Ashoka’s Role in Maximizing the Impact of the Social Entrepreneurs Elected as Ashoka Fellows

Abstract

Founded in 1980, Ashoka has become the largest global network of social entrepreneurs, now encompassing almost 3,600 Fellows elected in 92 countries. While other organizations have focused on social entrepreneurs as leaders of social enterprises or social businesses, Ashoka realized early on that what characterized social entrepreneurs was not so much their ability to generate revenue from their activities, but rather their ability and desire to think big, to include diverse partners in the solution, and to successfully change systems for the benefit of all, not just those directly touched by their work. While Ashoka has tracked Fellows’ ability to influence systems change for more than 20 years (both in terms of changes in policy and laws as well as changes in market dynamics), in 2018 Ashoka began to collect data to investigate whether and how it has had a role in accelerating the impact of its Fellows’ ideas. Therefore in the Global Fellows Survey we added questions to measure the impact that Fellows attribute to Ashoka, in addition to 43 qualitative interviews where we delved deeper into our findings from the survey.