[Assam] news@Ashoka - Social entrepreneurs

[umesh sharma]

This concept seems quite important- started by this institute.

 

Umesh

"Bill Drayton, ASHOKA: Innovators for the Public" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:

From: Bill Drayton Date: Thursday, December 29, 2005 To: Umesh Sharma Dear Umesh,         Earlier this month, friends sent you a note with our year end report asking for your support.  You may not have received it due to potentidelays. I therefore thought I should send you a copy of their overview letter again, so you can nonetheless contribute before year end.          From: Marjorie Benton, Former U.S. Representative to UNICEF; Former Chair, Save the Children          Richard Cavanaugh, President and CEO, The Conference Board, Inc.          Richard Danzig, Former Secretary of the Navy          Jessica Einhorn, Dean, School of Advanced International Studies, Johns Hopkins University Date: December 5, 2005 To: Umesh Sharma   Dear Umesh,    Harvard’s Center for Public Leadership and US News & World Report just designated Ashoka’s CEO, Bill Drayton, one of America’s “Best Leaders”.  (Along with Colin Powell, Bill and Melinda Gates, Oprah Winfrey, and the co-founders of Google.)   That they chose Bill, and heavily for his work building Ashoka, comes as no surprise to us.  Many in our community have worked with Ashoka for years and admire its values, practical creativity, and unrivaled impact.   Ashoka is extraordinary.   It invented the phrase “social entrepreneur”.  It built the field.   As Harvard and US News recognized, Ashoka’s impact is astonishingly enormous.  (Astonishing chiefly because Ashoka’s style is so quiet and because public awareness lags way behind the huge social changes Ashoka has helped trigger.)   Ashoka’s first insight was that there is nothing more powerful than a big social idea – but only if it is in the hands of a first-class entrepreneur.  Ashoka is probably best known for its brilliant ability systematically to find this rare combination of powerful idea and top entrepreneur – well before they have succeeded.  It helps them take off, and it sticks with them over their lifetimes – until they have in fact changed the world.   Year after year and on every continent, its results are extraordinary.  Five years after it finds and elects an “Ashoka Fellow”:   ·        Between 50 and 60 percent have changed national policy;   ·        Roughly 90 percent see their innovations copied by independent groups.   Wherever society is stuck, Ashoka social entrepreneurs are at work.  The roads in South Asia are a rule-ignoring bedlam and killing zone;  Fellows are changing the culture, taking on police corruption, putting in place 24 hour hotlines and well deployed emergency response, and creating the first blood banks in wide rural areas.  Each year, 150,000 college capable American high school students do not even apply; one of the early U.S. Fellows now has 80 percent of his participants attending and graduating.  Ashoka allows us to be stakeholders in 2,000 such stories.               The impact is extraordinary, the costs very modest (chiefly a stipend for the Fellow if and to the degree he or she needs it, which averages as little as $3,000 a year in South Asia, for an average start-up period of three years).               The Fellows’ direct impact is only the beginning.  They are role models that inspire many, many others to care and to organize,.  Moreover, their ideas disrupt existing local patterns; and, because the entrepreneur makes them as user friendly as possible, they entice local people to step up and become active changemakers, who in turn become role models for their friends and neighbors.  This dynamic is at the heart of the democratic revolution.               Ashoka does far more than help individual ideas and entrepreneurs fly and succeed.  It weaves them together into a global community whose collaborations are far more powerful than the sum of its solo practitioner parts.  And it is hard at work building the institutions that will best serve its rapidly maturing -- and now globalizing -- field.                For example, now that for the first time social entrepreneurship has a significant number of practitioners who have made major scratches on history and who are operating globally, Ashoka is quietly helping them find one another, collaborate at their quite different levels, and provide leadership to the field.  The resulting Global Academy for Social Entrepreneurship is now publishing a DVD series of in-depth discussions with some of these remarkable people.                Ashoka was founded this month 25 years ago.  It has accomplished a very great deal.  It now is uniquely positioned to make even bigger contributions to the history of our era.  To do so, however, it needs our -- and, very much, your -- help.               Please do what you can.  There is no higher yielding, more important investment.               With every good wish for a superb 2006! Joan Z. Bernstein Former Director Bureau of Consumer Protection Federal Trade Commission   Marjorie Benton Former U.S. Representative to UNICEF Former Chair, Save the Children   Richard E. Cavanaugh President and CEO The Conference Board, Inc. Former Executive Dean Kennedy School of Government   Richard Danzig Former Secretary of the Navy   Marian Wright Edelman Children’s Defense Fund   Jessica Einhorn Dean, School of Advanced International Studies Former Managing Director World Bank   Peter Goldmark Environmental Defense Former Publisher, International Herald Tribune   Jan Piercy Former U.S. Executive Director World Bank Executive Vice-President ShoreBank Corporation   Kurt L. Schmoke Dean Howard University School of Law        Invest in Ashoka and Social Entrepreneurs Online:  Click here to donate now.   Carol Grodzins Former Director International Programs Kennedy School of Government Henry B. Hansmann Yale Law School   Hendrik Hertzberg Senior Editor The New Yorker   Philip B. Heymann Harvard Law School   Michael Lerner President, Commonweal   Eugene Ludwig Former Comptroller of the Currency Chairman and CEO Promontory Financial Group LLC   Theodore R. Marmor Yale Law School Yale School of Management   Joseph Nye Kennedy School of Government   Susan Wachter The Wharton School University of Pennsylvania   Richard Zeckhauser Kennedy School of Government   Richard Ullman Woodrow Wilson School Princeton University       Or mail your tax-deductible contributions to:   Ashoka: Innovators for the Public 1700 North Moore Street (Suite 2000) Arlington, Virginia 22209

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Umesh Sharma
5121 Lackwanna ST
College Park, MD 20740

1-202-215-4328 [Cell Phone]

Ed.M. - International Education Policy
Harvard Graduate School of Education,
Harvard University,
Class of 2005

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