Bill Drayton: "Changemaking is the new literacy"

This article originally appeared on IDR India

"When you talk to anyone who has the gift of being able to give, they have a good life and they’re helping other people have that gift. When you imagine what the world is going to be like when everyone is a giver, and everyone is helping others be ever more powerful givers, that is a completely coherent world. And it’s very close to the traditional South Asian view on the purpose of life—it is about being one with the universe. That’s the highest level of empathy.

Development has always been about how to help people be powerful. So, if we’re all helping one another be the best possible changemakers, that is, givers, that’s a pretty good world. Everyone has the ability. Everyone has that right. We just have to link arms and make sure that everyone does get that right. Because otherwise we’re going to suffer a rapidly deepening ‘new inequality’. That means society’s divisions will get worse. As will our ability to deal with COVID-19, climate change, income inequality, and so on.

Changemaking is the new literacy. It is the new reality."

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Ashoka insight

"The second construct is what [Ashoka is] working on now: Everyone a changemaker. You and I want everyone to have a good life. But one cannot have a good life if one cannot give. And to be able to give, one must be able to play in today’s everything-changing and everything-connected new (and only) reality. So, the biggest change is that we understand that consciously.

Very few people are going to change society’s big patterns. The difference between a social entrepreneur and a changemaker is that an entrepreneur changes major systems and/or frameworks of thinking on a large scale. But everybody can and has to be a changemaker. Saying that out loud and actually working on it is the second big change for us at Ashoka. The Ashoka Fellows remain critical to this new thinking and this work."