Objective: To find and support leading social entrepreneurs around the world and catalyze systems change within the global citizen sector.

Commitment: Ashoka commits to identify and support 260 new social entrepreneurs around the world, many working on innovative solutions to eliminate poverty, promote environmental sustainability and halt climate change, improve governance and encourage peace, tolerance and religious understanding. It also commits to raise $50 million to assist these social entrepreneurs through multiple programs and to expand Ashoka to China, other parts of the Middle East, Africa and Western Europe.

Background: Since 1980, Ashoka has pioneered the field of social entrepreneurship, investing in more than 1,400 leading social entrepreneurs with systems-changing ideas, known as Ashoka Fellows, in 60 countries. Rather than building one school or clinic in one community, Ashoka Fellows work at the systemic level, transforming the way children learn or creating new healthcare delivery systems. Together with these social entrepreneurs, Ashoka develops patterns for effective collaboration and designs the systems and supports that help social entrepreneurship thrive.

Ashoka’s work is at the leading edge of a dramatic transformation in society, in which entrepreneurs are paving the way for the citizen sector to grow and establish itself as an innovative and powerful force to improve lives around the world. Just as the business sector has seen tremendous growth in productivity over the last century, the citizen sector is experiencing a similar revolution, with the number of civil society organizations dramatically growing around the world, and the level of sophistication in the citizen sector increasing. Rather than leaving societal needs to the government or business sector to address, social entrepreneurs, such as Ashoka Fellows, are innovating solutions, delivering extraordinary results, and setting new milestones in their fields.

Ashoka’s vision is a global society that is able to respond quickly and effectively to social challenges anywhere. Every member of society would have the freedom, confidence and societal support to address any social need. Our society would foster innovation and the desire for change, such that individuals find within themselves the potential to make change. To support a world of constantly innovating “changemakers”, the citizen sector must be nimble, efficient and globalized. Ashoka’s mission, therefore, is to shape the citizen sector to be entrepreneurial, productive and globally integrated. Ashoka invests in social entrepreneurs because we believe they are the most powerful force for social change. Their social impact will lead others to adopt and spread their innovations, and will demonstrate to individuals that they too can become changemakers.

Partnership Opportunity: In an effort to support the expansion of its Fellows program, Ashoka seeks to fundraise for programs in China, Africa, Turkey, the Middle East and Central Asia.

Update:
January 2006:
1. As of Jan 1, 2006 Ashoka has raised 6 million toward its $50 million goal. This includes support to begin electing Fellows in Germany, France and Spain and modest support to expand to Lebanon, Palestine, Israel, and Afghanistan.
2. An international meeting was held with all of Ashoka’s Representatives and Venture staff to discuss search and selection strategies and methodologies in the four thematic areas of the Clinton Global Initiative.

May 2006:
This past month, we launched the Ashoka Venture Fund for Leading Social Entrepreneurs, as the first of the initiatives we are launching in order to reach our $50 million commitment to support new social entrepreneurs working on critical Clinton Initiative issues. The fund should help to rapidly expand Ashoka's community and support the next generation of Ashoka Fellows. The Venture Fund will help Ashoka keep pace with the growing number of leading social entrepreneurs worldwide, and will direct stipend support where innovators are emerging and investment is most critical. The Venture Fund is designed to support and expand every aspect of Ashoka's search and selection process. The Venture fund will enable Ashoka to maximize its investment in the world's leading social entrepreneurs by allocating more resources to Ashoka Fellows who work on innovative solutions to eliminate poverty, promote environmental sustainability and halt climate change, improve governance and encourage peace, tolerance and religious understanding and specifically to those who are located in China, other parts of the Middle East, Africa and Western Europe.

The Venture Fund has been established with a founding gift from the Oswald Family Foundation in honor of their father, Charles W. Oswald, former CEO of National Computer Systems of Minneapolis and current chairman of Rotherwood Investments. An advisor and supporting partner to countless entrepreneurs during his career, Charley understands the critical role that investing in people plays in bringing forth new ideas and integrating change. Charley writes, "Through Ashoka's Venture Fund my family and I share in supporting the most creative people in every field and on every continent. The opportunity to connect our resources with such transformative global change is invaluable for everyone involved. Clearly, it's one of the most satisfying and effective investments we've made."

Ashoka Fellows who currently work on Clinton Initiative Issues and exemplify the types of Fellows we will fund under the Venture Fund are:

Religious Tolerance/Peace: Ebrahim "Eboo" Patel, USA
Dr. Ebrahim "Eboo" Patel is leading the movement to engage young people of various religious identities in the United States in interfaith community service. His work aligns the deeply held principles and shared values of public service, religious freedom and pluralism to enrich society and reduce the ignorance that has made religiously motivated attacks the second most common form of hate crime today. Eboo recognizes that youth programs are often the first ones mentioned in a church or synagogue's newsletter but the last thing funded in their budgets. His program provides the resources (both financial and programmatic) that are frequently missing to bring together young people from different faith communities to work in social action projects, fostering cooperation--not conflict--among youth of diverse religious beliefs. Additionally, his organization encourages their youth participants to speak about their own experiences, which allows them to recognize what they have in common with each other while maintaining their uniqueness.

Climate Change: Pati Ruiz, Mexico
Pati Ruiz is designing a master plan to overhaul the global practice of conservation. Focusing her efforts on the Sierra Gorda Biosphere Reserve, about three times the size of the city of Los Angeles, Pati has built a sustainable model to protect and maintain the biodiversity of a relatively highly-populated area. Recognizing that the majority of properties with high biodiversity lie in the hands of the extremely poor, Pati utilize a broad range of advocacy, public education and income-generation approaches to shift how natural resources are understood, protected, and sustainably used. For example, fee-based restoration projects targeted at both children and adults provide local income while reducing global carbon counts and local erosion. Pati's work directly benefits 47,414 local farmers of the Sierra Gorda region in Mexico, in addition to the indirect beneficiaries across the region.

Notably, Pati is reengineering the concept and practice of ecosystem service payments as a tool to reappraise the value of natural resources while mitigating environmental destruction. Because the carbon exchanges designed by the Kyoto Protocol were intended to suit large tracts of uninterrupted and singularly-owned forests, Pati has sought to redefine the boundaries of those predefined rules and apply the same logic to highly-populated territories. As a result, Pati's organization has received an unprecedented environmental service payment by the UN Foundation (UNF) to enable the UNF to become carbon-neutral. Pati is also creating models for payment for new ecosystemic services, ranging from water to biodiversity. Pati's goal is to push the limits beyond one-component services in order to open the market up to the possibility of multiple environmental services integrated into one package.

Poverty: N Muthu Velayutham, India
Muthu Velayutham creates wealth in poor rural regions in India through coordinated business venture and responsible stewardship of natural resources. He has created a suite of companies that organize federations of dry land farmers into cooperatives that allow the poor access to regional and national markets. He has focused his efforts on the creation of a natural health products industry as a way to generate income. Specifically, Muthu has created an integrated effort to oversee the collection, cultivation, processing and marketing of medicinal plants. He teaches impoverished communities to take ownership of the process, thereby providing sustainable livelihoods to thousands of families.Using the bounty of the natural landscape in an ecologically sound manner, he has also had a dramatic impact on the environment of the communities he is working in - reducing carbon emissions by over 80% through planting and introducing eco-friendly fuels.

Governance/Transparency: Supinya Klangnarong, Thailand
Supinya Klangnarong spearheads a national campaign for electronic media reform, using research, policy advocacy and public lobbying to put the production of radio and television broadcasts within the reach of the common citizen. Article 40 of Thailand's Constitution states that radio and television frequencies are national resources for the public interest. Supinya interprets this to mean that communication is a resource over which every citizen has a right to exercise a degree of control. Supinya is challenging major media, corporate and government entities for public access to the means of modern communication.

She has used a mix of research, lobbying, demonstrations, and legal actions to guarantee that media is not restricted to the hands of the powerful, but can be in the service of the public. Her efforts often times directly challenge the transparency and overall governance in Thailand; in some cases, these challenges have incited political pressure and even legal action threatening Supinya. These pressures came to a forefront in 2003, when Shin Corporation filed a criminal libel suit against Supinya for telling the Thai Post that Shin Corp. may be a major beneficiary of government policy due to the company's relationship to Prime Minister Thaksin and his family. The case has been considered a major crossroads in free speech and media rights in Thailand and held a maximum two-year jail term or a fine of up to US$ 10 million if Supinya was found guilty. The charges were dropped in 2006, partly through the efforts of a collation of pro-bono advocates brought together by Ashoka's Advocates of Social Entrepreneurs program.