most important new social change ideas and supports the entrepreneurs behind them by helping them get started, grow, succeed, and collaborate. As Ashoka expands its capability to integrate and connect entrepreneurs around the world, it builds an entrepreneurial infrastructure that is supporting the fast-growing needs of the citizen sector. Ashoka’s vision is to create change today, for an Everyone a Changemaker™ society to become the reality of tomorrow. For more information, visit www.ashoka.org.
About Artemisia
Artemisia inspires and supports a new generation of entrepreneurs to develop market-based solutions to social and environmental problems. Since 2003, 90 young entrepreneurs have received direct support, 85 students have been intensely involved in social and sustainable ventures, and over 7,500 young people have participated in awareness-raising activities. Currently operating in Brazil, Senegal and France, Artemisia offers managerial, financial and leadership development support to entrepreneurs at different points in their venture’s lifecycle. For more information, please visit www.artemisia-international.org.
Artemisia inspires and supports a new generation of entrepreneurs to develop market-based solutions to social and environmental problems. Since 2003, 90 young entrepreneurs have received direct support, 85 students have been intensely involved in social and sustainable ventures, and over 7,500 young people have participated in awareness-raising activities. Currently operating in Brazil, Senegal and France, Artemisia offers managerial, financial and leadership development support to entrepreneurs at different points in their venture’s lifecycle. For more information, please visit www.artemisia-international.org.