Before you guys start working on your assignments, we now have the chance to listen to the people who are part of the case today. We will later on have an interview with the CEO of UnLtd Cliff Prior, and right now, I'm here with Åsa Burman, the Co-Director of Ashoka Scandinavia, and Rebecca Altman, who is the Venture and Fellowship Manager of Ashoka Scandinavia. Rebecca, could you just give us an example of an Ashoka fellow? >> Yes, absolutely, Kai. I think a great example to begin with is an Ashoka fellow from India, who's named Jeroo Billimoria. Now, Jeroo was a great example of a social entrepreneur who began her work at an early age. She had the change making bug from the very beginning. Jeroo started at 16 years old with her own first organizations; now, over the course of her lifetime, she's already started over 9 organizations from, from the start. But her beginning organizations were very much focused on child protection and child protection services. Now she got into this field of work because of her own experience working with street children. She noticed some very, very significant challenges faced by street children when they were not able to access the services and support they needed at the moment in which they need it. Now, a help line existed in India when she began, for children, but that help line ran at the average nine-to-five workday, which didn't fulfill the needs of these young people that really needed a person to call and resources 24 hours per day. So Jeroo saw that as a real challenge and tried to get the resources needed to start this and get it off the ground. And that's what she did. She created an organization called Childline India, which began as a 24-hour help line for street children, run by street children. So this concept was quite revolutionary. These were not social workers, these were street children running a helpline 24 hours per day. Now, she took that a bit further, once she got that organization up and running it was reaching millions of children in India. And the government of India actually adopted that system and her model as the child protection system in the entire country of India. She stopped there, or continued there, and sort of let that program continue on its own and real systemic change taking place. And she went on to scale this internationally to become Child Helpline International, which works in over 180 countries around the world today, taking over 160 million phone calls from children around the world to link them to the resources and the help that they need. So throughout this whole process of working with the ecosystem of child protection services, Jeroo became, and continued to be very fascinated with the root cause of the problem. Why, she asked, are children needing this helpline in the first place? What brought them to that state of challenge? And what she saw over and over again was a continuous pattern in, both, in terms of self-confidence of the children. But also, in terms of money. Simple questions of how to save money, how to grow and be more entrepreneurial as a person and work towards your dreams, or his or her dreams. So she created and bridged the gap between the child protection system and the ecosystem she had built to actually the economic rights of children through her first organization in this space called Aflatoun, which works with actual training and education of young people in, simple methods of actually saving money and working towards goals. Whether that's saving for key milestones in life, or even starting your own enterprise. Now, Aflatoun now continues working with over a million children around the world, organizations from banks to other NGOs. Mm, and also works with one million children, around the globe. So this is a great example of an amazing human being, but a wonderful Ashoka fella that really embodies the qualities that we see in social entrepreneurs, that includes, you know, looking at her story of the persistence and the drive and the obsession with changing the social problems she saw, but at the same time staying true to the system impact. And the desire to really change the systems and not attach herself to the organization but instead to the social impact of her work. All throughout I think the one underlying key message here, is that she was training change makers of all types around the world to feel confident in themselves and to be able to be in the driving seat of the rest of their life. >> So tell us a little bit about the history of Ashoka and actually what it means to be a social entrepreneur for Ashoka. >> Great, that's very important. So I think, you know learning from the story of Jeroo, we can rewind back in time. Maybe 30 plus years, to the beginning of Ashoka as an organization. Now let's imagine this for a moment, that Bill Drayton, the founder and CEO of Ashoka, was spending some time in India. And he was very, very interested in how social change happens. What he noticed was that change came from not the usual suspects. It was actually that he saw individuals with great ideas, like Jeroo, who were actually really changing systems in society. Now, he noticed three key qualities of these types of individuals he noticed in India. The first was that these were people that would really recognize the need for an innovation. They saw, they really understood the depth of the problem. And because of that, they knew, and it absolutely required entrepreneurial skills in order to solve that social problem. So that beginning of a picture was formed for Bill Drayton in India, which led him to realize that these people exist around the world. They must exist around the world. Yet, they lack the structures of support and connection to others. So that was the initial insight that actually led Bill Drayton to found Ashoka. To become a network and support for these types of individuals that he termed social entrepreneurs. Entrepreneurs applying entrepreneurial principals to social problems. Not only to identify these entrepreneurs but actually connect them to the resources and individual people and communities that they needed in order to spread their work. So Ashoka began as an organization to do just that. To build a profession out of social entrepreneurship. Now we'll look a bit later at how Ashoka looks today in terms of the vision that's much bigger and broader than only around the social entrepreneurs. But I might also add just as a beginning of that process that we will get to, that Ashoka today, of course continues to source these innovations from around the world. And we also enable businesses, and media, and universities and policy makers to connect over common purposes towards social impact. So you might be wondering, okay all of that said, what is a Ashoka today and what does it look like? We didn't start and stop in India. Today we work in over 87 countries around the world. We've elected 3,000 Ashoka fellows working across fields of work. Now, that's very important point I think actually, Kai, because we're not looking only at Jeroo, someone working with Child Protection Services or the economic rights of children, but in fact, we're almost as if a perch overlooking all the, these great ideas around the world, and bringing together those that work across fields of work, from human rights to economic development to environment to health. This is very important for what we call collaborative entrepreneurship. A realization that we had after several years of working with Ashoka. That the power of ideas is actually much stronger when we work together in teams. So, this is a bit about Ashoka, in terms of our growth, and as an organization, the number of fellows spanning across fields of work around the world. And the importance of spanning fields of work in different areas, of social challenges that need really, really good solutions. So if we look even further and zoom in a bit from this big global reach of Ashoka, let's talk a bit also about the qualities that we see in social entrepreneurs. Or Ashoka fellows, as we call them, once they're elected into the fellowship. We've seen five key qualities that are not so far off, from what Bill Drayton noticed as these first key people in India. It's a small evolution of the early thought that he had. But really today we're left with five key qualities that every single Ashoka fellow in our network has in some shape or form. Now let's go through those together. The first is a new idea. What we call the innovation that systems changing new idea. What is it that's actually fundamentally different, about what that person is doing compared to what has been done before? We know that if they're solving a really complex challenge like Jeroo, working with child protection in India, requires innovation. It requires doing something different than what has been done before. In addition to that component of the qualities we see, we also look very closely at the entrepreneur him- or herself. We look at the creativity of that person, the vision - this includes the vision that this entrepreneur has towards a bigger and better future. It also includes the origin of the idea. How creative is this idea? And is this person's idea ... is it this person's idea to begin with? Tied to creativity as a key quality. We also see entrepreneurship or entrepreneurial skill or quality. This refers to the person's drive and persistence and almost obsession with solving a social problem. If you look at Jeroo, as a great example, the fellow we've discussed today. It's very clear right away: her entrepreneurial skill even began, with a spark I should say, began as a 16 year-old when she began her first organization. And it continued throughout. It would be very easy for her to give up. It's a big challenge she was trying to solve, but she didn't, and that's the quality we always see in leading social entrepreneurs in our network. Combine with that, there's another key fourth quality, which we call social impact. Now this is a broader aspect of social impact than only on the number of people touched, or the millions of children in Jeroo's case she touched. That's one very basic level, important level of social impact. But Ashoka takes it a bit further in the sense that we're looking for systems change. We're looking for solutions that are actually shifting the way that people think, that people, processes and institutions act in society. It's a deeper kind of impact which we'll get to later in the session. And finally we're looking at ethical fiber. Now this relates a lot to the motivation of the social entrepreneur. And also... it relates a lot to the motivation of a social entrepreneur. In the sense, I mean, that this is a person driven by social impact, not on building a business or changing... or personal gain. What I mean by that is, this is someone who is motivated by the change in society and that's their ultimate goal. So it's more about, if you will, scaling impact, rather than scaling a business or an organization. So those are the five qualities that we see, and includes the new idea, the creativity, the entrepreneurial quality, the social impact, and ethical fiber. This is the full picture that we see. So I think, to wrap this up, the final two key parts of this discussion will be how a fellow is elected, you may be wondering, but also what happens once you become an Ashoka fellow. So, let's start with the process. This is also something, similar to the criteria. The process to become an Ashoka fellow has been used for 30 years. This is a process honed over those, that period of time. And again is used in every single one of the 87 countries that we worked in, that we work in. The search and selection process begins at a local level, in the local country office with the nomination stage. This is a five part process, which continues along its course through a national evaluation which includes the site visits and due diligence and references et cetera, that are done on every single Ashoka fellow, candidate, in addition to an international review stage. An international panel stage, which requires interviews with both social and business entrepreneurs in the local context. Finally, an Ashoka fellow candidate goes through the, through the last stage of the selection process, which is the global Board of Directors' review. So, that's a five part process that you can see spans from the beginning local, national review, through an international review, and finally through Ashoka's global Board of Directors. So, when someone does pass that five stage process, you have an Ashoka fellow. This is someone, one of 3,000 people around the world who serve as a role model for the citizen sector. This is someone we can look towards as inspiration to start our own idea, to create something new, to connect with another person to start something you've been thinking about. When an Ashoka fellow becomes an Ashoka fellow they join the network of these 3,000 Fellows, and there's three key parts of the Ashoka fellowship, which is life-long, this is not an incubator or an accelerator. We work with social entrepreneurs in such a way over their entire lifespan. So the first key part of the fellowship is what we refer to as the, the intellectual capital, if you will. The components of strategic support. Whether that's through a partner of ours, or pro bono partner, or individuals in our network that are linking up in the challenge areas a fellow faces. The second key part of the fellowship is maybe perhaps called social capital. This refers to what we've described before as the collaborative entrepreneurship piece. The connections between fellows around the world, and the programs that Ashoka builds to actually facilitate that. The last component of the fellowship is the financial capital. Now for those fellows that need funding in order to focus full time on their work, Ashoka provides a living stipend. But in addition to that we work a lot as well in terms of opening doors to new funding through our network, which includes not only the 3,000 fellows, but of course the businesses and universities and schools that are part of our network that we'll get to as well in later sessions. >> So what is the actual impact that Ashoka fellows have in the world? >> That's a really good question. Almost 60% of Ashoka fellows change national policy within five years of election. Even more interestingly, is that more than 80% of Ashoka fellows change a system at the national level, within ten years of election. And here we could come back to Jeroo's story again. Her service, Childline India, is now the way that the Indian state is protecting children in India. So that's a perfect example of system change at the national level. And then an even more interesting number I think is that more than 90% of Ashoka fellows have their ideas replicated by other groups or other people. And then I think it's quite interesting to stop here a little bit. So more than 90% of Ashoka fellow have their ideas replicated by other groups. If we think about traditional business versus social entrepreneurship, a traditional business would be very unhappy, and it wouldn't be their criteria of success to have other people run with their products, so to speak, and take the product. For a social entrepreneur, in Ashoka's terms an Ashoka fellow, that is the key criteria of success that they have other people, lots of other people, adopting the idea as their own and creating a system change with that. So it's a, actually a big success for them if they have other people replicating the idea. And I think also this number speaks quite well back to, or links well to the criteria, that Rebecca mentioned before. Because it's because we have trustworthy people, that are very inspirational, and that have a new idea, an innovation that people want to follow. So that also links back to that I think. So let's look at the maybe the notion on systems change a little bit more because that's at the core of our understanding of social impact and social entrepreneurship. It can be clearer if you think about the model in four steps. Let's start with direct service, or providing a product directly to some people. So for instance when Jeroo went out and spoke to the children on the streets. She was gathering a lot of data, and so on. She soon realized, it's not enough with just me, or other social workers, so she scaled, so that's providing an indirect service. And other children then picked up the line when someone had a problem, and then she wasn't a bottleneck anymore, so it could be quite big. If you think about these two categories, like direct service, and indirect service, you still measure how many people are we reaching, and what kind of difference does that make to those people. And that's of course all fine, that's also what we should be doing. But Ashoka focuses a lot on what we call system change. And there are two categories. There is pattern change and there is framework change. So if we think about the pattern change, that is when you revolutionize or you change a system. So for instance, once Jeroo got Childline India to be the national protection service for children in India, that is really how you change a system, or change an industry. And then, I think sometimes at rare occasions in our world, we come to something called framework change, and that's even bigger changes. That's when you change how people understand themselves, how they think about themselves, how other people regard them basically our understanding world shifts a little bit and I think the women's rights movement is a perfect example of that. Other things are the civil rights movement in the US and I will also say that the field of social entrepreneurship has changed our way of understanding how we can do business in a different way. >> Thank you very much, Åsa and Rebecca.
