Leading Social Entrepreneurs 2018

Ashoka builds, connects and amplifies a global community that is leading the everyone a changemaker movement. We now live in an everything-changing world. This fact requires everyone to be able to contribute to and adapt to change, i.e., to be a changemaker, to be able to participate in and contribute. Based on the insights from our work with more than 3,500 of the world’s leading social entrepreneurs in more than 93 countries, Ashoka has an experience-based framework of empathy, teamwork, new leadership and changemaking that is the new foundation for living and working together.

Ashoka uses a rigorous, highly-refined, five-step process to identify the most important emerging social change ideas and the entrepreneurs behind them who, together, will redefine their fields, be it human rights or the environment or any other area of human need.

Once Fellows are elected, Ashoka makes sure that they have the supports and full freedom—including the ability to work full-time—they need to launch their visions and succeed. This includes providing a launch stipend to the degree it is needed for an average of three years, organizing a wide range of high-leverage supports, and—most importantly—engaging them in a local-to-global collaborative fellowship of their peers.

By continuing to develop our extensive network of Fellows, Ashoka works to share the wisdom of these leading social entrepreneurs with a global audience. Our Fellows’ work exposes the world’s most urgent and critical needs. Ashoka looks for patterns in these fields, investigates them to gain new insights, and then mobilizes social entrepreneurs to collaborate and expand in the needed areas.

Full versions of the stories below appear in the 2018 edition of "Leading Social Entrepreneurs" (LSE) which features a selection of just a few of the Ashoka Fellows recently brought into the largest global network of social entrepreneurs. The LSE presents some of the newest innovations by leading social entrepreneurs whose ideas are changing the way things are done all over the world.

We invite you to support Ashoka by sharing these stories and helping us continue to find and invest in the next generation of systems-changing social entrepreneurs.