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Erin: Welcome to T2A webchat for Wednesday, October 24th. We are meeting Bill Drayton, CEO and Founder of Ashoka. Ashoka is the global association of the world’s leading social entrepreneurs—men and women with system changing solutions for the world’s most urgent social problems. Ashoka develops models for collaboration and designs infrastructure needed to advance the field of social entrepreneurship and the citizen sector. Bill is currently significantly involved as board chair of Get America Working! and Youth Venture.
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Andrianavalomalala, Madagascar (email): 1.Does Ashoka give equipment or financial support to organizations in developing countries that are working on serious development projects, for example: transformation of raw materials? 2.Could you give any advice about organization management?
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Bill: 1. Ashoka is the world's association of leading social entrepreneurs. For them, we help in every way we can so when a social entrepreneur has a major pattern change idea and they are ready to run with it, we enable them to leave their job and work on this fulltime, prototyping and launching the idea. From that point and for the rest of their career, we invite them into a community of peers, the best social entrepreneurs in the world. We collaborate as a field and that's enormously powerful. We also help fellows in any way possible, including equipment, management and legal help. The purpose is to help the individual entrepreneur and the field to develop.
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Anil, India (email): Social problems in India, specifically in the Northeast states, require urgent attention as youths there are turning to drugs and crime. Are there any Ashoka-sponsored organizations that address this issue?
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Bill: Ashoka has a number of fellows working in India's northeast. I just was corresponding with a Fellow from the Naga group who is working with young people in the tribal areas to help the youth’s entrepreneur and manage businesses successfully. Almost certainly the most effective way helping people escape corruption, crime, the wars in that part of the country is to build a positive alternatives. We have many Fellows working on these issues in the northeast, ranging from the environment to sports to helping urban young people engage with the rural parts of the region. We invite you to visit our website for profiles of our Fellows, including those in the northeast of India at www.ashoka.org
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Mo - Baghdad, Iraq: Hi..where has Ashoka done work?
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Bill: Ashoka works on every continent and on every subject matter area. There are now Fellows working in over 70 countries. Since you are in the Middle East, let me mention that there we are just now expanding the program's coverage from strong bases in Pakistan, Turkey and Egypt. In the last year, we elected the first Fellows from Saudi Arabia, Lebanon, Palestine, Morocco and Afghanistan. For example, one of the Egyptian Fellows has introduced home health care, which is now spreading rapidly across the country.
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Imma, Nigeria (email): 1.Is Ashoka based on any religious or philosophical presuppositions? 2.What kind of successes has Ashoka achieved through its social entrepreneurship?
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Bill: 2. First: We evaluate the impact of the Fellows 5 years after they were elected. We've done this for 7 years and the results are very consistent across time and across geography. 97% are continuing fulltime pursuing their vision. 90% have seen independent institutions copy their innovation. Over half have already changed national policy. So this is a very powerful group of people and those individual successes are multiplied when you understand that we work as a community as well. 1. Ashoka is very specifically open to every philosophy, religion, age, gender and nationality. We care about whether or not the combination of the idea and the entrepreneur is going to change the pattern in that field on a continental scale. That's what really matters. We look for creativity, entrepreneurial quality and ethical fiber in the person and the likely social impact of the new idea.
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Robert, Singapore (email): Everywhere in this world there have been people who claim to have solutions for the world’s urgent problems. The problem is that when the solutions offered by them clash with one another, creating other urgent problems. What criteria can you propose to judge the solutions on the table and to come out with the best solution, or a better solution?
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Bill: Entrepreneurs like the rest of us make mistakes, but the entrepreneurial process is one of constant self-correction. That's especially true when you realize that you're not talking about just one entrepreneur but a world increasingly filled with social entrepreneurs. This is a highly competitive world. If you've made a mistake and I see it I will try and fix that. So there's no guarantee that the field of social entrepreneurship isn't going to make mistakes, but of all the different ways of organizing how people work, it's probably the least error-prone, because it is the most self-correcting.
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Wondwossen, Ethiopia (email): How does Ashoka help women’s rights?
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Bill: Roughly between 40 and 50% of the Fellows are women. We are a new field growing very fast. We don't have glass ceilings. If you are an entrepreneur and you're building your own organization around your own vision, there is no one there to tell you, you cannot advance and you cannot run your own operation. Ashoka and the field of social entrepreneurship are both central to the most important historical transformation of our time. The agricultural revolution produced a small surplus and as long as we remained agricultural societies, only a tiny proportion of the world's people were in the game. That world does not work anymore. It's deeply frustrating to people and as the rate of the change increases logarithmically as it is, every element of society has to have people in it who help this school, this business change ever more rapidly, i.e. we need to have everyone be a change maker versus a tiny elite, the 40 or 400 families, maybe one or two percent. Social entrepreneurs are at the cutting edge of this revolution. They are role models and they are mass recruiters of local change makers. Why? Because they can't succeed unless in community after community after community, people stand up and say, that is good idea, let me try that, I can do this. This is an area were social entrepreneurship is different from business entrepreneurship. Business wants to capture market. Social entrepreneurship wants to change the world and needs people to do that, so social entrepreneurs make their ideas as accessible and user friendly as possible to local people. Women will be a prime beneficiary as we move into an everyone-a-change maker world.
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Turkay, Azerbaijan (email): 1.What is the most dangerous social problem in the US today? 2.Do some TV programs, music videos, or films lead to social problems, as they may have a bad or undesirable impact on children and adolescents?
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Bill: If you talk to different social entrepreneurs in the U.S. they would probably identify different problems as being especially critical. So my personal point of view is this: We like the rest of the world have to go through the most profound transition in how young people are treated and live their lives. What is the key factor for success of any organization or any society now and increasingly going forward? It is the proportion of that human community who are change makers. Whichever society now does the best job of helping the largest proportion of their young people be powerful, i.e. cause change while they are 12 or 14 or 17, will be the country with the highest proportion of change makers in its population 10 or 15 years from now. This is change as large as the Civil Rights movement or the Women's movement but much more important. It's more important because it's not only about the lives of the people involved, but if we don't succeed in this transformation we simply will not have the change makers that will allow the society to function in a world of extremely rapidly escalating change. America's greatest advantage in the world is that we have had a relatively high proportion of change makers in our population and we have attracted generation after generation of immigrants bringing that quality. But we still have the overwhelming majority of our young people not being allowed to grow in this most important way because we still have old family expectation patterns and an educational system that, except for the elite, does not make it easy for young people to have their own ideas, build and run their own organization and leave their school or neighborhood changed. For example, a very young woman in Utah was offended by the idea that girls couldn't be astronauts and she therefore created “Astrotots”, that brings science education and empowerment to young girls. She and her friends designed and run the program. She is going to be a powerful change maker throughout her life because she already has that power. She has already caused a major change in the world around her. Moreover all the other young people involved with her are learning empathy and teamwork and getting the idea that they too could start something. We'd love to see young people everywhere in the world have that opportunity. That's what will make them powerful and great contributors in life and our success in increasing the number of young people who have that experience very sharply is key to whether or not the societies will succeed. That's as true for Ethiopia or Poland as it is for the U.S. If you'd like to become engaged with this global movement, please see youthventure.org Ashoka has learned from the work of 400 of its Fellows around the world whose primary focus is on young but this is the key factor for success for the young people and for their society. You can learn more by going to either the Ashoka.org or Youthventure.org websites
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Hio, Philippines (email): Would you agree that the solution for most social problems lies within the family?
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Bill: To get to a world where everyone is powerful, and can contribute and cause change we have to change how young people grow up and the family is completely central there. It's not the only influence, but it's central. If you are a parent and have a 12-year-old or 16-year-old and that daughter or son is not being powerful now, you should be very very concerned. You should be asking what's wrong with the schools and youth programs upon which you've been relying. Why are they not giving your daughter or son what's going to be completely central to their success in life in a world of very rapid change?
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Kemal, Ethiopia (email): How much difficulty is faced when attempting to fix social problems?
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Bill: The biggest barrier in seeking to change a community or the world is giving yourself permission to do it. If you believe you can and you put your mind to it you can figure out what to do and then you just have to be persistent in continuing to think it through and adjusting as you learn. But most people have been told they can't and as long as you accept that, of course you can't and furthermore if you believe that, you won't see problems or opportunities, which are the same thing. If you don't believe that you have the power, why would you ever want to see a problem? To recognize a problem is to then confront the rather sad fact that you don't think you can do anything about it. On the other hand once you've given yourself permission whenever you run into a problem it's an opportunity to use your talents as a thinking intelligent human being, of course you can solve the problem.
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Adilson, Brazil (email): In reference to How to Change the World, how can someone like me help change the world?
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Bill: Can you identify a problem? Given the state of the world and of Brazil, it's pretty hard to imagine that you can't. There are over 300 Ashoka Fellows in Brazil. They've each spotted a problem and gave themselves permission to solve it and they've done so. One has cut the cost of rural electrification 70 to 90 percent and changed millions of lives in ten states and in Uruguay so far. Another has created a new legal structure for the Amazon that is appropriate for the multiple use environment of a forest, and this innovation is now a worldwide model. Just go to www.ashoka.org and you'll find the other 298 examples in Brazil go and talk to some of the Ashoka Fellows. You'll know very quickly that you too can make a big difference.
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Erin: That wraps today’s T2A webchat with Ashoka social entrepreneur Bill Drayton. Our thanks to Bill and to you for joining us. We hope you can come back tomorrow – that’s Thursday, October 25th at a special time, 1400 UTC. We will Cal Ripken, Jr., US Baseball Legend and member of the National Baseball Hall of Fame. Cal is a U.S. Special Sports Envoy of the State Department. He travels to China October 28th as part of his mission to teach baseball to young people around the world. Cal is with voanews.com tomorrow, Thursday, October 25th at 1400 UTC. See you then!
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