Ashoka Romania has arrived at its fourth yearly finish line, a year that challenged us, brought us together, but also offered new opportunities to connect and innovate under a lot of uncertainty. This report aims to be a reflection on how we coped during a year of unforeseen events, a global pandemic, as well as how we managed to inspire and support our ecosystem. It is a narration of our activities and key outcomes, an evaluation and presentation of our strategy as well as our overall impact of Ashoka Romania as we grow our organisation.  

The road to changemaking Romania 

For the next years, taking into consideration the continuous feedback loops and actively listening to our stakeholders, we tweak and improve our strategy to best accelerate the ecosystem of social change. 

1. Social entrepreneurship – we wish to build the identity of the social entrepreneur to offer access to resources that makes the social entrepreneur an identity the people can easily relate to. Identifying and supporting Ashoka Fellows is a crucial element for this strategic pillar 

2. Systems architecture – This pillar aims to contribute to enriching the ecosystem for an environment more prone to social innovation 

• Social finance - Develop the capacity of the Romanian social finance market and create the conditions for launching at least one financial instrument for Romanian social enterprises. 

• Social Business Intelligence - Create a Social Business Intelligence Hub that enables Ashoka to better centralise and increase data transparency in achieving more reliable intelligence with regards to social issues. 

• Involvement in decision making - Increase sector’s participation in decision making processes and design better collaboration for a better society and build on the efforts on portraying the social entrepreneur identity 

4. Education - e aim to explore and map potential interventions that Ashoka Romania could initiate within the Romanian educational ecosystem in order to ensure that a new generation of young changemakers is equipped with the skills necessary to navigate change for the good of Romanian communities and the society overall. 

5. Impact communities - Knowledge and impact transfer activities from the Ashoka global network to the ecosystem of social entrepreneurs and other architects of transformation in Romania, in order to increase the ability of local organizations to build programs and projects together. We wish to bring as many solutions from the network to connect Ashoka Fellows with the local organisations and adapt innovative solutions to the local context. 

Internal  

We aim to have a strong, open, and healthy workplace based on a framework of empathy, teamwork, new leadership, changemaking and organizing in an open and fluid team- of-teams. We intend to introduce new ways of organizational development and focus on immediately consolidating and increasing efficiency in our operations and administration activities, while strengthening our fundraising capacity. Moreover, bridging teams-of- teams between Ashoka and Romanian Fellows and their organizations will increase the level of cooperation and impact in activities.  

Perspectives and impact study  

It is very relevant to us to understand how our work influences our stakeholders. We ensure that we offer the space for the ones we work with to support us in how to improve and reach a bigger impact together.  

Like every year, we ask our stakeholders to give us feedback. Apart from the multitude of 1 on 1 conversations we had throughout the year, we also sent out a targeted online survey sent out to our partners, collaborators, and the changemakers community to receive their input and insights. We analysed the 22 responses and present them in the report, together with the results of the Global Ashoka Fellows Survey, where we lay out the outcome of the 6 Romanian Fellows responses.