Fellowship

Ashoka’s Fellowship is an international community of more than 2,700 social entrepreneurs. The Fellowship is an incredible network of individuals, citizen sector organizations and powerful allies. Ashoka elects Fellows at various stages of their lifecycle as social entrepreneurs, from early launch Fellows just getting an innovative idea off the ground and beginning to see its social impact to Senior Fellows who have achieved national impact and made a “scratch on history” with their idea at the time of election. The Ashoka Fellowship program offers network and strategic support for its members throughout their careers as social entrepreneurs.

Ashoka Canada has:

  • Reached a network of 37 Fellows across Canada, including 8 Senior Fellows

  • Invested approximately $400,000 in stipends and support programs for Fellows

  • Connected Canadian Fellows to the global network of Ashoka Fellows, including Jimmy Wales (Wikipedia) and Matt Flannery (Kiva.org)

  • Connected Canadian Fellows to global events like the Clinton Global Initiative and the Skoll World Forum, giving them the chance to learn about management systems for citizen sector organizations, new approaches for communicating with funders, creating partnerships with other Fellows in mutual areas of interest, and connecting to members of the global ASN

  • Ashoka enabled Fellow Al Etmanski to participate in a global collaboration with 16 other Fellows from 5 continents. The (Dis)Ability Initiative resulted in an exchange of methodologies and a book entitled "CREATING CHANGE: Innovations in the World of Disability" which was published in Polish (and is to be published in English)

Ashoka works on three levels. First, we support individual social entrepreneurs -financially and professionally- throughout their life cycle. Second, we bring communities of social entrepreneurs together to help leverage their impact, scale their ideas, and capture and disseminate their best practices. Finally, we help build the infrastructure and financial systems needed to support the growth of the citizen sector and facilitate the spread of social innovation globally.

 

Ashoka’s additional programs in Canada:

Ashoka’s Venture & Fellowship program identifies and elects leading social entrepreneurs into our global Ashoka Fellowship and provides strategic support, collaboration opportunities, a community of like-mined individuals, recognition and possible financial support.

Ashoka’s Changemakers.com is a global online community of action where we open-source solutions to the world’s most urgent social problems.

The Ashoka Support Network (ASN) is a global community of successful business leaders and philanthropist who engage with Ashoka, committing time and resources to support the work of Ashoka Fellows.

Ashoka’s University Program fosters, incubates, and accelerates new and effective approaches to high quality social entrepreneurship teaching, research, and action in universities and across campuses.

Ashoka’s Youth Venture inspires teams of young people to launch and lead their own social ventures with the support of mentors and seed funding.

Ashoka's Social Finance Services (SFS) improves more creative and strategic ways to financing and sustainable capital in the citizen sector, addressing the lack of quantity and diversity of institutional financial supports needed for social ventures to succeed.

All of our programs contribute to Ashoka's vision and mission. They all convey the historical transformation of the citizen sector taking place and are building upon that understanding. None of our programs exist to provide services exclusively.

Ashoka's programs together are bringing our vision of Everyone a Changemaker™ closer to reality.