Ashoka’s Board of Directors is designed carefully to serve the very specific needs of both Ashoka and the larger movement we serve.

Membership entails a major commitment, including probably annual program travel and board or committee meetings on average more than monthly. More important, it requires: (1) deep understanding of and commitment to our vision, values, and design pillars, and (2) enjoying working in our different “everyone a collegial entrepreneur” culture.

Over half the members must be social entrepreneurs, and we also try to have a critical mass with mastery of how to design and lead and manage institutions of all sorts (since so much of the board’s most important work is designing and redesigning very new institutional forms). The board’s skill at working together closely, openly, and in unity is key.

The board is complemented by the Council. Its members typically contribute in more specialized ways -- serving as an endowment trustee or providing board-like wisdom and help to specific programs. Many of its members would not be able to make the major commitments required by the board proper.

The board’s bedrock role is to ensure that Ashoka and the movement achieve as much of the historic opportunity before it -- as wisely and quickly as possible. This involves contributing to Ashoka’s rapidly evolving strategy, and therefore also to its continual institutional evolution. This is the chief focus of the board’s major meetings. More important, it insists (1) on all Fellows, staff, and other key members of our community truly consisting only of leading, top-caliber entrepreneurs with strong ethical fiber; and (2) that Ashoka be so designed and led that this community is asking the big questions and going on to conceive and entrepreneur major parts of the new Everyone a Changemaker™ world we are building.

The board plays another key role -- as our ultimate guarantor that Ashoka will be one of the pioneer genuinely operationally integrated global citizen organizations. This is essential because almost all social problems now and increasingly will need global answers in whole or in part and also because, if we can help the members of our community work together in trust and shared historic achievements, we will be building an important part of the unity the planet so needs.

The board also exercises financial control and other expected fiduciary oversights including selection, policy guidance, and review of the CEO.

Board Members

C William Carter, USA
Alternative Energy Entrepreneur
C. William Carter has entrepreneured and intrapreneured many different things. He cofounded and helped lead one of America’s early -- and one of the few successful -- alternative energy companies. He has recently been building a new, more action-oriented and collaborative high school debate movement. While serving at EPA, he was a government-wide leader in introducing civil service reform, and he also engineered a far more constructive relationship with both the Justice Department and the Appropriations Committees. Just out of school, this tall, thin, red-haired American went to Kalimantan and, as part of helping Indonesia gain better control over the forestry industry, mapped the level of corruption at each stage of the process.

 

After going to Wesleyan as an undergraduate, Bill earned his Ph.D. from the Fletcher School of Law and Diplomacy. He has consulted for the Harvard Advisory Group, where he worked with Indonesian government agencies as well as citizen groups, and also with McKinsey & Company, where he served a range of public and private sector clients, often internationally.

 

Bill is a founding member of the Ashoka board and gives generously of his time and creativity to it and Ashoka’s work. Bill was key in the launch of Ashoka’s second country, Indonesia. As an Ashoka panel chair, Bill has interviewed many hundreds of Ashoka Fellows throughout the world, and he has played a key role in elaborating and refining Ashoka’s Fellow search and selection methodology in the light of the field’s rapid evolution. Bill has also contributed a number of important ideas to Ashoka’s strategic and institutional evolution, e.g., the first conceptualization of the Strategic Diamonds that are now central to how we organize.

Gloria de Souza, India
Ashoka Fellow and Founder, Parisar Asha Environmental Education Centre
One of the first three Ashoka Fellows, Gloria de Souza turned down lucrative business career opportunities to teach. She found an educational system that deadened student’s creativity, motivation to learn, problem-solving capacity, and faith in India. The majority’s dream was to emigrate.

Gloria set to work to introduce modern experiential (in the local environment) education that challenged students to think and to solve problems together -- rather than chanting from memory little understood phrases.

Her core contribution has not been to invent modern education -- but to adapt it to make it attractive to everyone in non-Western settings -- from the students to their parents, from teachers to administrators.

Gradually her patient work of adoption, persuasion, training, and organizing gave her wider and wider impact. She won over the Jesuits, the Bombay Municipal Corporation, the state of Maharashtra’s tribal schools, a large group of Muslim schools, the Aga Khan group, and others. Eventually the government of India introduced her work in the Union Territories it runs directly, and UNICEF asked her to help in Sikhim and now beyond.

 

Gloria now must respond not only to growing demand from across India but to new requests from Bangladesh, Sri Lanka, and the Middle East.

Bill Drayton, USA
Chair and CEO, Ashoka: Innovators for the Public
Bill Drayton is a social entrepreneur. As a student, he was active in civil rights and founded a number of organizations, ranging from Yale Legislative Services to Harvard’s Ashoka Table, an inter-disciplinary weekly forum in the social sciences. He graduated from Harvard with highest honors and went on to study at Balliol College in Oxford University, where he attained his M.A. with First Class Honors. In 1970, he graduated from Yale Law School and began his career at McKinsey and Company in New York. He taught at Stanford Law School and Harvard’s Kennedy School of Government. From 1977 to 1981, Bill served in the Carter Administration as Assistant Administrator at the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency, where he launched emissions trading (the basis of Kyoto) among other reforms.

After his term at the EPA ended in 1981, he returned to McKinsey half-time and launched both Ashoka and Save EPA and its successor, Environmental Safety. At McKinsey, he helped the firm develop tax and regulatory design work and then its use of industry strategy (an increasingly useful first step to company strategy). With the support that he received unexpectedly when elected a MacArthur Fellow at the end of 1984, he was able to devote himself fully to Ashoka.

Bill is Ashoka’s Chair and Chief Executive Officer. He is also chair of three other organizations: Youth Venture, Community Greens, and Get America Working!

Bill has won numerous awards and honors throughout his career. In 2005, he was selected one of America’s Best Leaders by US News & World Report and Harvard’s Center for Public Leadership. Other awards include the Yale Law School’s highest alumni honor, the National Wildlife Federation’s Conservation Achievement Award International; the National Academy of Public Administration and American Society for Public Administration National Public Service Award, and the Dr. Jean Mayer Global Citizenship Award, and more. He is a member of the national Academy of Public Administration and the American Academy of Arts and Sciences.

 

As one of three members of the Leadership Team, he pays special leadership attention to the new group entrepreneurship and social financial services programs and to the staff search and marketing functions. Sixty percent of his performance agreement with the board is focused on helping build “an irreversible institution and movement”.

Mary Gordon, Canada
Ashoka Fellow and Founder, Roots of Empathy
Mary Gordon grew up in a small community in Newfoundland. She became a teacher in Toronto. She quickly realized that there were far more important and urgent challenges facing the children before her and, therefore, education and society than could be addressed by her lesson plans.

She has introduced a series of profound changes in response to seeing this bigger problem. In 1981, she founded Canada’s first and largest school-based parenting and family literacy program. This program has been used as a best practice model throughout North America and internationally.

More recently, Mary has developed a methodology that helps young children grasp empathy. This enables them to break out of the vicious cycle of only being able to respond to anyone who makes them uncomfortable with aggression which, of course, only invites more aggression. Any child who does not break out of this cycle by developing empathy will be marginalized in life. Anyone who cannot be self-guiding will hurt others and will be thrown out of the game. Moreover, any school populated by children without empathetic skills is going to at least in significant degree be a dysfunctional place.

Mary’s methodology has at its heart bringing a very young infant (the “professor”) and his or her mother to the class. The children in the class then have the responsibility of figuring out what the “professor” is saying, and then feeling. Bullying rates come down and stay down. Mary is now engaged vigorously in spreading this very successful, simple way of helping children escape life marginalization and take the first step to becoming adults with the critical social skills of empathy/teamwork/leadership/changemaking. She has written a widely appreciated book, The Roots of Empathy. She has helped her model spread to classrooms in every province in Canada. It is also in Australia and will soon be in New Zealand. Portions of Germany and the U.S. are actively interested. The World Bank Institute in Paris and the World Health Organization, among others are beginning to appreciate the importance of Mary’s work. Mary is a member of the Order of Canada and an Ashoka Fellow.

Roger Harrison, United Kingdom
Newspaper Executive and Journalist
Born in Ireland, Roger has had an extensive career as a journalist, manager, CEO and board member and chair. He has served both business and society. His business careers have been chiefly in local and national newspaper publishing, magazine publishing, broadcasting, and property ownership and development.

Roger began his career in 1951 as a freelance writer, writing mainly for The Times, where he took up a full-time position in 1957. In 1967 he joined The Observer where he held the positions of Director and Joint Managing Director. He was Chief Executive from 1984-1987. Roger also served as director at London Weekend Television and the Deputy Chairman of Capital Radio.

After his studies at Oxford and Harvard and mandatory military service, Roger lived for several years in one of the poorest parts of East London helping with and later becoming chairman of a youth club and community centre. Subsequently, he became Chairman of Toynbee Hall from 1990-2002, where, in the 19th century graduates from Oxford were the first to live and offer help in one of the most deprived areas of London. Toynbee was responsible, over time, for many social initiatives including free legal aid, citizens' advice bureau, and the child poverty action group. It was one of the progenitors of the welfare state and the free National Health Service. It now serves a heavily Bangladeshi immigrant community.

Roger also has also served as Chairman of Asylum Aid (a charity helping asylum seekers in the UK), a council member of Goldsmiths College (a university in South London), and a trustee of other charities involved in youth work, prisons, the environment and organic farming, oil depletion, the theatre and the arts. Presently, he is the Chairman of the Royal Academy of Dance (RAD), one of the largest and most influential dance education and training organizations operating in 80 countries worldwide.

Fred Hehuwat, Indonesia
Ashoka Fellow and Founder, The Green Indonesia Foundation
As a student at the prestigious Bandung Institute of Technology, Fred was one of the founders of the nonparty student movement that played so important a role in ending the Sukarno era. After earning a Ph.D. in geology in Holland, he quickly became one of the most skilled professionals in the field and for twelve years directed the important National Institute of Geology and Mining. He expanded this role to include extensive development work. He was one of the co-founders of the first citizen environmental organization, the Green Indonesia Foundation, at the time a difficult and courageous initiative.

Fred chairs Ashoka Indonesia and has played many roles in Ashoka -- from selection panel chair to member of the board Executive Committee.

William Kelly, USA
President, Stewards of Affordable Housing for the Future (SAHF)
Bill took early retirement from his twenty-five year partnership at the law firm of Latham & Watkins to pursue his passion for preserving affordable rental homes for low-income people. An organizer of SAHF and its first President, he is working to change the policy landscape and the marketplace to enable sophisticated non-profits to buy and operate affordable apartments in a way that serves as a platform for residents to improve their lives and is financially sustainable over the long term.

His earlier experience included serving as a law clerk to Court of Appeals Judge Frank Coffin and to Supreme Court Justice Lewis Powell, as Executive Assistant to the Secretary of Housing and Urban Development, and as counsel in a wide array of domestic and international transactions. A life-long innovator in the provision of pro bono legal services, he is working with Ashoka to develop a global network of pro bono counsel for Ashoka Fellows and other social entrepreneurs. Bill is a Director of the Washington Legal Clinic for the Homeless Governance Institute, and the International Senior Lawyers Project.

Kyle Zimmer, USA
Co-founder and President, First Book
Throughout her career, Kyle has worked at the intersection of policy, business and social issues. Early in her career, she served in the federal liaison office for Ohio Governor Richard Celeste and later became a state and local issues advisor in the Presidential campaign of Walter Mondale. After graduating from The George Washington University National Law Center, Kyle entered legal practice and then served as Director of State Affairs for an innovative alliance between major consumer organizations and insurance companies.

Kyle and two colleagues founded First Book in 1992, and Kyle serves as President of the organization. First Book recently celebrated the distribution of its 40 millionth book through its network in more than 3,000 communities domestically and is in the process of expanding globally. In addition, First Book has successfully launched several new subsidiaries, including the First Book National Book Bank, First Artists, and the First Book Marketplace. First Book is a highly celebrated social sector organization, having received awards from a range of institutions, including Forbes Magazine, Fast Company Magazine and the Monitor Group, as well as the Promotional Marketing Association of America, the Cause Marketing Forum, and Oprah's Angel Network. In addition, the First Book Marketplace was awarded the grand prize in the Yale School of Management/Goldman Sachs Nonprofit Business Plan Competition in 2005. Kyle was elected an Ashoka Member.