Ashoka
Claire Fallender
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.
Leading Young: A New Framework for Navigating a World of Change
If your teenager doesn’t know how to add two numbers together, you would know there is a problem. Math, like reading, is generally understood to be an essential skill for functioning in the world. But what if your teenager doesn’t know how to read others’ emotions and act on that interpretation? What if your teenager couldn’t collaborate with others? What if your teenager doesn’t know how to handle uncertainty and problem solve in changing situations? What is the new framework to navigate and thrive in this new reality? While math and reading are still core skills, there are four competencies that become critical. First, there is a premium on those who have mastered cognitive empathy and are in tune with the people around them and can adjust their own behavior and actions to respond accordingly. Second, with this empathy comes the ability to work in teams where everyone contributes meaningfully and productively. In this kind of teamwork, a new kind of leadership — the third competency — is valued, one where strong leaders empower all to lead rather than command others to follow. These three skills of empathy, teamwork, and multidimensional leadership lead to the fourth critical skill of changemaking which is creating one’s own solution to a problem for the good of all.
Ashoka insight
In today’s world, change is the new norm. This is the first in a series of stories that highlight what it looks like when young people know they are powerful by creating and leading something for the good of all, and why we should make leading young the new norm for growing up.