A battle cry for Positive Social Change

Ashoka is a not-for-profit organization founded in 1980 by Bill Drayton in Washington, DC, USA. Today, it employs 160 staff in 25 regional offices throughout Africa, the Americas, Asia, Europe, the Middle East, and North Africa. Ashoka rejects government funding, as it has opted to be financed solely by individuals, foundations and business entrepreneurs from around the world

Drayton, a pioneer in the global field of social entrepreneurship, established Ashoka believing that most the effective way to promote positive social change is to invest in social entrepreneurs with innovative solutions that are sustainable and replicable, both nationally and globally.

The focal point of Ashoka's effort is thus, people. It invests in people - not just anyone, but people who it identifies as social entrepreneurs. Ashoka's credo is that social change may be initiated and steered forward by persons who have powerful ideas aimed at solving pressing social problems. Just as business entrepreneurs launch innovative solutions and so often disrupt market places, so too, social entrepreneurs facilitate change in society. Having recognized this basic fact - that ‘there is nothing as powerful as a new idea in the hands of a first-class entrepreneur' - Ashoka seeks to encourage these change agents to convert their ideas into reality and further, into flourishing professions. 

Supporting ultimate realists: In India, Vinoba Bhave is a classic example of a social entrepreneur, who as founder and leader of the Land Gift Movement, made possible the redistribution of more than 70,00,000 acres of land India's untouchables and landless. Overseas, Florence Nightingale, who founded modern nursing by establishing the first school for nurses and simultaneously fought to improve hospital conditions, also typifies social entrepreneurship.

What is similar about all Ashoka's change agents, or Fellows, is that they are ambitious visionaries willing to work consistently to achieve their goal. After all, social change, in many ways, calls for a greater commitment vis-à-vis the business sector. Encouraging societies to adopt a new approach, and not depend on interventions by the government or business sector can be painstaking work. For this reason, many social entrepreneurs commit their lives to changing the direction of their field.

Ashoka's Fellows: Although hard to set rolling, change is often a catchy process. It is upto a social entrepreneur to present his/her solution as user-friendly and easily understandable, so as to maximize the number of local people that will stand up, seize the idea, and implement with it. Thus, by inspiring and engaging widespread support, change-makers act as mass recruiters of local change-makers, who may then collectively persuade entire societies to take new leaps.

Since 1980, the organization has elected over 1800 leading social entrepreneurs in more than 60 countries as Ashoka Fellows. These men and women have benefited by becoming a permanent part of the Ashoka global association. Each receives a living stipend for an average of three years to allow him/her to concentrate on building his./her social career, avails of a professional support network that often yields partnerships with professional consultants, and enjoys access to a global network of peers.

A three-pronged approach: This financial and professional support to individual social entrepreneurs - throughout their life cycle - is only the first level of work done by Ashoka. The organization also focuses on groups of social entrepreneurs, by bringing them together on one platform to help leverage their impact, scale their ideas, and capture and disseminate their best practices.

This collaboration among peers ensures that Ashoka is able to distill the most effective patterns and unify them into a "mosaic," a synthesis of the commonalities and intersections of key principles that guide Fellows' individual solutions. These overarching mosaics are then disseminated globally, and form the basis of programmatic initiatives specific to each field of work, such as youth development or the environment.

Thus, group entrepreneurship not only furthers the work of individual Fellows but also helps Ashoka identify and implement cutting edge trends in the citizen sector.

Finally, it promotes the citizen sector by putting in place the infrastructure - such as access to social financing, bridges to business and academic sectors, and frameworks for partnerships that deliver social and financial value - needed to support its growth and facilitate the spread of social innovation globally. Ashoka especially recognizes that the citizen sector stands to improve its efficiency by learning from and reproducing competitive business models in its own sphere.

Ashoka's three leveled interventions represent a multi-pronged approach that furthers its commitment to encourage the replication of the innovative social ideas implemented by its Fellows by fostering collaboration between peers. Perhaps for this reason, the organization is ideally represented by an oak tree, known for its strength, sturdiness and broad spread.

Everyone is a Change-maker

Ashoka's vision is easily summed up as, a world where ‘Everyone is a Changemaker,' and hence where social challenges are quickly and effectively solved.

Although these individuals may work in every field of human need, the work of the organization broadly falls into six major fields - civic engagement, economic development, health, human rights, environment, and learning/education. Of course, some endeavors overlap these categories and others may fit into other niche sectors.

According to the Ashoka website - http://www.ashoka.org - its civic engagement initiatives aim to organize and amplify the voices of private citizens, empowering a culture of participation. Economic development projects expand economic opportunities, strengthen bargaining power, and develop markets that are more responsive to the poor, in order to create economic independence for under-privileged individuals. Environ-mental solutions are focused on protecting the environment while simultaneously tackling closely linked social problems.

The health endeavours supported by Ashoka aim to establish public-private partnerships to expand and strengthen health care delivery systems and thus increase access to essential medicines. Human rights solutions secure a full range of civil, political, and social rights for all people. Lastly, learning/education innovations aim to develop new methods for learning and education that engage youth in the learning process, by encouraging problem solving, decision making, responsibility, teamwork and creativity.

Ashoka and India: Ashoka's relation with India goes back many years. Its very name, Ashoka, honours India's ancient leader (by the same name) known for unifying the Indian subcontinent in the 3rd century BC, but more so for renouncing violence and dedicating his life to social welfare and economic development after witnessing the disastrous effects of conquest wars.

Not surprisingly, then, Ashoka's first Indian Fellow was selected way back in 1981. Gloria de Souza, founded the ParisarAsha, Environmental Education Centre, a not-for-profit Trust registered with the Charity Commissioner of Mumbai. The centre was envisioned to offer the Environmental Studies Approach to Learning (ESAL-pronounced ‘ease-all'), a systemic alternative to deeply entrenched rote-learning. The ESAL learning processes are environment-related, experiential and oriented towards problem-solving. Parisar Asha's mission has been to provide quality education for all, and especially to breach the disparity between those who fit in with the Indian education system and those who don't and who therefore drop out, most often because of being a family's ‘first-generation learner.'

Shelter Associates: One of Ashoka's most recent Indian Fellows is Pratima Joshi, founder and director of Shelter Associates http://www.shelter-associates.org, an organization registered in 1994 as Trust and Society that works with urban poor, particularly women in informal settlements to facilitate, and provide technical support to, community-managed housing (slum rehabilitation) and infrastructure projects.

As a group of experienced architects, Pratima and her team architecturally and structurally design rehabilitation settlements, all the while taking care to involve community members in the process. Once a design is frozen, Shelter Associates prepares the drawings in the required format and submits these to the local government for approval. Sometimes, the group also undertakes construction and supervision responsibilities.

Sanitation in urban Indian cities and towns is a grim affair, and has a negative impact on the quality of lives of many informal settlers. This is yet another avenue where Shelter Associates has aimed to make a difference. These projects have so far been successfully implemented in the cities of Pune, Sangli and the Municipal Council of Khuldabad in Aurangabad District.

As part of her work Pratima has also been able to advocate for the poor and put pressure on public officials, for example, to resettle communities in flood-prone areas to safer locations. According to Pratima, "Following the successful completion of this project, YASHADA - an apex government training institute - made a 20 minutes documentary film to show how an NGO / CBO / local government partnership can work for the poor and be replicated and scaled up."

An ideal Ashoka Fellow: A plan aimed at providing housing to urban poor, which is easily replicable and self-sustaining - evidently, Pratima's solution has all the makings of an idea worthy of Ashoka's backing. A vital part of Shelter Associates' work that brought Pratima in the limelight, is based on its recognition of the lack of credible information available for policy makers and local government authorities to formulate realistic rehabilitation plans for urban informal settlers. In view of this, Shelter Associates prepares poverty mapping projects that include the costs of data collection and collation, and that are funded by local governments. It then proceeds to mobilize slum youth to collect data which is eventually integrated with the map on a GIS platform.

Pratima says that this methodology works well as it ensures that "the community members own the process and data, and the quality of data is much better than it would have been if outsiders had gathered it." Further, she continues, "Wherever possible, we have outsourced data entry to slum dwellers having computers at home. We train them to enter data in this case." Thus, the community is involved as far as possible in its rehabilitation process. So far, over a lakh households in 200 settlements spread over 230 slums in Pune city have been surveyed.

Although she is a new Fellow, Pratima acknowledges that "the Ashoka network will be immensely beneficial to our work." As she shares, "I am already in touch with a Fellow counterpart in Brazil and we are exploring whether we can introduce poverty mapping in their organization the way we do it here. There is a provision of support by Ashoka for such exchanges which can be mutually beneficial to Fellows. I have already been linked through Ashoka to software engineers who are trying to locate software that can be tailored down to our requirements of data entry."

Ashoka has selected all its Fellows for their ideas and commitment to implementing their innovative solutions. Gloria, Pratima et al are leading social change by example. Ashoka's success in backing its Fellows and heralding change should inspire each of us to dwell on what we could do to become change-makers. But the question that arises is - are we free in our minds and willing to think on these lines and act accordingly? 

Charu Bahri is a freelance writer and author of two books. She also writes funding grants and software for a charity working in the health sector.

Issue BG76 July07