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Another World is Possible

The Citizen Sector Transformed

Nothing More Powerful

Duration: 47 minutes and 28 seconds

Country: United States

Language: English

License: dotSUB Participatory-Commercial

Genre: Instructional

Producer: Ashoka

Views: 870 (34 embedded)

Posted by: fsosa on Oct 14, 2006

What is a social entrepreneur? The creator of the field of social entrepreneurship describes how social entrepreneurs work, how together they are transforming how almost everything works in society. He also illuminates how everyone can contribute in many different ways.

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Nothing More Powerful
Ashoka: Innovators for the Public is a global organization that searches out and supports “social entrepreneurs”
men and women who use entrepreneurial vision and skills to attack and solve social problems.
We are only talking about people who cannot come to rest
until their vision has become a new pattern society-wide
Ashoka is a community over 1700 social entrepreneurs, plus 400 staff members
partners and volunteers in more than sixty countries, who work together to create widespread, long-lasting change
Bill Drayton is its founder.
You got to have a vision to change the field.
You got to be equally concerned with the how tos?
How do you get from here to there?
In this program, Bill Drayton describes how social entrepreneurs think and act
How the burgeoning field of social entrepreneurship is making a profound impact on millions of lives.
and how everyone can contribute to its growth.
What is a social entrepreneur?
We all know what a business entrepreneur is.
Social entrepreneurs are the same personality type just applied in a different set of areas.
They are people who see over the horizon; what the next big step for field is, but they don’t stop there.
They take that insight, and they make it a reality; then they spread it until it becomes the pattern all across society.
the same thing is true of business
it’s Florence Nightingale vs. Andrew Carnegie
Both of them created major structural change
and at least to my money, Florence Nightingale was the one that we remember today more.
Who had the bigger impact.
She didn’t make millions, she just created the nursing profession,
the modern housing codes, the modern sense of sanitation, the first sanitary revolution.
An entrepreneur sees the next step, they organize, they build an organization,
they get all the other organizations to do it.
Maria Montessori for young people.
She said the way we're teaching young people is very harmful, disrespectful, there's a better way of doing it.
And she had this very, very intelligent clever idea that she would have a set of schools;
any school that met her standards would be a Montessori school.
So all across the world you have good solid examples of what this means.
And other people of course can borrow whenever they want, and they have.
So her impact is much larger than the limited number of Montessori schools.
It's a classic entrepreneur's mind at work.
Why are we talking about all this?
Ultimately it’s because the people in the world, and the planet itself,
has really big problems that we are behind in solving.
The bottom 60% of the world’s people have only a fraction more than 5% of the world’s income
This is just not even remotely sustainable, aside from the fact that it’s not fair.
We can’t solve that problem with the existing institutions and arrangements.
The problems are only gonna get worse, unless we have a quantum jump in the problem solvers.
And especially the major pattern change problem solvers, the entrepreneurs.
Leading Social Entrepreneurs
The entrepreneur and the idea are so closely tied together,
that the life cycle of an idea and the entrepreneur is very hard to separate.
You know, of course an entrepreneur can live beyond the launch of an idea.
Similarly the idea can live long after the entrepreneur.
Jean Monet I think was the second most brilliant person of the last century.
He was responsible for unification of Europe
his basic dynamic in Europe, idea, institution, stronger idea, next institution,
more momentum and credibility for the idea.
He died in 1979 and that dynamic is still going on.
That’s his core genius, in my mind, is setting that dynamic in place.
So the person and the idea are married,
but especially once you get beyond this stage of defining and figuring out how to make it work at scale,
then they can have independent lives.
One of the Ashoka fellows in Brazil, saw that half the people in a relatively rich state, Rio Grande do Sul
had no electricity in the rural areas.
He wanted to change that; so he developed a new approach to a rural electrification that cut the cost 70 to 90%.
And then he went to work to change it,
and he had to talk to the engineering firms and get financing structured and so on,
that’s changed the lives of way over a million people and spreading.
He is now focusing on how do you get solar energy into the hands of people who are not wealthy.
And there are hundreds of millions of people across the world who can benefit from that.
J.B. Schramm, right here in Washington is one, was one of the first U.S. Ashoka fellows.
He has a very simple idea, but one that will have a big impact.
He went to college, most of his classmates didn’t.
That bothered him because he knew that they were just as smart and he thought this was wrong, a big waste,
He had parents who went to college, they didn't.
This is not what should make the difference
Classic for an entrepreneur, he kept that idea in his mind.
He kept looking at it, feeling his way to an answer.
He had to find an answer that would be low cost and simple. And a big win for all the actors.
Classic entrepreneur criteria
He set up something called College Summit.
The way it works, is he takes a peer group highschool students from families that do not have college backgrounds;
and they spend four or five days at a College Summit on a nearby campus.
College is demystified
They are challenged from the first moment to think about their lives,
to articulate the strengths of what they've done, to write the essays for getting into college.
They are talking with people who are role models.
He then works with the home room teachers
Now, this works. 80% of the kids go, 80% graduate
Now, this is a very simple idea, but it has to be implemented.
He’s now at the stage of moving it out across the country.
That’s a social entrepreneur at work
The Qualities of a Social Entrepreneur
What is the core quality that defines the entrepreneur, business or social?
And I think it’s deep personality drive.
The entrepreneur simply cannot come to rest,
can’t be a happy person until they have seen their vision become the new pattern society-wide.
The scholar, the artist expresses an idea, and that’s satisfying,
the professional you serve a client, you come to rest,
the manager your organization,
none of that really even begins to interest the entrepreneur.
There is no correlation with brilliance here
There’s no correlation of conceptual ability. None.
London School of Economic study couldn’t find any of that but a persistence, faith that you can do this.
Once you understand that that’s the core drive then everything else follows.
You’ve gotta have a vision that’s going to change the field.
That means you have to know the field really well; all its dimensions to know what the historic next step is.
You’ve gotta be equally concerned with the how-to’s?
How do you get from here to there?
How do you make the pieces fit together?
How do you overcome this problem or that challenge?
or how do you seize this opportunity?
It’s an every day, year after year process of idea and reality iterating back and forth.
With a person’s antennae out there to pick up any movement in the environment,
maybe this isn’t quite working, well what do I have to change now?
Entrepreneurship is almost always a life-long affair
It’s not a short business.
You can see people starting when they’re young;
they know that they’re reaching;
unconsciously, they know that they’re trying to find where they can make a big impact in life
– they’re looking for the opportunity.
For years, they’re learning, they’re mastering their field,
and they’re doing it in a way that gives them the ability to think creatively;
to move things around.
They’re also giving themselves the skills of how do you cause major structural social change.
This is a very complicated business.
It’s unforgiving; if you leave one element of the equation out it won’t work. That’s the test.
Will it work? Have you changed the whole field?
Then you’ve gotta go through this long process;
when the idea is ripe, you’ve gotta demonstrate it, refine it, very intense local activity.
You’ve got a whole new task after that.
How are you gonna spread it, how are you gonna market it?
To use business language.
Then, when you get traction there, all of a sudden you’ve gotta run a big organization that’s growing fast.
Our whole field is not very good at management, so how do you do that?
You’ve got a big movement out beyond that.
This is a, it’s a life-long challenge.
Social and Business Entrepreneurs
We have found that the group of people in the world that understands social entrepreneurs.
like that, other than social entrepreneurs, are business entrepreneurs.
You’re dealing with the same sort of life history.
And every study I’ve seen shows if you’re a pattern change entrepreneur, business or social,
it’s the pattern change that you’re after.
Social entrepreneurs are very interested in how this other half of society works
and what sort of deals they can work out that will leverage their work.
And the same thing vice a versa.
As a result, Ashoka has learned from this phenomenon
and we have been for over a decade now building something we call the entrepreneur-two entrepreneur
or entrepreneur squared program, the E2 program.
It is designed to have the best social entrepreneurs,
and by invitation the best business entrepreneurs
who typically want to be as effective in the social arena as in business come together.
And our challenge is how do we do that in an intelligent systematic way
that brings much more value to each interaction than the time cost involved.
It’s an incredibly powerful program.
A New Language
When Ashoka got started there wasn’t even a word to describe what a social entrepreneur was.
How do you explain it? My Godmother never could explain what I did. Problem for her and for me.
It is so satisfying. You talk to someone,
I remember that I was talking to Anton Sujarwau, he’s an incredible entrepreneur in Indonesia.
And he is one of the first people we talked to,
I remember sitting in his office and at the end of the conversation he looked at me
in that sort of very gentle way of his,
and he said: You know, I never knew what I was before.
This is really helpful, I am a social entrepreneur.
This is a new language, a new way of looking at the world,
a new category, a new career possibility, a new way of self-definition, it’s part of the liberation process.
You know if there’s a category then it must be o.k.
And maybe all the stuffed shirts are wrong, maybe I can do this
so I you know, I just take great satisfaction to see that word,
the idea of the concept of a field
and now increasingly even some understanding of the whole historical transformation beginning to take root and spread.
Social Entrepreneurship and Democracy
Social entrepreneurship and democracy are highly, mutually supportive.
What is a leading social entrepreneur?
Some who is a citizen
Who organizes a group of other citizens, who care about a service,
Who care about a change that needs to be made
and they make it happen
now that is citizens exercising power.
That is the roots of democracy, that is the cutting edge of democracy,
those are the role models that encourage everyone else
to care, and organize, and take initiative and hold all the other people accountable
the democratic revolution is very centrally led by the social entrepreneurs,
But the social entrepreneurs also depend on democracy.
There’s a reason that Burma doesn’t encourage social entrepreneurship.
There’s a reason that in China, it has lagged business entrepreneurship.
Its very interesting when you watch what happens when the dictatorial regimes,
whether it’s the Communists in central Europe or the Generals in Latin America,
left or right, when they clear away,
within five years you have this extraordinary wave of social entrepreneurship
you know one step after another,
one idea after another eating away at the problems,
building the new alternatives and each step in building a new alternative is building an institution,
it’s building the momentum and the confidence and the institutionalization of decentralized power.
Women's and Human Rights
The women’s movement is one of the areas where the citizen sector has taken off brilliantly.
The women’s area and human rights area are two of the most creative.
And as the field has moved from local, when we were just getting started,
to national and now out at the global level, you can see the difference.
The human rights groups have gotten together
and two thousand groups across the world came together and they got the international criminal court.
In a small way that makes you and me and every other human being on this planet
a citizen of a sovereign entity independent of the nation states.
That is the beginning of something very profound that is not something that the nation states wanted.
They kept this idea locked up;
it was there at Breton Woods at the end of World War II.
They kept it locked in the attic.
It was only because the citizen groups in the human rights area came and blasted it out of the attic that it exists.
Our government still I think cannot quite believe that this has happened.
Similarly the women’s movement
If you look at the last decade every one of the major global meetings,
agenda setting meetings, typically organized by the U.N.
What did you read?
It was always the women who were setting the agenda.
Whether it was Vienna, or Cairo, or Istanbul, or Copenhagen.
Now, why was that happening?
Why wasn’t it happening for the environment?
Well, one of the differences is, that there was brilliant leadership.
Citizen sector leadership who saw the opportunity
and helped grass roots, women’s groups all around the world, understand this phenomenon,
and know how to do it and get organized.
Ashoka's First Focus
Although you have this totally coherent life history,
there are certain moments where a really small intervention makes a huge difference
and the first place Ashoka focused is the most highly leveraged of those points.
It’s the moment when the idea and the person have finished their apprenticeship, they’re ready to fly,
it’s the right historical moment but who are they and what is this idea,
they don’t fit any of the existing patterns,
People have gotta support their family.
They’ve gotta step out of the existing institutions almost always,
But that window of time is a time of great vulnerability.
What Ashoka does is we invite these extraordinary people
and ideas and their nascent institution into our family of their peers.
The best social entrepreneurs in that country and worldwide, and we help one another.
That is the biggest power we have.
A stipend allows the person to look their family in the eye and say it’s ok
I’m leaving this tenured job in a country that has no social security
and there’s many more people seeking jobs than there are jobs
and I’m gonna upset people with a new idea but it’s really o.k
There’s gonna be bread on the table for the next three years or whatever it is.
And furthermore these people who are highly respected in our society and beyond are with me,
they agree the system, this, is important, they’ll support me,
and so even the nervous uncle will say o.k.
We work all the way across the life cycle, the community, fellowship, the mutual help.
The collaboration continues from that point on for ten, twenty, thirty years, however long it takes.
We can help open doors, we can share methodologies, we can collaborate together.
That’s incredibly powerful, not being alone, being able to think out loud with peers that’s really important.
Not being alone means you’re less afraid, means you have more confidence, more support.
Beyond that, and this is a huge leverage point, now that we are an association of leading social entrepreneurs,
on every continent and every field across the world.
Beginners all the way through to people who are highly successful.
We are able to do much more than what we can do as the sum of our parts.
So we can together identify the big ideas
and we can make the move out that is group entrepreneurship.
Ashoka's Criteria
Ashoka invests in the top tier of social entrepreneurs.
The people who will have a huge change across a continent or broader.
There are people who bring change at the local level.
They’re very important but we’re focused on that top tier.
We have one knock out test, and four criteria:
Is there a new idea? Is it a powerful practical attractive new idea?
The people working in this field will say “Boy this is something I’m gonna run with.”
No new idea, you’re not gonna have a major transformation, so that is an early knock out.
The first criterion, creativity, has got two parts:
Is this person good at imagining the next step of the vision and at problem solving?
An entrepreneur needs both.
How do we test for this?
Well for one thing, we’re talking about an idea that the entrepreneur has,
What’s the quality of the thinking? How creative is it?
I find its really helpful to ask about what people did in school.
Because now creativity didn’t just suddenly come at age 35.
If they’ve got a strong creative element it’s gonna be popping out somewhere,
So look at the present, look at the past,
check and see if it’s the person, test the quality of the thinking.
Second, what is this person’s entrepreneurial quality.
And this is the toughest measure.
There are many people who have all the other qualities.
This is the narrowest mesh.
We do not need the ability to get things done, the ability to lead, the ability to administer,
There are millions of people who can do those things.
We are only talking about people who cannot come to rest,
personally cannot come to rest in their deep inner self until they have changed the whole society,
until their vision has become the new pattern society-wide.
The two most basic sub patterns are is this person married to a vision, long-term, really married?
I mean the verb carefully.
And two, Do they get equally excited about and are they equally engaged in depth with the how-to questions?
How am I gonna get from here to the ultimate goal? How do these pieces fit together?
The idealist of the world, when you start asking how is this gonna work.
They will describe to you what Xanadu looks like again.
Stately pleasure domes and all that .
They cannot tell you how it is built.
They have a poem in their head, not an engineering drawing.
The entrepreneur has an engineering drawing.
There’s a quality of thinking, it’s not having the answers it’s the quality of thinking,
how much they get turned on, you can see the light come on in their eyes
and they really engage with you on both those dimensions.
Vision and the practicals of how you’re gonna get there.
The third criterion is: the social impact of the idea.
This is the only one of the four criteria that is not about the person.
In fact, explicitly it is not about the person.
We ask the question as follows:
Let’s assume the entrepreneur gets this idea to the point it’s demonstrated in one place,
and then that person disappears for the next thirty years
Will people who are working in this field say boy that’s a really interesting solution to a problem I have,
I hadn’t thought of that before.
This is a new fresh, practical, and attractive idea that will have legs on its own.
And the second part of the test is, assuming that it does,
How many people will it affect, how importantly, how beneficially?
So social impact of the idea
The final element, the fourth criteria is: ethical fiber.
This is back to the person.
And, Why do we have this criteria?
It is very important to complete knockout test.
You cannot lead, if people don't trust you. You won't be effective
Especially if you are trying to change people to change basic patterns
and how do they relate to other people, power relationships.
If they don't trust you, forget it.
Second, there are too many untrustworthy public leaders in public life already
and we just don't want to add to the supply.
Third, Ashoka is a community.
If you have one person in a room of twenty who is intuitevly not trustworthy, the conversation is over.
And so, this is a really important criteria.
How do you, as a system, find these extraordinary ideas and people
and separate them out from all the other creative altruistic really good people?
So we had to design a system.
We have a five-step selection process,
different people at each step, different incentives.
That does that, that achieves uniform results.
The selection process starts with nominators, and anyone can apply.
But we have learned that by working with people who really know the field,
who are really of the field, a few very good outside observers,
we can get a very high proportion of the good nominations.
These are the role models to whom people come.
They can tell in their stomach the difference between an idealist
and someone who really will change the pattern.
They care about this because this is their community.
The second step in the process is very intensive work by the Ashoka representative in that area.
A very mature very savvy person who must check a series of independent references if at all possible,
physically go and talk to the client, see how the thing is actually working on the ground.
The representative has to make a judgment,
I believe that this person and this idea together are going to change the pattern in the field.
The third step is a senior Ashoka person who must be from a different country,
for every one that you’ve moved forward
and you’ve been involved with someone that’s a good person, a very good person,
you get emotionally committed to that.
And having an independent person come is just very valuable.
Now this accomplishes a number of other purposes.
It’s very key for training the representative;
it protects the representatives against local pressures.
The minister of something says you should look at my nephew.
Well, it’s a little awkward to say that your nephew is a jerk Mr. Minister.
So instead, we say: Oh I’m so sorry this Brazilian came and they just didn’t understand and what can I do?
So for many reasons, the second opinion, review, is really important.
At that point it goes to the fourth step.
A jury of peers, a selection panel pre eminent social entrepreneurs from the country
plus one, who is either a member of the international board or
carefully selected and representing the international board, who must be from a different continent.
That selection panel typically meets for two days it might have six candidates.
The first day you interview them each, one on one, privately.
As each person will see different things, but always with four criteria in mind.
The next day the candidates go into one room; in another room you have the panel.
It starts of with a big wall chart,
candidates across the top, the four criteria down the center.
We haven’t been seeing that before. Hmm
But very few cases get actually overturned but it’s a very rigorous step;
we look at each case, talk it through,
the minutes are shared with the staff worldwide so there’s a constant conversation.
This is such an important criterion for us that we really get this right, the selection of fellows.
That’s what creates the community,
everything turns on that so we have to be really tight on that.
This is not like the Nobel Prize.
That’s after someone has succeeded.
We have a much more difficult job,
Before someone has succeeded, when it’s an idea, an early experiment, probably not articulate.
And our track record is that we do that.
Very remarkable results across the world:
88% of the people we elect at the end of five years have had other institutions copy their ideas,
59% have achieved national policy, over 50 countries.
This only could possibly happen if we had a system that was really reliable.
And I think that’s one of our chief successes as an institution.
The Global Academy
The idea for the global academy of the world’s most leading social entrepreneurs is:
it’s a community of the people who have already made a scratch on history and who are working at the global level
they can work together one on one or in groups of two and three
just fellows at earlier stages do.
They can provide a very powerful leadership, almost board-like role.
It’s been obvious that’s this is something the field would need from the very beginning.
so you can look back in the late 70’s we were talking about the academy,
but it’s only now that we felt the academy is ripe
because only now has the field reached the point of maturity
where we have a significant number of people who meet that test.
They have changed history and they are operating at the global level.
And so as the whole field moves to globalize,
they’re the natural pace setters, role models, in many ways leaders.
Every single member is an amazing story of gigantic impact.
Sustained creativity over a long period of time, sustained entrepreneurship.
Members of the academy are the quintessential role models,
individually, and also collectively, they define our field in a way that people can understand
The members of the Academy have a megaphone; they have a credibility;
collectively even more than individually.
Muhammed Yunus
is an extraordinary Bangladeshi who said the banking system has it all upside down.
Poor people do not have collateral so that doesn’t work.
So you’ve gotta develop a new system.
What did they have, they have relationships of trust with their neighbors.
So you build a banking system where the collateral is the trust and the mutual guarantee of neighbors.
It works brilliantly.
He then went and marketed it, he got the whole world to focus on this idea.
He made it a global phenomenon.
Fazle Abed is one of his extraordinary colleagues in Bangladesh.
He has actually built a much bigger organization in Bangladesh.
It has four times the number of employees of the largest business in the country.
All aspects of rural development, school systems that do a better job than the government schools
at a fraction of the cost for the poorest students, a whole series of businesses that help pay for this.
This is an extraordinary institution.
Stories like this are part of the evidence that this sector is no longer in the early stages.
This is a sector that now has brilliant institutions that are very sophisticated,
that can go head to head with any institution, in any sector and out-compete them.
And the fact that these two entrepreneurs are from Bangladesh should cause us to stop and think
that maybe the world is not quite as dependent on our four percent of the world as we like to think.
Oded Grajew is another of the founder members, from Brazil.
He started with a educational toy company,
he then organized several thousand organizations of business men to focus on social issues.
He engineered a whole series of extraordinary advances there,
getting business to work back through their supply chain
to end the exploitation of children in coke making and orange picking and so on.
He then went on and was the key person in creating the world social forum,
the counterbalance to the world economic forum.
A person you will hear much more of.
Another founder member from Germany is Peter Eigen who set up Transparency International.
We have a corruption problem across the world.
He has created a worldwide movement to stop it, the time is ripe.
He’s developed a series of mechanisms, one of which is very well known:
Every year there’s an analysis of which countries are the worst,
the next worse, and so on in terms of corruption.
which is of course, somewhat embarrassing if you end up in the wrong place.
This has a certain persuasive effect.
He’s created a network of people dealing with corruption all across the world,
reinforcing one another, sharing ideas.
This is a statement of the maturation of the citizen sector.
You have people of this caliber, this impact who are now seeing the world as the agenda.
And so the academy is the home for the leading people, the leading social entrepreneurs in the world,
who have made a scratch on history and who are operating globally.
If you look at the academy members that are there already, they all work with Ashoka fellows.
who are the best possible people for them to work with?
If you’re trying to set up anti-corruption movement around the world
as Peter Eigen has with Transparency International,
many Ashoka fellows are working with them.
An Argentine who’s set up a private public hearing process.
To give the public hearing process discipline and credibility,
That’s a building block, its an idea that Peter can use, that they can reinforce one another,
Even on that one-on-one basis.
But then when you think about the things we do together,
If you have the collaboration of several hundred fellows who are dealing with
the environment, or law for all, or full economic citizenship.
That is a group of people that is magical for an academy member,
this is the group of people who think like you,
who are better able to run with whatever ideas you have
than any other group of people on the face of the planet.
This is a two-way thing of great value.
The Academy is just getting getting started now;
what's it gonna be like in five years?
I think we're gonna be very surprised.
At the moment, it's small, because the number of people who meet these criteria
of having made a big historic change, and operating at a global level, is small.
In five years, the number will be much, much bigger,
because the field is moving out and these early pioneers are gonna be copied.
The whole dynamic of a field now is that the problems are at least in part global.
The field is intensely competitive now.
Someone somewhere in the world running a citizen group is gonna entrepreneur and say,
I can address this problem at the global level and they'll succeed, and then other people will copy them.
The field will have come together at a worldwide basis, unified,
and with that wiring, we will work together more and more
and so the leading people operating at the global level will have a very full plate
the field is gonna be moving so fast
that I think we can predict that there are gonna be major strategic problems the field has.
Right now we have got to invent a new social financial services industries, it’s absolutely critical.
Well this is an area that members of the academy can play a big role in;
they know that this is a problem.
A Historical Transformation
All during the three centuries that the revolution in business was taking place
where it became entrepreneurial and competitive
the most important thing that was happening
was that the basic architecture was changing,
That a half of the world was breaking free into this new architecture.
Where anyone could have a better idea and they would be respected and move ahead.
We’re at a much more exciting moment, I think.
Where the social half that’s dealing with the social issues is now breaking free in a much shorter time horizon.
It’s not in the newspapers;
people don’t notice it, it’s the classic case,
it’s not at the shutter speed of the press or the political system but this is the real historical force at work.
Once people are free in their heads, as Gandhi said, they’re free.
There’s nothing the British can do about it.
That’s when independence comes.
When people are change makers when they have stared down the stuffed shirts,
the people who say they can’t, then they’re free,
then they can solve problems and that’s what’s happening.
Yeah we have backwaters and problems.
But India and China, major, the biggest parts of the world are breaking free of their chains at this point.
The madness of the systems that held them back, and the human talents are, are moving,
You can see it right in front of your eyes.
It’s a little bit like the wall coming down in central Europe,
once that wall is down, once people are liberated,
you can never put it up again because they won’t tolerate it.
There is no way on the earth that the generals could ever take control in Brazil again
because there are a million citizen groups in that country and growing.
And every year as they’re more and more competitive, competent, strong ;
they set the pace, they were the central cause of why Brazil impeached president for corruption
this is a ratchet effect, once you have it, you can’t take it away.
It’s not only that we can’t go back to the generals or the old empires;
we’re now building to something very, very powerful
when every one is a change maker, wired together, collaborating together;
we have gone through an evolutionary change in the human species.
This is extraordinary; this is the ultimate team.
Where every single human being takes initiative but in ways that strengthen the whole.
And Ashoka is committed to that.
We think that the revolution that we are serving,
the emergence of that entrepreneurial competitive citizen sector,
is the engine that’s gonna make that happen
yes, we’re serving leading social entrepreneurs
but we’re ultimately serving this historical transformation as are all of our individual members.
So that's the revolution we are ultimately focused on
And social entrepreneurs are the cutting edge of this.
A leading social entrepreneur sees a new opportunity, figures it out,
And then they start introducing it at the local level.
That upsets the existing arrangements.
It undermines the idea that things don't change.
It's like plowing the earth, and then they provide, the new idea, the seed
which is designed to be used as userfriendly as humanly possible as.
Every entrepreneur has an idea they want you to run with.
That's how entrepreneur's ideas spread.
So they plow, they provide the seeds
That means that there are more and more local changemakers
Everyone of those local changemakers becomes a role model.
That encourages more people, the patterns get easier, the barriers fall.
So the dynamic that's leading to everyone a changemaker is happening everyday.
It is an unstoppable dynamic, and the reason it's unstoppable is that people love it.
People do not want to be objects, they want to be actors.
They want to create, not to be the subjects of all these forces.
And so we don't have to fight hard.
This is one of those, incredible rare moments in history
where there is deep profound change going on
and our job is to serve that, what a priviledge.

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