Nadine H Freeman
Nadine Freeman is Ashoka’s Globalizer Co-Director. She has over 20 years of experience working closely with social entrepreneurs. Through the Globalizer she has helped build and hone an innovative process that places leading social and business entrepreneurs together to develop effective strategies to spread social impact and create long term systemic change.
Before joining the Globalizer team she led Ashoka’s Andean Region and Latin America Fellowship programs, contributing to establishment of social entrepreneurship as a critical field in the region.
Prior to joining Ashoka, Nadine was Director of Programs at South North Development Initiative where she helped to create some of the first impact investment funds in southern Africa and Latin America.
Nadine, a fomer teacher, is a Phi Beta Kappa graduate of Washington University with a Bachelor’s degree in Political Science and Spanish and an M.B.A. from the Anderson School at U.C.L.A
Mark Cheng
Mark is a member of the Leadership Group at Ashoka, based in Hong Kong. Mark started with Ashoka in 2007 as a Senior Advisor on Social Finance, based in London. He became UK Director in 2011, and European Director in 2014. Mark led the European Diamond from 2014-19, before moving to Hong Kong where he has launched the Hong Kong Chapter for Ashoka. Prior to joining Ashoka, Mark founded Chelwood Capital, a global social investment advisory firm, which he continues to actively manage. Mark is recognized as a pioneer in impact investment, and over the past decade has helped raise over $250mn for social causes in areas including micro-finance, clean energy, healthcare, education and conservation. He is a Director of Emerge Education, a leading incubator for ed/tech start-ups, and a founding member of the ClearlySo Angels network, the UK’s first angel investment network for impact investors.
Reem Rahman
Reem Rahman is passionate about co-creating open-source tools for learning and designs products to increase collaboration, impact, and sustainability. These have included: changemaking.net - tools for creating deep change, the Systems Change Crash Course, and a Feedback Dashboard for peer to peer learning by social entrepreneurs. At Ashoka, Reem was a director of knowledge and impact evaluation, and directed communications and public relations for a civil rights group in Chicago. Reem graduated with honors from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign with a Bachelor’s in Cognitive Neuroscience and received a Master’s in Management Research from the University of Oxford focusing on strategy, innovation, and entrepreneurship. She resides in the Bay Area.
Moving Beyond Business for Good: How Markets Can Transform Systems for Good
Can you use a business model to not just to do well, but also to radically change a system? At Ashoka, the global network for the world’s leading social entrepreneurs, we’ve met hundreds of groundbreaking entrepreneurs around the world who have taught us that social businesses can be a powerful pathway to social change.
Entrepreneurs we’ve learned from so far include the first free provider of Massive Open Online Courses (MOOCs) that’s registered over 12 million students, and an Indian eye care company that has provided affordable cataract surgery for over 32 million low-income patients, the majority of whom were treated for free or at minimal cost.
The fact that there are successful models for market-based social impact, however, does not mean that it’s easy.
Why These Case Studies?
In conferences and accelerators held around the world, social entrepreneurs have repeatedly asked us: what are practical examples they can learn from? They want examples of how to use business models to reach greater scale of social impact, or to effect systems change, in a way that doesn’t compromise their original social mission.
To address this challenge, we selected five social entrepreneurs from diverse sectors that serve as examples of market-based models of systems-change.
What the Case Studies Cover
The case studies share the founding story of each initiative, and highlights key decisions, lessons learned, and pitfalls avoided in order to reach impact. An accompanying executive summary covers why social entrepreneurs prefer a market-based solution over one that is funded for free, as well as five types of failures that market-based innovations seek to address.
Join us in exploring the journeys of five such social entrepreneurs and consider ways you can shake up your approach to impact through two critical levers: leveraging market-based solutions and opening up.
View the Executive Summary here:
View Case Studies here:
- Alison - First Free Massive Open Online Learning Platform
Designed to Meet Modern Job Needs Serving 12 million registered learners and 2 million graduates read case study
- Aravind Eye Hospital - Eliminating Needless Blindness
Treating over 4.1 million outpatient visits a year; replicated by over 320 hospitals in 27 countries read case study
- FrontlineSMS - Saving Lives through SMS
Downloaded over 200K times by citizen organizations in over 190 countries read case study
- Toast Ale - Brewing with Fresh Surplus Bread. Catalyzing a Movement Against Food Waste
Model adopted by international brewers in Brazil, South Africa, and Ireland read case study
- VillageTelco - Making telecommunications accessible to the last mile
Over 7,500 devices sold to provide low-cost wireless access points read case study
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
Case Studies authored by Reem Rahman, Olga Shirobokova, Odin Mühlenbein, Nadine Freeman, and Mark Cheng, Ashoka Globalizer
Made possible by the support of SDC-Hystra and interviews by Ken Banks (FrontlineSMS), Michael Feerick (Alison), Steve Song (VillageTelco), Dr Devendra (Aravind Eye Care Systems), and Tristram Stuart (Toast Ale)
Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 International License.