Recommendation for Ashoka Fellowship: Submit a Changemaker for the Fellowship

Ashoka depends on its neighborhood—companions, friends, colleagues, and supporters—to floor the world’s most promising social entrepreneurs. If you recognize a changemaker whose work is shifting techniques and increasing alternative, we welcome your suggestion for the Ashoka Fellowship.

Please learn the choice standards fastidiously earlier than nominating to make sure the candidate aligns with Ashoka’s definition of a main social entrepreneur.

Why advocate somebody to Ashoka Fellowship?

Ashoka can not establish each distinctive social entrepreneur by itself. Nominators play a important function by offering steady results in promising candidates and by providing on-the-ground perspective about rising innovation. Your nomination helps Ashoka discover people who find themselves not solely fixing speedy issues, however who’re altering the buildings that trigger these issues.

Ashoka’s dedication to fairness and inclusion

Ashoka envisions a world freed from systemic oppression—the place everybody has entry to assets, security, energy, and self-expression. To understand that imaginative and prescient, Ashoka is dedicated to figuring out and decreasing structural, institutional, and historic boundaries which have marginalized individuals and communities, together with girls, Black individuals, Indigenous peoples and People of Color, spiritual minorities, individuals with disabilities, neurodivergent individuals, members of the 2SLGBTQIA+ neighborhood, working-class individuals, and people dwelling in poverty.

Ashoka welcomes nominations that improve range amongst Fellows and that spotlight changemakers working with and for underrepresented communities. If you characterize or work carefully with such communities, your nominations are particularly invaluable.

How to advocate a candidate

When you click on the suggestion button, you’ll be requested to supply details about the candidate and their work. Useful data to incorporate:

• Candidate’s full identify, organisation, and site

• Brief biography and related background (3–5 traces)

• Description of the candidate’s thought/initiative (what’s new or totally different?)

• Evidence of influence up to now (attain, adoption, measurable outcomes)

• Examples of management and entrepreneurial dedication (time invested, sacrifices made, observe document)

• Why you suppose the thought can change the subject or scale nationally/regionally

• Any related publications, stories, web sites, or media protection

• Your contact particulars and relationship to the candidate

The extra concrete examples and proof you present, the simpler it’s for assessors to guage match in opposition to Ashoka’s choice standards.

Ashoka’s Five Selection Criteria

All candidate nominations are reviewed in opposition to 5 core standards. Make certain your nominee demonstrates strengths throughout these areas.

1. New Idea

The nominee must be pushed by a genuinely new thought—an method or resolution that modifications the sample in a subject. Ashoka evaluates whether or not the thought is revolutionary relative to historic and present apply, and whether or not it has the potential to change techniques.

2. Creativity

Top social entrepreneurs are inventive visionaries and sensible drawback solvers. Look for indicators of lifelong creativity—novel considering, distinctive problem-solving, and a observe document of producing new visions or approaches.

3. Entrepreneurial Quality

Entrepreneurial high quality is the defining trait of an Ashoka Fellow. Candidates ought to reveal single-minded dedication to their thought, a willingness to commit the subsequent decade (or extra) to realizing it, and the capability to construct establishments or actions that maintain change.

4. Social Impact of the Idea

Ashoka is inquisitive about concepts that can change fields at scale. A undertaking that merely launches another service (e.g., a single clinic or faculty) should be linked to a broader technique for systemic change—coverage reform, replication fashions, structural redesign—to qualify.

5. Ethical Fiber

Change brokers should be trusted by the individuals and establishments they ask to alter. Ethical fiber covers integrity, credibility, and the interpersonal belief essential to mobilize communities and companions. If a candidate can’t be trusted completely, they’re unlikely to cross choice.

Practical suggestions for robust nominations

• Provide concrete proof (metrics, testimonials, pilot outcomes) relatively than solely aspirational language.

• Demonstrate scale potential—clarify how the thought could possibly be adopted broadly or affect techniques.

• Highlight community-centered design and engagement with these affected by the drawback.

• Note collaborations, partnerships, and any demonstrated skill to mobilize assets.

• If the candidate is from an underrepresented group or works with marginalized communities, make that specific.

Use the button HERE to submit a recommendation. 

What occurs after you nominate?

Nominations are reviewed by Ashoka’s scouting and choice groups. Strong candidates could also be contacted for extra data, interviews, or subject visits. Ashoka’s choice course of is rigorous and confidential; not each nominee might be elected, however submissions are invaluable for constructing the pool of doable Fellows.

By recommending a candidate, you assist floor changemakers whose concepts can reshape social techniques and broaden alternative. Ashoka appreciates your time and perception—your nomination could possibly be the first step towards a main social innovation motion.

Ashoka welcomes suggestions of excellent social entrepreneurs year-round. There is no fastened deadline to appoint a candidate for the Ashoka Fellowship, and submissions are accepted on a rolling foundation.

To know extra about such alternatives, click on right here.

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