January 20, 2005 | Read Time: 2 minutes
Ashoka, the nonprofit organization that helps so-called social entrepreneurs, is “this century’s (much better) version of the United Way,” says Fast Company magazine (January).
In a profile of the organization and its founder, Bill Drayton, the magazine notes that Ashoka has been expanding rapidly. Its budget grew by 50 percent, to $30-million, last year. While the group started out by identifying people who have “solutions of such ambition and force that they cannot be denied,” the magazine says, and providing them with the help they need to carry out new approaches to solving social needs, Ashoka is “morphing into a knowledge-management organization.”
The group’s employees are being encouraged to spot emerging trends and find ways to “apply solutions that have worked in one part of the world to problems in another, link together similar innovations to amplify their impact, and package ideas in ways that take them from local to global in reach.”
Mr. Drayton’s chief goal is to ensure that good ideas can be spread without any help from Ashoka. To get to that point, Ashoka is trying to create new mechanisms for financing nonprofit groups and considering “an online marketplace where entrepreneurs and funds can find each other.” And ultimately, he says, he wants to turn everyone into a “change maker.”
“Think about the implications for society of that change,” he says. “The number of angry, frustrated, unhappy people would be dramatically reduced. And the probability of problems outrunning problem solvers would go away.”
In the same issue, Fast Company also names the winners of its second annualSocial Capitalist Awards, a project it coordinates with the Monitor Group, a Boston management-consulting company to select outstanding nonprofit groups.
More information about the award winners is available at http://www.fastcompany.com.
