Our Leadership

Ana Sáenz de Miera is leading Next Now: Ashoka´s initiative to build new emerging fields in social entrepreneurship and organize the whole Ashoka global community around them. Previously, Ana served as Ashoka Spain Country Representative for 7 years, creating a movement in Spain that brings together social entrepreneurs, companies, public administration, youth and schools to work towards a society where everyone realizes their changemaking potential.

Ana’s leadership started young. As a scout member from the age of 8, she was taught early what it means to see a problem, have an idea, and to make it happen. Since then she has never stopped leading towards social change in a way that inspires many others to be changemakers. 

She was born in Spain and holds a bachelor’s degree in Psychology, diploma in Social Sciences, Master in Humanities and Master in Clinical Psychology, and has been recognized as one of the Top 100 Female Leaders in Spain for a number of years.
 
Ana has held a number of board positions. Amongst others, she was vice-president of Fundación Cotec (the Spanish institution that promotes innovation as the driver for social and economic, of which King Felipe VI is Honorary President), and member of the Board of Directors for Spanish Association of Foundations.

Anamaria Schindler is Ashoka's leadership team member. She is also responsible for Ashoka Latin America and Global Integration.

She holds a master's degree and doctorate studies in sociology from the University of São Paulo/USP, Brazil, focused on the development of philanthropy, and subsequently corporate philanthropy, in Latin America.

She was part of the initial group of the first Brazilian think tank on human rights, the Center for Studies of violence, at the University of São Paulo. For 10 years, Anamaria dedicated to human rights and democratization in Brazil. During this period, she developed a partnership with the Attorney General of the Republic of Brazil, conducting analysis of human rights violations in rural areas in Brazil.

In 1996, Anamaria joined Ashoka to build the Center for Social Entrepreneurship, in partnership with McKinsey&Company. During this period, she expanded the strategic partnership to several countries and launched the first business plan competition for social entrepreneurs in Latin America.

She became Ashoka global co-president between 2005 and 2008.

Between 2008 and 2011, she launched and led the Arapyaú Institute in Brazil with Guilherme Leal, Brazilian business entrepreneur. The Arapyaú Institute is committed to supporting sustainable development and environment. She was also part of the 2010 presidential campaign in Brazil, contributing with Marina Silva and Guilherme Leal, candidates for President and Vice President respectively.

She was a columnist for the Brazilian newspaper Valor Econômico.

Anamaria is a member of several boards of civil society organizations in Brazil, Latin America and Europe, including Fundación Avina, Conectas Human Rights, WRI Brazil and Investment committee of Good Energies Foundation and Porticus.

Andrea leads the Framework Change, Marketing and Communications Program at Ashoka Latin America. Her goal is to exponentially grow the number of people who generate systemic changes in the region, and help these changemakers acquire the skills they need to produce positive, longstanding impacts. Prior to Ashoka, Andrea led the communications and education program at Conservation International, and the environmental program at the Roberto Marinho Foundation. In 2015, she returned to school to study landscape resilience at Harvard’s Graduate School of Design. Afterwards, she joined the Collective Learning group at the MIT Media Lab. More recently, she was part of the business and partnership team of Datawheel, a start-up in Boston specialized in data analysis and visualization. Andrea has a background in journalism and business administration.

Angelou’s love for the environment stretches far back to when she was a little girl who had the chance to escape the dense urban streets of Jersey City, New Jersey, to summer in her family’s home in upstate New York. After a brief stint of practicing law, it was through her work as a Legal Specialist for the New Jersey State Agriculture and Development Committee that Angelou embarked upon a career as an environmentalist.
 
 Angelou further honed her skills as a Project Manager for the Trust for Public Land (TPL) in both its New Jersey and Georgia offices. In her position, Angelou acquired land for preservation and worked on the New York/New Jersey Highlands Program, Parks for People-Newark, the New York/New Jersey Harbor Program in New Jersey, the Atlanta Beltline and the 20 County Regional Greenspace Initiative in Georgia.
 
While at TPL, Angelou realized the disconnect between the land that was being preserved and the education of people about that preservation—particularly as it related to our next generation. This was the impetus for the Greening Youth Foundation. As a woman and minority-founded and led non-profit, Angelou is at the helm of a movement to provide environmental and wellness education and career pathways to a new generation, both in the United States and in countries throughout Africa. Angelou was elected as an Ashoka Fellow in 2016 for her work at the Greening Youth Foundation, where she remains the CEO today. The Greening Youth Foundation is cultivating a generation of youth of color to be stewards of our land and natural resources, ultimately shifting the demographics of the environment conservation movement.
 
Angelou is a graduate of Spelman College, Georgia. She received her Juris Doctorate in Law from the University of Florida, College of Law. Angelou is a member of the National Center for Civil and Human Right’s Women in Solidarity Society, and Georgia Audubon boards; Advisory Board Member for Outdoor Afro, The Million Mile Greenway, Inc., Keeping It Wild, Inc., and Rachel’s Network; and most recently the author of “Engage, Connect, Protect: Empowering Diverse Youth as Environmental Leaders. Angelou is a lover of cultural dance, hiking and birds and good avocado toast! As recent empty-nesters, Angelou and her husband of 25 years, split their time between Atlanta, GA and Lagos, Nigeria.

Arnaud Mourot is Co-Director Ashoka Europe. A member of the French team of Olympic wrestling for 10 years and a graduate from ESCP Business school, Arnaud has been involved in the humanitarian sector since he finished his studies. He founded and led the NGO “Play International”  (formerly Sport Sans Frontières) in 1999. He has also contributed to the development of various Social Businesses and CSOs in France. He launched the operations of Ashoka France/Belgium/Switzerland in 2005. He now leads the development of Ashoka in southern Europe and Francophony, as well as Ashoka’s “innovation for EACH businesses” initiative. He also serves as a global spokes person for Ashoka.Arnaud is married and  the father of 3 children. He lives in Switzerland.

As a student, Bill founded organizations ranging from Yale Legislative Services to Harvard’s Ashoka Table, an inter-disciplinary weekly forum in the social sciences. He launched Ashoka in 1981. He used the stipend received when elected a MacArthur Fellow in 1984 to devote himself fully to Ashoka. In 2005, he was selected one of America’s Best Leaders by US News & World Report and Harvard’s Center for Public Leadership.

Claire has a deep sense of justice and fairness which has led her towards a career in building systems that support social entrepreneurs and young changemakers driving positive impact in the world.

Claire’s trajectory was highly influenced by supportive parents: A mathematician mother who challenged inflexible gender norms until she chose to pivot all her acumen into community leadership in public education and a business executive father whose work trips abroad taught Claire a sincere respect for a diversity of cultures not her own. They purposefully instilled in her a deep sense of fairness and a sense that she could do anything.

Claire’s changemaking journey started in high school where she became a leader in her school’s social change organization, overseeing a dozen student-led initiatives from housing to health to social justice. This work and early experiences volunteering with a community organization in Honduras exposed Claire first-hand to how well-intentioned people from outside a community could unintentionally do more harm than good.

In college Claire led a number of social justice initiatives. For instance, after witnessing labor violations so close to home as an intern with a leading garment worker’s union in New York, she launched the Students Against Sweatshops campaign at Yale, resulting in the administration approving a Code of Conduct to ensure the university’s ethical sourcing of its licensed goods. While studying in Chile, Claire was inspired by an Ashoka Fellow who demonstrated the kind of systems change impact only possible for someone who lives with the social problem and can skillfully put others into powerful roles. She graduated college and joined Ashoka’s team.

At Ashoka, Claire worked at every level of Venture, starting in D.C. and quickly moving to Brazil where she led the Venture/Fellowship program. She co-designed with a Fellow and launched Ashoka Brazil’s first youth changemaking program. Led by her passion for connecting the impact of social entrepreneurs and public policy change, she left Ashoka in 2004 to pursue a degree in Public Affairs at the Princeton School of Public and International Affairs where she eventually worked with UNICEF to develop the first inter-agency guidelines for supporting adolescent girls across 7 UN agencies.

After Princeton Claire joined the Oikos-Cooperation and Development, a social entrepreneur-led Portuguese organization in Mozambique, as a country leader in 2006. Her work catalyzed innovative approaches to support farmer and fishing cooperatives in their mitigation of the impacts of climate change and the HIV epidemic. Unsettled by the lack of support to Mozambican social entrepreneurs and changemakers, Claire returned to Ashoka to lead the Global Venture Program.

In the last decade, Claire has entreprenerd Ashoka’s LeadYoung initiative to help young people and now everyone to tell their Everyone a Changemaker story. She works across our global team of colleagues to develop tools and systems to align our global youth strategy and bring resources to support our core strategy. For example, she intrapreneured the four super key EACH dashboards.

In Claire’s free time, she loves to hike, make Halloween costumes and windchimes. She is grateful for the support of her husband and two young sons.

Bill Carter was one of Ashoka's founding Board members. After stepping down from the Board of Directors in February 2009, Bill joined Ashoka as its Everyone a Changemaker Leader for Africa. In this role, he guides Ashoka's overall strategy for our programming in Africa. Before working fulltime with Ashoka, Bill was the COO of an independent power company, the Long Lake Energy Corporation, that developed hydroelectric, cogeneration and other types of power generation which was sold to public utilities in the US and Canada. He also played a leading role in developing Ashoka's Indonesia program starting in 1981. He spent a number of years in McKinsey & Company's international practice and served at the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency, where he was responsible for wide-ranging management reforms.

David Bonbright is a serial social entrepreneur whose four decades of work focus on organizational effectiveness through a lens of mutuality. The Constituent Voice performance measurement and learning system that he co-created has been widely adopted by foundations and nonprofits around the world and is now making its entrance to the business playbook. He says, “We have entered the Age of Agency. The only winning way to work now is by doing things with people, not to people or for people.”

He describes Ashoka as his Hotel California, where “you can check out but never leave”. Over 35 years, since 1987, he has frequently engaged with Ashoka as grantmaker, volunteer, staff member, and consultant. His current work involves growing Ashoka’s leadership team in Europe.

Diana joined the organization after graduating from Brown University in 1988 with a degree in South Asian Studies. As an undergraduate, her year-long study abroad in Varanasi, India led her to see the need for local solutions to solve global problems. This insight inspired her to pursue an internship at Ashoka, where she created one of its core programs, Fellowship Support Services, (now Fellowship) which expanded the resources available to Ashoka’s social entrepreneurs to connect them to one another. When Diana took a leave to pursue a Ph.D. in anthropology from New York University (2000), she was named both a Fulbright and Woodrow Wilson scholar. Her ethnographic research on understanding how social change happens as a local articulation of a global social movement resulted in her dissertation: 'Between the Difference: The Emergence of a Cross Ethnic Women’s Movement in Trinidad and Tobago.'

Ph.D. in hand, Diana returned to Ashoka as a leader in the worldwide process of selecting social entrepreneurs to be Ashoka fellows. Additionally, she was given responsibility for Ashoka’s geographic expansion and during her tenure, there was a significant increase of Fellow elections, allowing Ashoka to reach its current total of 3,000. She became the President of Ashoka in 2005. She has contributed significantly to the field of social entrepreneurship by implementing one of the first, and now widely respected, tools to measure the impact of social entrepreneurship.

She is on the Advisory Board for the Center for the Advancement of Social Entrepreneurship (CASE) at Duke’s Fuqua School of Business and on the Board of GuideStar International. She has taught at Georgetown University on Anthropology and Development and has authored and edited numerous journal and book publications, including two compilations on social movements in the United States.

In 2007, Diana was celebrated as one of 10 winners of the first annual Women to Watch award, by Running Start. She also received the first Social Innovation Champion Award at George Mason University’s Accelerating Social Entrepreneurship (ASE) conference in 2011.  Since then, in 2012, her alma mater, Brown University, honored her with its highest distinction for graduates, the Williams Rogers Award, in recognition of exemplifying Brown’s mission to prepare alumni for lives of "usefulness and reputation."

Flavio Bassi is a Global Leadership Group Member of Ashoka and Vice President of Ashoka in Latin America. Since 2015, Flavio leads Ashoka’s Empathy and Education strategy by establishing and co-leading key partnerships with government, faculties of education, publishers, education unions and the media in Brazil, towards a movement that inspires and enables young people to feel and act as changemakers. Flavio also designed and leads the Global Excellence Team, which enables Ashoka to be home to the world’s leading entrepreneurs across all stakeholder groups. He is also a founding member of Ashoka’s Indigenous Peoples Reflection Team. Previously, Flavio served as regional director of Ashoka in Southern Africa. He started his career as a social educator working with traditional communities in Brazil, then completed degrees in Biology (BSc), Social Sciences (BA) and a Master’s in Social Anthropology. He is the founder and served as executive director of Ocareté, a citizen-sector organization active in the social-environmental field with indigenous and other traditional communities in Brazil’s Amazon and Atlantic Rainforest. In 2012, Flavio was recognized as “Europe-Africa Young Leader” by BMW Stiftung and in 2013 received the prize “Top 35 Under 35 Young Foreigners Making an Impact in Africa” awarded by Young People in International Affairs (YPIA).

I was born and has lived most of my life in São Paulo, Brazil. As a Sociologist, I have always dedicated to the themes of democracy and social innovation, with most of my projects and ideas focusing on the field of education. In this area, I co-led the creation of a couple very innovative schools in Brazil. For some years, I was co-director of Learning City School, an organization focused on local development processes guided by education. In 2015, I became a special assistant to the Minister of Education, responsible for an initiative to foster innovation in basic education in the country. I hold a PhD in Sociology, postdoctoral degree in Education.

A visionary for social entrepreneurship and a pioneer of women-led and gender-focused development initiatives for over 30 years, Iman Bibars is the Vice President of Ashoka: Innovators for the Public and the Founder and Regional Director of Ashoka Arab World. Dr. Bibars is also the Co-founder and current Chairperson of Egypt’s very first microfinance organization, the Association for the Development and Enhancement of Women (ADEW): a citizen sector organization that provides credit and legal aid for impoverished female heads of household. She is currently leading Ashoka in launching its revolutionary Women's Initiative for Social Entrepreneurship (WISE) - a movement aiming to redefine success and elevate women social innovators around the world.

Dr. Bibars holds a PhD in Development Studies from Sussex University and a BA and MA in Political Science from the American University in Cairo.

Lisa has deep values, has achieved truly major social entrepreneurial impact and is skilled both as a lawyer and manager. Here are a few highlights.

Her values have deep family roots. She grew up in the American rural south where her mother was the sole white teacher in an area black college. In law school she was never drawn like almost all her classmates to the security and riches of the fancy Atlanta law firms.

Instead, her path quickly took her to Albania supported by the American Bar Association (ABA) to fight on democracy’s front line. After that ABA year, she stayed for another four years to continue and deepen her work’s impact.

While there she saw time and time again that human rights defenders were at risk -- and that society did not defend them.

Lisa changed that during her long service at Freedom House, historically one of the world’s best known and most respected centers for researching and then ranking and publicizing how countries were performing on the main dimensions of freedom.

She changed the world’s perceptual framework by making human rights defenders visible, indeed an important category of giving that the world needs, should honor, and must protect. Such framework change is quiet, but is there anything more powerful?

Lisa’s leadership and values-based drive has transformed Freedom House. It now has offices across the world, especially in its south. Its budget has multiplied -- as has its impact.

After Freedom House, Lisa led the International Association of Women Judges, a special group of pioneers that quietly brings change for the good.

Lisa is also a skilled lawyer. A member of the D.C. and Virginia bars, she has over a decade’s experience with all dimensions of corporate governance, contracts, licenses, internal controls, affiliate agreements, branding rules -- and, as a confident member of this confident profession, much more.

Marie Ringler is leading Ashoka's work in Europe and is a member of Ashoka's Global Leadership Group.
She founded Ashoka’s Austrian office in 2011 and soon took over Regional Director for Central and Eastern Europe. In 2015 she became one of Ashoka’s Europe Directors, in 2018 she was appointed European Leader of Ashoka.
 
She holds a number of board positions including as Vice-President of the European Forum Alpbach and Specialisterne Foundation and serves on several award juries. She was a member of the Supervisory Board of the Austrian Broadcasting Agency (ORF).
She was born in Vienna, studied Sociology, Political Science and Women`s Studies at the University of Vienna, and holds a degree from ESADE Business School, Spain and an MBA from the University of St. Gallen, Switzerland.
 
In the late 90`s she helped build Public Netbase, an art institution dedicated to exploring the social implications of the internet and new technologies through the lens of art, and later became its managing director. She was elected into office as a Member of the Regional Parliament and City Council of Vienna in 2001, making her the youngest member.
During her time in office, she focused on developing policy to drive innovations in society and served on the Vienna Department of Commerce Advisory Board, initiated the city’s Open Source Software Strategy and developed a federal policy program for innovation. After two successful terms in office, she decided against a life-long career in politics and established Ashoka`s Austrian office in Vienna.
In her earlier role as Director of Ashoka in Central and Eastern Europe she led Ashoka’s relaunch efforts in Slovakia, the Czech Republic, Hungary and Israel. As Europe Leader Ringler is advancing Ashoka’s work in over 25 country offices who support more than 800 Social Entrepreneurs (“Ashoka Fellows”).
 
Ringler also serves as a 2nd Opinion Interviewer in Ashoka’s Global Fellow Selection process and has led the global selection process for more than 50 Fellows in countries such as Argentina, Colombia, Indonesia, Nigeria, Mexico, and the US. Her work has been featured extensively in international media and she is a frequent speaker at conferences and events focusing on social entrepreneurship, social innovation, cross-sectoral collaboration and policy.

Michael joined Ashoka as one of its earliest staff in 1986. During three years he helped build the early Ashoka in Mexico, Nigeria, and Pakistan. 30 years later Michael rejoined Ashoka to build an Everyone A Changemaker movement with partners in Southeast Asia. Before rejoining Ashoka, Michael was an intrapreneur at Wells Fargo in San Francisco, Hong Kong, and London. During 26 years at Wells Fargo he built and led 7 new businesses in small business credit, and in intellectual property and patenting.

As a professional photographer/artist and writer, Nana observed Japan start failing after its economic prosperous period roughly between 1982 and 1993. The observation made her believe Japan was missing a role-model for youth and triggered her to search social change-makers and recount their stories to Japanese audience as a new role model. Along the journey of hunting and interviewing over 150 social innovators between 2000 and 2006 she noticed some of the interviewees were recognized as “Ashoka Fellows”. She thought introducing the idea of Systems change to Japanese audience is crucial and knocked on the door of Ashoka and led to create Japan office.

Nani has been working on women empowerment at the grass root level since 1987, starting as a field worker of The Center for Women’s Resources Development (PPSW) – a woman NGO in Indonesia. In PPSW she gained experience as a grass root women organizer, community trainer, facilitator, project coordinator and program manager. She was appointed as the director of PPSW in 1995 and served there until 2000.

In 2001, Nani founded PEKKA (Women Headed Family Empowerment) focusing on empowering female heads of family, the poorest of the poor in Indonesia. PEKKA offered exceptional support to women who head of families—to recognize themselves as capable of making important contributions to society, helping them to create new roles for themselves, individually and collectively.

Nani, leading over 60 PEKKA team members, has accompanied over 60,000 women-headed families in over 3,000 self-help groups across 1,300 villages in 20 of 34 provinces in Indonesia fight for their education, economic, legal, social and political rights.

PEKKA built over 40 community learning centers in different part of Indonesia that serve entire villages, providing sites for adult literacy, vocational training, and early childhood education for grassroots women. Their legal empowerment programs developed paralegal skills to assist village women bring family law and legal identity cases to court and civil registry officials.

PEKKA has also worked assiduously to change discriminatory laws and policies. They drew attention to the status and role of women heads of families as key drivers in efforts to eradicate poverty. PEKKA successfully pressed the government to expand its judicial system to rural areas and fought to obtain legal status for women-headed families, ultimately achieving this goal in 2006.

PEKKA has received several International awards including Best Practice Award Ministry of Finance Japan 2009 and ASEAN Leadership Award 2013.

Alongside her work through PEKKA, Nani co-founded several national networks and NGOs which promote women’s rights and advancing policy reforms for the sector especially in the face of its marginalization in public policy and funding. Among them are ASPPUK (Association of NGOs Working with Women Entrepreneurs and Micro Businesses) on economic justice for women, and ALIMAT; a network of activists and Islamic scholars for a just system for families in the Muslim context.

Njideka Françoise Harry is working with leading entrepreneurs who have made a big, positive impact in their industry and who want to make an equally transformative impact on society. An experienced entrepreneur-for-good and philanthropy advisor, Njideka is a Leadership Group Member and Vice President, Strategic Entrepreneurship Relationships, where she oversees "Entrepreneur-to-Entrepreneur," an exclusive network of high-impact entrepreneurs who partner with Ashoka's most powerful social entrepreneurs to change the way people harness their social, political, financial and intellectual capital to create lasting systemic change.

A serial social entrepreneur and an Ashoka Fellow, Njideka started her first social business, a neighborhood bakery, at the age of 12.  She experienced first-hand how such enterprises sit at the inflection point of market and social norms – as a transactional business requiring an understanding of non-market values that regulated operational behavior.  Most Ashoka Fellows have their first changemaking experience in their early teens.  Those who signaled that they started something noteworthy in their teens are four times more likely to be entrepreneurs.
 
At 25, Njideka founded Youth for Technology Foundation (YTF), an education technology citizen sector organization. YTF leverages appropriate technology for education and entrepreneurship, replacing economic disparity with economic opportunity. Since founding YTF, Njideka has built several award-winning initiatives that leverage technology for good, while bridging digital and gender inequities.
 
A Fellow at the World Economic Forum, Njideka serves on the Civil Society and Future of Work committee. She has served on the Kellogg Advisory Council and is currently in the Pete Henderson Society of Northwestern University. She is an advisory board member of the Alliance for Affordable Internet, an expert contributor for the prosperity index at the Legatum Institute in the UK and is on the Global Advisory Council of TWIN Tech. Prior to working in social impact and philanthropy, Njideka began her corporate career at GE Capital and Microsoft traveling and working out of offices in Europe, Africa, and North America.

Njideka earned her Bachelor of Business Administration from the University of Massachusetts, Amherst, and a Master of Business Administration from Northwestern University Kellogg School of Management.  She completed post-graduate studies at Stanford University, where she was a Reuters Digital Vision Fellow.

Okey is a global Leadership Group Member of Ashoka and currently leads the Youth Years strategy in Africa. In the last year, he has been establishing and co-leading strategic partnerships with government, faculties of education, publishers, education unions and the media, towards a movement that creates an enabling environment for young people to feel, act, and thrive as changemakers. Okey has been a pioneer in justice reform, security reform, and social transformation at the national and regional levels in West Africa for 15 years. Previously, he led the ECOWAS Commission reform program in improving transparency, accountability, effectiveness, and people participation in security decision making. He has supported regional policy formulation, parliamentary capacity building, knowledge sharing, and forging multilateral and multisector partnerships. He is the Founder of EduTrust Foundation and Ofala Publishers Ltd. A lawyer and Master’s degree holder in Conflict, Security and Development from King’s College London, Okey loves to write, to teach, and to capture beautiful moments of joy and wonder through poetry and travel photography.

Shruti leads Ashoka in South Asia. She started at Ashoka building impact strategy and went on to lead the Youth Years program in South Asia. In her current role as the leader of the region, she leads the overall team and strategy responsible to search, select and build a community of Ashoka fellows (Social Entrepreneurs), Ashoka Young Changemakers (Teen Changemakers) & institutional partners to help society re-imagine a framework where everyone is a changemaker. Prior to this, Shruti has helped various social enterprises and impact organisations in measuring and communicating their impact. In her previous role, Shruti has worked with one of India's largest Impact Investment Fund and later with Social Venture Partners, an international venture philanthropy organization.

Shruti is an invited speaker on women leadership, social entrepreneurship, systems change at various national and international forums. She was recognised by the Femina Magazine in the campaign #FAB50 as one of the 50 influential women leaders from across India in the year 2020.

Shruti has a Ph.D. in Media Studies from Florida State University, and also holds a Master’s degree in Mass Communication from Nanyang Technological University, Singapore.

Shruti can be reached at [email protected]

Tope is a social entrepreneur with 20 years of senior financial leadership experience, and has credentials as CPA, Institute of Chartered Accountants of Nigeria. She finished 2nd best student in the professional exam level 1 (May 1999). She has served in multiple financial leadership roles, including with the American Federation of Teachers, a developing US jujitsu partner. She has Big 5 accounting experience starting with 5 years as an auditor for Arthur Anderson and later for four years with PWC, Price Waterhouse Coopers.

Tope founded several social impact ventures such as She-EO, a global network of women of African descent. She also co-founded a regenerative farming company Dodo Farms, as a voice of racial equity in ag, land and food access. At 25, she launched United for Kids Foundation (UKF) Inc., an organization, which has been serving children from low-income families in Nigeria since 2002.

At 10 years old, she represented her school in a Nigeria state-wide debate competition, where she discovered her powerful voice. She started a musical group at 13 and produced artists who were paid from “admission fees” for the shows she produced out of her parents’ garage.

When she was 19 years old and in college, she read about a young man who lived hundreds of miles away from Lagos (her home state). He had been playing football when he got seriously injured. He needed to raise a significant amount of money for his treatment. She decided to use her “voice” to do what the world now calls “crowd-funding.” There were no mobile phones or internet at the time, so she cut out the page with his photo from the magazine, and she recruited one of her best friends to go door knocking with her. They knocked on hundreds of doors on the large University of Lagos campus. They got bits and pieces, and within days they had raised an unbelievable amount of funds. She recalls taking the cash to the magazine editor’s office, and everyone stared at her in disbelief.

Her childhood experiences led her to build United for Kids Foundation up from a group of 10 friends to a network of almost 500 donors with annual receipts of over Two Hundred and Fifty Million Naira. She handed over the reins of UKF to a group of young changemakers on August 1st, and she is already seeing signs that they will take the organization to places even she never imagined.

United for Kids, u4kids.org, is beyond direct service. It’s a whole child approach with impact on parents, health, mentorship, financial inclusion, and foster care. They created a new free library system supporting 10 schools, and due to youth empowerment purpose, improved reading levels 300%, increased student participation, and provided scholarships to children to attend prestigious institutions. In response to the COVID pandemic, they pivoted to building a mobile library system, ensuring reading remained accessible for every child. Moreover, they have a program to support mothers to achieve financial independence, Mummy and me, with 8 microbusinesses generated. They also have a Donors Choose-like initiative for school supplies impacting 50,000 children.

Vipin leads the Your Kids and EACH Learning work at Ashoka. He loves creating spaces and experiences to help everyone discover their power to be changemakers.

Vipin enables individuals and institutions in co-creating new pathways to adapt and thrive in times of rapid change. He does this by designing and facilitating transformational journeys that cultivate innovation, agency, and empathy. He has led transformation-based work for groups and institutions in Asia, Europe, Africa, and the United States. He specializes in building a create a culture of trust, agency and belonging in teams.

Vipin is an experienced facilitator, coach, design consultant, public speaker and a serial entrepreneur. He is the founder of the Changemaker Communities initiative, which weaves together influential institutions in cities to support the next generation of changemakers. He is constantly creating new programs that help people connect and bring their whole selves to their work and discover their power to become changemakers – eg:  Youth Venture, the Wellbeing Project, the Spiritual Changemakers work, EACH leadership gatherings, Your Kids/Your Family, and the Togetherness Practice. 

Vipin has a master’s degree in Social Work, is an Integral Life Coach, and is a Kundalini yoga and meditation teacher. He lives in Falls Church, VA with his wife, Angie Thurston, and son.

Yashveer leads the “Ashoka Young Changemakers” program at Ashoka. Yashveer launched Ashoka Young Changemakers program in the year 2018 to identify, select and build a global community of Teen Changemakers. Prior to this, he founded a youth non-profit to address talent inequity in the development sector and influence youth culture in India by inspiring and educating university students to pursue social innovation and entrepreneurship. Yashveer has co-authored a book #ChangeStartsYoung featuring inspiring stories of young changemakers from across India.

For his work, Yashveer has been recognized in "Forbes 30 Under 30 Asia" list in the year 2016. He was also awarded Youth Action Net 2012 Fellowship – as 1 of the 20 young social entrepreneurs representing 16 different countries by International Youth Foundation.
 
Yashveer earned his MBA at University of Oxford, where he was the only MBA student to receive Vice-Chancellor Social Impact Award 2014 for his initiatives as Co-Chair Social Impact, Oxford Business Network (OBN). As the President of Student’s Union BITS Pilani 2006-07, Yashveer co-founded the University VISION 2020 Plan.

Bill Drayton is a social entrepreneur with a long record of founding organizations, bringing big change, and service. As a student, he founded organizations ranging from Yale Legislative Services to Harvard’s Ashoka Table, an inter-disciplinary weekly forum on how society truly works. After graduation from Harvard, he received an M.A. from Balliol College in Oxford University and his J.D. from Yale Law School. Over ten years at McKinsey & Company, he brought significant structural changes to policy and organizations. He also taught at Stanford Law School and Harvard’s Kennedy School of Government. He served in the Carter Administration White House and as Assistant Administrator at the Environmental Protection Agency, where he launched emissions trading and many other lasting reforms. He launched Ashoka in 1981. He used the stipend he received when elected a MacArthur Fellow in 1984 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. He has honorary doctorates from Yale, NYU, and others; and he is a Fellow of Balliol College, Oxford. He is a member of the American Philosophical Society, the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, and the Council on Foreign Relations. 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; and the National Academy of Public Administration National Public Service Award.
 
Bill is an avid backpacker. He especially loves long, off trail, above the tree line immersions.
 
As Ashoka’s CEO, Bill brings history-based vision and a deep grasp of how things work to help Ashoka keep learning and keep changing big time so that it and its community can make the truly big contributions it can and must. He has overall management responsibility and, as one of three members of the Leadership Team, has special responsibilities for Purpose Teams (e.g. Young People, Climate), “Jujitsu” Partners and Metro Areas, Frame Change/Communications, organizational evolution, and Search/Talent.
 
(photo: (c) Yusuke Abe)

After graduating at the top of her class at the University of Delhi, Sushmita served as a Sub-Editor, Research Director and Executive Director of Maneka Gandhi’s national Indian news magazine Surya from 1979 to 1982. She went on to pursue a successful career in freelance journalism, working with every major mainstream publication in India, including The Times of India, The Hindustan Times, Business Standard, Sunday Magazine, and others. After more than two decades with Ashoka, Sushmita has moved on to an honorary role of Leadership Team Emerita. Following her career in journalism, Sushmita served as Ashoka’s country representative for India from 1989 – 1997. During that time, she helped Ashoka launch its new programs in Latin America and directed its European efforts. In 1992, Sushmita founded Changemakers, which she evolved from a magazine for social entrepreneurship to an online platform for open source problem solving. That service now offers instruction in changemaking for social change organizations and ordinary citizens, ultimately aspiring to form a self-energizing community of changemakers. Subsequently, she became Ashoka’s International Vice President and the Executive Director of Changemakers. She later served as President of Ashoka from 2000 to 2005. Sushmita is also a board member of several non-profit organizations around the world, and a council member at the American India Foundation. Her leadership has driven Ashoka’s growth and its support programs for the global citizen sector. She has a special interest in how social entrepreneurs use online platforms to drive social change on a global scale and is currently developing ways of gathering and sharing knowledge in this area.

Mary Gordon is recognized internationally as an award-winning social entrepreneur, educator, author, child advocate and parenting expert who has created programs informed by the power of empathy. Ms Gordon created the aggression/bullying prevention program Roots of Empathy in 1996 and named her not-for-profit organization after the program. Roots of Empathy now offers programs in every province of Canada, New Zealand, the USA, the Republic of Ireland, Northern Ireland, England, Wales, Scotland, Switzerland and Germany. In 2005, Ms Gordon created the Seeds of Empathy program, a social emotional and early literacy program for 3 to 5 year olds in child care. She is a Member of the Order of Canada, the Order of Newfoundland, an Ashoka Fellow (2002) and Ashoka Globalizer (2011). Ms. Gordon was awarded the Commemorative Medal for the Golden Jubilee of Her Majesty Queen Elizabeth II in Education (2002) and the Queen Elizabeth II Diamond Jubilee Medal for significant achievement and remarkable Service (2012). Ms Gordon is also the founder of Canada's first and largest school-based Parenting and Family Literacy Centres, which she initiated in 1981. They have become public policy and have been used as a best practice model internationally. Ms Gordon speaks and consults to governments, educational organizations, and public institutions. In the late 90’s The Nelson Mandela Children's Foundation brought Ms Gordon to South Africa to share her parenting expertise. Ms Gordon has also presented to the World Health Organization, Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development, and the United Nations, among others. Ms Gordon is the recipient of several prestigious awards recognizing her contribution to innovation in education. In 2009 she received the Public Education Advocacy Award from the Canadian Teachers' Federation. As a leading expert on empathy, Ms Gordon has had several dialogues with His Holiness the Dalai Lama. The Dalai Lama has expressed that programs like Roots of Empathy will build world peace. Ms Gordon has been featured in several documentary films and scholarly books. She frequently appears in popular print and electronic media. Her book Roots of Empathy, Changing the World Child by Child is a Canadian best seller and available in several languages.

Roger has had an extensive career as a journalist, manager, CEO and board member. His business careers have spanned local and national newspaper publishing, magazine publishing, broadcasting, and property ownership and development. Roger’s journalism career began in 1951 as a freelance writer. He worked full-time for The Times and in 1967 moved to The Observer. He served there as of Director, then as Chief Executive from 1984 to 1987. Roger also served as director at London Weekend Television and as the Deputy Chairman of Capital Radio. After his studies at Oxford and Harvard, Roger began his social service. He 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 center. From 1990 to 2002, he served as Chairman of Toynbee Hall, which serves a heavily Bangladeshi immigrant community. Roger also has also served as Chairman of Asylum Aid (helping asylum seekers in the UK), a council member of Goldsmiths College (a university in South London), and a trustee of many diverse charities. He is currently the Chairman of the Royal Academy of Dance (RAD), an influential dance education and training organizations that operates in 80 countries.

As a student at the prestigious Bandung Institute of Technology, Fred was one of the founders of the nonparty student movement that played an important a role in ending the Sukarno era. After earning a Ph.D. in geology in Holland, for twelve years he 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 was one of the very early Ashoka Fellows. Fred chairs Ashoka Indonesia and has played many roles in Ashoka -- from selection panel chair to member of the board Executive Committee.