The Ashoka Journal Spring 2017

The Ashoka Journal SPRING 2017

Division has become an increasingly prevalent concern amongst citizens and institutions across the world over the last few months. The theme could be considered in the context of the electoral divide apparent in so many countries: a battle often framed as between liberal metropolitan elites and the excluded and isolated ‘forgotten’ working classes.

The divide is also apparent between those who recognise the rapidly advancing threat of climate change and those more concerned with the monetisation of existent resources than looking towards a shared future. Across the world the tension between globalisation and increasing movements for isolationism and nationalism is another divide, an apparently ever-widening chasm, ripe with temporary, cheap political currency but little else. Less visible, perhaps more urgent are the divisions between those demarcated as legitimate and free individuals through accidents of birth, skin or gender and those concealed and excluded from legitimacy by the very same categories.

In the context of such turbulence it is our responsibility as social innovators to work to strengthen communities and challenge the divisions that are being both cultivated and revealed. As individuals dedicated and committed to social change it is impossible to anticipate how our decisions and choices might look in the light of hindsight, years or even months ahead, the only tools we have with which to construct our future are our values.

Recalling the words of Elie Wiesel: “We must take sides. Neutrality helps the oppressor, never the victim”.

We collected this issue of The Ashoka Journal in the spirit of exploring collaboration, connection and community. Sir Ken Robinson muses on creating an education system for the common good of society, MP Stephen Kinnock considers reuniting communities after Brexit and former Director of Ashoka UK, Rob Wilson talks about our plans to bring changemaker politics to young people en masse.

Meera Patel Editor

Contents Lessons on leadership: In conversation with Richard Collier-Keywood, Global Vice-Chairman of PwC

01

Politics in the wake of Brexit: In Conversation with Stephen Kinnock, MP

05

What is a changemaker?

Reem Rahman, Kris Herbst & Tim Scheu

09

Surviving in the modern world: In conversation with Sir Ken Robinson

13

Why Entrepreneurship? In Conversation with Amy Stursberg: Executive Director of the Blackstone Charitable Foundation

17

Scotland and England – a different value base for social entrepreneurship?

Mel Young

21

How do you unite a divided nation? You put young people in charge Robert Wilson

25

AI, Big Data and the Future of Your Classroom - In Conversation with Priya Lakhani, founder of CENTURY

29

Weaving the #FabricOfChange: The moral crisis of fast fashion

35

The gaps between societies, economies and educations: In conversation with Andreas Schleicher, Director of Education and Skills, OECD

41

Defining Social Entrepreneurship: Sally Osberg, President And Ceo Of Skoll Foundation In Conversation With Bill Drayton Founder And CEO Of Ashoka

45

Lessons on Leadership: In Conversation with Richard Collier-Keywood, Global Vice-Chairman of PwC

Ashoka’s Meera Patel met with Richard Collier-Keywood, Global Vice Chairman of PwC to discuss leadership in a changing world and how to build purpose and values in organisations.

Meera Patel (MP): PwC’s mission is quoted as ‘to build trust in society and solve important problems’. I just wanted to start by asking you what it means to build trust?

Richard Collier-Keywood (RCK): I think if you look back into our history, we started by being the essential link in the capital markets between the people who were investing money and the places where that money was invested. We provided a link of assurance between the investors and the people managing companies and our work confirmed that the accounts produced at the end of the year were a fair representation of the business result and return on the money that had been invested. that was our starting point, but over the years, we’ve found that people trust us to bring an independent view and an independent voice in many different ways and with many different institutions of society, and we have come to adopt this as our purpose.

MP: It’s very clear that purpose is at the heart of what you’re doing in PWC, but where does that come from?

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“Culture I think starts at the top of an organisation, it starts with the values and ambition of the people running the organisation. Culture is the thing that binds an organisation together.�

RCK: I think it comes from the leadership of PwC, from thinking about our relevance to society today and talking about that with our different stakeholders from our clients to our employees and people that work with us.

MP: And how do we build and grow leaders with a sense of purpose at the core of what they do?

RCK: I think it first of all comes down to culture. It’s crucial for organisations to have the right culture, and culture is a tremendously unifying force. Culture I think starts at the top of an organisation, it starts with the values and ambition of the people running the organisation. Culture is the thing that then binds an organisation together. It provides the framework for how people should behave in that organisation, and I think that if you have a culture that has very clearly defined values of integrity and very clearly defined

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behavioural aspects to it, it makes it clear what’s expected of people who work within that business. When people are exposed to that culture, they see leaders and they are able to develop themselves based on learnings from those leaders. This doesn’t necessarily mean that they become the same as those leaders, because that wouldn’t be right, but it means that they have the ability to experience different facets of leadership within a framework that works.

MP: I guess another way of thinking about leaders is people who mediate the relationship between inside and outside the organisation. How do you think a relationship with the public changes an understanding of purpose, or shapes the sense of values or culture?

RCK: a lot has changed over the last five years with the advent of social media. I’m not clear today that there is an inside and an outside to an organisation. In other words, I think that if organisations today are not totally transparent, there’s a good chance that social media forces them to be transparent. So, as a leader of an organisation, you strive for that transparency because that means you’re the same thing to the people who work with you, as you are to your clients, as you are to the whole outside world, to regulators, to governments. I think that would be my starting point: there is no difference today between inside and outside an organisation. Going back to your point on leadership I suppose, leaders have to be capable of being the same facing inside the organisation as facing outside the organisation. You can’t be one person on day one and then another person on day two when you’re doing different work.

MP: Is this a new form of leadership?

RCK: I’m not sure if it is a new form of leadership to be honest, I think it’s an evolution.

One of the big changes that you see in corporate Britain in terms of leadership is an appreciation by leaders more and more over the last few years that they’ve got a variety of stakeholders to take account of, and it’s not just shareholders. So if you go back 15 or maybe 20 years, the only focus in corporate Britain was the shareholder, to make money for the shareholder. Shareholder value was the buzzword. You know today actually, people are talking about multiplicity of stakeholders, including society as a whole, including government, including, obviously clients, including employees. So leaders have had to evolve their style over a period of time to actually ensure that they deliver to all sets of stakeholders, not just to one single set. Leadership has got more complex over that period of time. It needs to be rebalanced to include broader obligations that business has in society.

This interview has been condensed and edited.

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Politics in the wake of Brexit: In Conversation with Stephen Kinnock, MP

Ashoka UK’s Meera Patel caught up with Labour MP Stephen Kinnock to discuss building a constructive politics in the wake of the vote to leave the EU. Meera Patel (MP): What are the implications of Brexit for young people?

Stephen Kinnock (SK): It poses a fundamental question about our future as a country.

Whilst there are some incredibly important decisions to be made around our future trading relationship with the EU and the future of the movement of people and labour around the EU, I think it also poses a major question about the gap between generations.

This is most evident in the fact that young people voted very strongly to remain in the EU and people of the older generation voted to leave, there is a great question over the intergenerational question that Brexit revealed. I don’t think it caused a gap I think it revealed something that was already there, a very different set of perceptions and thoughts about Britain’s place in the world and how much you as a young person want to engage with the rest of the world.

I’ve got two young daughters, 20 and 17, and when I talk with them about their global vision it’s incredibly different to the older generation in terms of how interconnected my daughters feel with the rest of the world. I also think there’s a huge difference between them and young people in communities such as the one that I represent such as the one in Aberavon, communities that have felt that this process of globalisation has happened but it seems to have happened without them. They don’t see a broader global community around them, they see their own communities, their immediate surroundings and their own networks. This approach has strengths too, on the one hand there’s a really tight knit, strong sense of identity and community within my constituency, but I think that

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Young people see how much the world has changed in terms of technology and yet they don’t really see political institutions catching up with that reality or speaking to them in a language that they understand. there’s also a sense of less opportunities being available to young people in that sort of area. I think it’s about marrying together all of these different concerns, intergenerational concerns, what Brexit means in communities like Aberavon compare to people in a more urban and metropolitan community. How do we ensure that Brexit doesn’t end up with us pulling up the drawbridge and floating off into the mid-Atlantic. I think for young people, some of the questions that are going to be answered over the next months and years are going to shape their whole lives.

MP: How would you respond to concerns that whilst some young voted passionately, the number of young people voting is significantly less than other demographics. Why centralise the concerns of young people?

SK: I think that young people feel that politics and political institutions are not facilitating change. Young people want to see change, they want to see progress on climate change,

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they want to see progress on opportunities in terms of jobs and their future in the 21st century. Young people see how much the world has changed in terms of technology and yet they don’t really see political institutions catching up with that reality or speaking to them in a language that they understand. We shouldn’t therefore be surprised that young people feel disconnected from political discourse and the political mainstream. Until we speak that language, a language that’s clearly connected too what’s happening right now, in the 21st century, we will really struggle to make that connection with young people and get them interested in politics. There are however fantastic projects such as Bite the Ballot, lead by the Ashoka Fellow Michael Sani, which I think have a really new take on what is required for young people to get involved. It’s evidently not just about the voting process, it’s about understanding the role of the media, understanding the role of different institutions, understanding the role of the trade union movement, it’s a much richer dialogue than counting how many people are voting and how many won’t. This is a bottom up approach about getting people engaged in civic activities, getting people volunteering, working together and understanding that they can be the agents of change, not just the objects of change. Young people will not invest their time and energy, in something that will not lead to any kind of change, but if you can demonstrate that you understand the reality in which they live, you understand what needs to change and you will find that way of making a change – and I think that’s often at community and at grassroots level.

MP: In the context of this disconnect, what is the role of politicians?

SK:I think that the politics of the 21st century, particularly for left of centre politicians such as myself, is no longer about the machine, or having conversations inside this Westminster village, it’s much more about reaching out reuniting our country and reuniting our community. I think the United Kingdom is probably more divided than it has ever been, since the civil war, because we’ve got to a situation where London and the South-East is drifting away from the rest of the country. I go to communities and just feel like I’m in a different world, then you’ve got this growing divide between the younger generation and the rest, we’ve even got growing examples of conflict between ethnic communities, so a lot of this is about reuniting and that must be done at a grass roots level. It’s up to politicians to provide some leadership in that sense and find some opportunities to work practically and in tangible way. Rather than simply going back and saying ‘there’s nothing we can do about that because we’re not in government,’ or ‘there’s nothing we can do about that, it’s not my responsibility,’ it’s about us going in and taking some responsibility and showing some leadership. As I said before, it’s about supporting communities to be agents of change, rather than objects of change.

This interview has been condensed and edited. Photo credit David B Young, via Flikr (https://www.flickr.com/photos/david0287/)

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What is a changemaker?

Reem Rahman, Kris Herbst, and Tim Scheu

Bill Clinton introduced the term into the zeitgeist during the DNC. What does it take to be one?

A remarkable thing happened at the Democratic National Convention in Philadelphia: Bill Clinton chose to encapsulate Hillary’s public service career with one description: “She is the best darn changemaker I have ever known.”

News outlets around the world carried headlines about the speech, with some wondering, what is a changemaker?

For us at Ashoka—a network that has been dedicated to building an “Everyone A Changemaker” world for more than a decade—it’s an exciting moment to witness changemaking become part of our collective consciousness. And it’s even better when it prompts a debate about who might qualify as the most effective changemaker. But the moment comes with trepidation, too. It’s imperative that the term doesn’t become partisan. The complexity of societal challenges are too great for any one party to lay claim to an identity as uplifting as changemaker.

Changemakers are school children in Haiti creating new traffic safety systems, American truckers preventing human trafficking, and Nobel Peace Prize winners bringing banking to Bangladesh and fighting for child rights in India. They can come from anywhere in the world, they can come from any sector, and most importantly, they can have any political leaning.

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Changemakers are school children in Haiti creating new traffic safety systems, American truckers preventing human trafficking, and Nobel Peace Prize winners bringing banking to Bangladesh and fighting for child rights in India

So if we shouldn’t gauge a changemaker by their shade of blue or red, what qualities do they exhibit?

Changemakers are Tenacious about the Greater Good They use a deep-rooted sense of empathy for others, identify a specific problem or opportunity to tackle, and give themselves permission to do something about it.

But it doesn’t stop there. Changemakers are relentless.

Picture a child who wants to recycle plastic to protect local wildlife. By doing so, she has taken her first steps in changemaking. But when recycling becomes commonplace, she’ll graduate to the next major challenge in managing resources (a scenario that is already becoming true in some places).

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Changemakers Leave the Parachute at Home Changemakers cannot just parachute into a community as an outsider who has come to save the day. They must be personally connected to the issue they want to solve. Take the example of Khalid al-Khudair, a social entrepreneur who focuses on creating jobs for women in Saudi Arabia. He is passionate about women’s empowerment in the Middle East not as a theoretical development professional from abroad, but as someone born and raised within Saudi Arabia, and having witnessed the struggle of his sisters search for employment first hand.

Further, changemaking is not just the domain of a privileged few. People seen as being “in need” often create and drive their own solutions, many addressing the most pressing issues of our time. For example, street children in India are running their own helpline to quickly reach other children in distress, women in Nigeria are incorporating technology to build wealth beyond subsistence farming, and ex-gang members are leading efforts to reduce gun violence by more than 75% in American inner cities or mentoring other youth for tech careers in South Africa.

Changemakers Bust the “Lone Hero” Myth Not every changemaker launches their own start-up. Sometimes it is the changemaker within an existing institution that’s most powerful. For instance, a cell-phone company employee worked to help informal businesses in slum areas function by giving them mailing addresses through mobile phones, or a pharmaceutical company employee began working on cheap, accurate, paper-based diagnostic kits for anaemia after a family friend died without being diagnosed. Known as social “intrapreneurs,” these are people—like many of us—who understand the mechanics of their own firms and are in a great position to innovate for the greater good.

We live in a rapidly transforming, increasingly interconnected world. The size and complexity of global challenges needs changemakers of every shape and size. And while the Clintons were among the first politicians to publicly embrace the association, our country—and our future—depends upon changemakers across the political spectrum.

As Engineers Without Borders founder and inspiring changemaker George Roter says, “Everyone has changemaking in their DNA; it’s just a matter of unlocking it.”

This article was first published on https://www.fastcoexist.com/3062483/what-is-achangemaker on 4th August 2016. Photo credit Matt Popov via Unsplash.com.

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Surviving in the Modern World: In conversation with Sir Ken Robinson

Ross Hall (RH): What skills are essential for humanity to thrive in the modern world?

Sir Ken Robinson (KR): Well, there’s a lot of talk these days about 21st century skills and I go along with a great deal of it, my only reservation about the idea of 21st century skills is that when they’re listed, they often include skills that were relevant at any time, in any century, it’s not that they’re a completely brand new set of things that people need to learn now that they didn’t have to learn before, but the context is very different.

We live in a world that’s growing very quickly in terms of population, which is producing great strains on the environment. It’s producing enormous cultural pressures, it’s changing the economic landscape. We’re challenging our relationship with the earth in a very fundamental way, we don’t know if we can continue for long this way so the issues of sustainability and new forms of economic practice we need to develop and the world’s becoming more complicated in all sorts of ways.

The capacity for new thinking and for turning old ideas into new applications has really never been more important, and I think our kids ought to recognize how deep their capacities for creativity are. People often think it’s a rather vague term that can’t be defined. I’ve spend a bit of time trying to convince people you can define it, it’s the process of having original ideas that have value, and it’s the fruit of imagination, it’s applied imagination and it can be present, evident, developed in almost every part of the curriculum. Not just the arts, but in science, technology, the world is crying out for fresh thinking, new ideas.

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So compassion to me is fundamental to our ability to be together as communities, as it’s this sort of cultural, glue that holds us together into communities.

A second is compassion. Compassion is rooted in empathy and empathy is our ability to step into other people’s point of view to see the world as they see it. To try and take that perspective and it comes from the same power of imagination of seeing things away from our immediate circumstances. I think of compassion as applied empathy, so to speak, the executive wing of empathy, it’s one thing to empathize with somebody else’s situation…it’s something else to do something about I, and to decide either to act on behalf of somebody or to prevent others acting against them.

So compassion to me is fundamental to our ability to be together as communities, as it’s this sort of cultural, glue that holds us together into communities. Active compassion to me is very important and that begins with self-understanding and it relates to mindfulness, which I think of as composure. I mean the ability to be centered in yourself. A lot of young people, and not only young people, all sorts of people, I think find themselves off balance in various ways. You only have to look at the figures for depression. According to World Health Organization, by 2020, depression will be the second largest cause of disability in human populations. This is in a world that’s growing materially better off all the time. What it points to is a spiritual deficit in our lives, and I don’t mean that in

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the religious sense, I don’t not mean it the religious sense, but I don’t mean it just in a limited faith-based way, whatever the faith happens to be. I’m talking about the sense of our internal energy whether we feel balanced or out of balance. Whether we feel whole or disjointed with ourselves.

And the fourth one I’d mention is collaboration. We do live in school systems, which are more and more based on competition and win-win and individualism, that’s an agenda that’s being sadly driven harder by the international lead tables where kids are competing against each other for limited places in other institutions, and schools are being drawn to compete with each other for limited resources, and countries are competing with each other for dominance in these league tables, and there’s a place for competition, but there’s a much more important place for collaboration. This seeing we face common challenges and we’re more likely to solve them if we work together rather than push against each other.

All of these areas are actually rather subtle and complicated in themselves and people need to be trained themselves to do it. We get very used to these safety announcements on aircrafts, you know, when they tell about when the oxygen tanks shoot comes down, and they always say put your own mask on first, before you try and help somebody else.

So one of the keys to developing these capacities in students is first to attend to helping teachers develop them in themselves.

Teachers have tremendous creative resources, but they’re often not encouraged or trained to develop them. They have their own needs to develop their capacities of composure and empathy, but they don’t have the techniques either, not all of them, but very many, it doesn’t feature in teacher education very much. Mentoring is, I think, an essential part of teaching, and of education more generally. A mentor is somebody who helps you identify your own interests, your own talents, your own strengths, and mitigate your weaknesses, but also it does more than that. A mentor is somebody who can also help you open doors, point you in a direction to move in, and I know in my own life that I’ve had all kinds of mentors that didn’t have mentor on the door, they were just people who took an interest in me, people I met, often teachers, who saw something in me that I didn’t see in myself, who took a shine to something I was capable in doing and encouraged it. Great teachers have always naturally taken on that sort of role. They take an interest in their students a recognize that to be a teacher isn’t just about teaching the discipline, in some direct way. Teachers also empower kids so they gain proper confidence in their own abilities. Seeing the professional growth of the teacher as part of the evolution of education, I think, is absolutely critically important.

This conversation was first produced as a video on Ashoka UK’s youtube.com channel.

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Why Entrepreneurship?

In Conversation with Amy Stursberg: Executive Director of The Blackstone Charitable Foundation

Meera Patel (MP): Why did the Blackstone Charitable Foundation develop a focus on entrepreneurship and economic development, over more traditional forms of giving?

Amy Stursberg (AS): When our Foundation was formed, we knew we wanted to make the greatest impact possible. In order to do this, we knew we needed to be able to leverage the resources of the firm, not just the resources of the Foundation. Following a series of conversations with Steve Schwarzman, Blackstone’s Chairman, CEO and Founder, we settled on entrepreneurship as our focus as a response to the economic crisis and as a way to drive job creation. Even after thirty years, Blackstone remains a tremendously entrepreneurial firm – in short, we believed that we could leverage our human and intellectual capital, as well as our scale, to support entrepreneurship and economic development in communities around the world.

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in short, we believed that we could leverage our human and intellectual capital, as well as our scale, to support entrepreneurship and economic development in communities around the world.

We knew that our Foundation would never have a huge infrastructure, so we wanted to be strategic about how we could have the most impact. I saw a real opportunity to build new and innovative programs to strengthen the entrepreneurial eco-system of a region in ways that others weren’t already addressing. Happily, our programs – focused on addressing a specific regional need and collaborating with key players in a region – have resulted in real impact. Since we’ve started, we’ve committed over $42m in over 30 regions globally helping to create over 25,000 jobs.

MP: What is the business case for creating social impact?

AS: For Blackstone, having a social impact is important both to our employees and to our firm at large. Since we started, we’ve seen a huge increase in our employees

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But 2008 was a moment where it had to be an all hands on deck in both the private and public sectors in order to create jobs and support economic development.

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hoping to get involved in the work of the Foundation. We’re proud to say that this past year nearly 70% of our employees volunteered with our nonprofit partners through Foundation programs. Our firm too is very philanthropic and lives our values that “we can do well by doing good.” Blackstone invests on behalf of more than half of all pensioners in the US and millions more internationally. Globally, we employ more than 600,000 people through our portfolio. Our entrepreneurship work through the Foundation reflects how seriously we take the reality of the firm’s reach, but so do a number of other efforts at the firm, including setting an example for our industry in sustainability across our portfolio.

MP: Why is philanthropy focused on entrepreneurship gaining ground over more traditional methods of philanthropy?

AS: In 2008, when we decided to focus on entrepreneurship, there were almost no other funders, let alone other corporate foundations, focused on entrepreneurship. Just keep in mind that when we started, Twitter had been around for just about a year and AirBnB had just been founded. Uber didn’t even exist. Entrepreneurs as we now define them weren’t a part of public conversation the way they are now. And supporting job growth wasn’t a philanthropic priority – it was an area that governments invested in. But 2008 was a moment where it had to be an all hands on deck in both the private and public sectors in order to create jobs and support economic development. We definitely saw an opportunity to become a leader in philanthropy focused on entrepreneurship, and also a real opportunity to align our social impact with the skills and other assets of Blackstone – a primary function of the firm’s work is help the businesses we invest in succeed and thrive in order to drive economic growth and jobs.

Over the past nine years, many other funders have realized that entrepreneurs around the world are going to be the big job creators of the future and that helping ecosystems support their entrepreneurs can be a really impactful way to create sustained job growth and change. Today, we are excited to work with so many of our peers on collective impact in entrepreneurship. We recently launched the #FacesofFounders campaign with Case Foundation, Google for Entrepreneurs, and UBS. Through that campaign, and thanks to the partnership of these other funders, we are now working to change the face of entrepreneurship to make it more inclusive.

This brochure was produced thanks to the generous support of Blackstone Charitable Foundation. The photographs in this article are from the Ashoka UK Changemaker Summit, also supported by Blackstone Charitable Foundation. Photo credit Claire Greenway Photography.

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Scotland and England – a different value base for social entrepreneurship?

Mel Young, Ashoka Fellow and founder of The Homeless World Cup

When I was visiting London recently from my home town, Edinburgh, someone asked me if Scotland and England were now completely different places?

The question was asked in the context of the angst created by Britain’s decision to leave the European Union and the consequent political uncertainty which this has caused.

It should be remembered that the winning margin for Leave was quite small and some commentators have argued that the country is now damagingly split 50:50. Except that this isn’t true in Scotland where every region voted in favour of remaining in the EU; sometimes by quite substantial majorities.

As discussions continue and the shrill media hyperbole intensifies, a new scenario emerges every week. At the time of writing, the Prime Minister has set out her position to begin the negotiations to leave the EU and this seems to have discounted the views of the

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Is it because Scotland has a very different set of basic values which have been honed over decades of political discussions and development, I ask myself? Words like “community” and “fairness” and “neighbourliness” are always present in Scotland when people are making assessments about new plans or making key decisions about local of national developments. It is in the DNA of Scots many would argue. devolved Scottish Government which demanded that the wishes of the Scottish people be recognised in these discussions.

This seems likely to mean that there will be another referendum on Scottish independence in 2018. But with the ever changing scenarios, who knows what the situation will be next week, let alone by 2018.

But in trying to answer the original question, and listening to the tenor of the debates and discussions which are going on north and south of the border, it does appear that sometimes the two countries have a completely different set of values. The media hysteria which seems to grow loudly any time the word immigration is mentioned in England just doesn’t seem to have any traction in Scotland.

Is it because Scotland has a very different set of basic values which have been honed over decades of political discussions and development, I ask myself? Words like “community” and “fairness” and “neighbourliness” are always present in Scotland when people are making assessments about new plans or making key decisions about local of national developments. It is in the DNA of Scots many would argue.

I am a social entrepreneur and I am relaxed living and working in Scotland. Social enterprises are springing up all over the place in what seems to be a very natural extension of the values which Scottish people aspire to. The notion that we can combine the concepts of business and charity together and make a difference to the wider community whilst also encompassing enterprise sits comfortably across the population.

At the end of last year, the Scottish Government launched “Scotland’s Social Enterprise Strategy 2016 – 2026” which is a comprehensive and ambitious policy for government which aims to grow and develop the social enterprise sector in Scotland. It has received widespread applause from all quarters and is probably one of the best government policy documents on social enterprise in the world.

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Scotland will aim to get to a position where social enterprise becomes the standard way to do business in the future. It is a fascinating place to be at the moment, given these uncertain times, and yes I do think that Scotland and England are starting to become very different places to live in.

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Scotland does have a history in this area. The pioneering businessman, Robert Owen, the mill owner, created a successful business in the early 1800s whilst providing excellent conditions for his employees and supporting the surrounding community. The early fires of Fair Trade were lit in Scotland when campaigners from the Scottish Nicaraguan Solidarity Committee worked out that a impactful way of supporting exploited Nicaraguan farmers was to import their coffee. People will say that coffee didn’t taste so good and that the distribution was erratic but the values behind Fair Trade were born.

So, the Scottish Government’s strategy finds traction with the many social entrepreneurs who are busy trying to improve their communities in Scotland. They don’t necessarily have high profiles, caring more about the outcomes of their work compared with their own public persona. Rural communities have been regenerated because land has been bought from landowners and transformed into sustainable entities by social entrepreneurs and community leaders. There is lots to be proud of and lots more challenges to take on.

But where is England in the space? Earlier this month, John Bird of The Big Issue, one of the pioneer social enterprises; urged the UK Government to follow Scotland’s lead in developing an effective social enterprise policy.

In response to the Prime Minister speech on a “Shared Society” where Theresa May mentioned social enterprise a number of times, he said: “Unfortunately, the whole system is moving rather slowly. If you carry on at this rate, somewhere towards the end of this century we might be able to have a social enterprise industry that actually gets to the parts of society that big business cannot get to.

“Is it possible maybe to imitate the Scottish government’s idea of having a ten-year strategy to look at ways in which to do social enterprise in every conceivable way?”

John Bird will keep arguing the case but the impression you get is that England doesn’t really “get” social enterprise in the same way that Scotland does because both countries have a different value base.

Scotland will aim to get to a position where social enterprise becomes the standard way to do business in the future. It is a fascinating place to be at the moment, given these uncertain times, and yes I do think that Scotland and England are starting to become very different places to live in.

Mel Young is the founder of The Homeless World Cup and is an Ashoka fellow.

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How do you unite a divided nation?

You put young people in charge Rob Wilson

As chaos consumed the UK in the aftermath of the European referendum, questions of leadership and economics dominated the political landscape. With a rapidly crashing economy and deep uncertainty, everyone from politicians, academics to business leaders were forecasting, debating and analysing. But behind the scenes (until now) there was one major demographic working to find a way forward: young people.

In the days that followed the referendum result I (as Ashoka UK Director) and a couple of others decided to convene youth sector leaders, Ashoka Fellows, social entrepreneurs, and young changemakers to pose the question: What next for the UK and how can young people shape the agenda? The answer was a simple one — put young people in charge. This is something we often say, but now was time to turn rhetoric into action.

It was clear that young people must decide and we should stop making decisions on their behalf. So we convened a group of 30–50 young people from all sides of the political spectrum, and from all across the UK, to run a week long ‘hackathon’ to decide for themselves what came next. Within weeks they had self-organised, formed a leadership

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Each participant realised that whatever their views and however they voted, they had a shared interest in standing united as young people with a list of demands for what Brexit could now actually look like. They will live with the outcome of this vote the longest, with the opportunities and challenges that it presents.

team, developed a strategy, drafted a manifesto of guiding principles, and raised significant funding from Paul Hamlyn Foundation to make this project a reality.

Three young leaders represent a diversity of interests across the UK. Hafsah (17 and too young to vote) Joe (22 and a young Conservative councillor for Stafford and leave campaigner) and Charlotte (27 and a left-wing activist pro remain campaigner) are running the show and momentum is gathering, as is interest from Westminster. They are joined by a wider leadership team of 100 young people who all realised that whatever their views and however they voted, they had a shared interest in standing united as young people with a list of demands for what Brexit could now actually look like. They will live with the outcome of this vote the longest, with the opportunities and challenges that it presents.

It is the UK’s first nationwide, youth-led campaign to demand the best possible Brexit deal for young people.

Formed by young people, for young people, to represent and unite all young voices regardless of background.

Undivided is strictly non-partisan and aims to engage a million under-30s (both leave and remain) to crowdsource their demands and ensure that young people have a voice

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in shaping post-Brexit Britain. It will not seek to reverse the referendum result but look to build a strong consensus that will allow young people from across the political spectrum to speak as one. The youth media agency Livity is housing the campaign and those of us too old to be the target audience of this campaign are quietly providing advice and support behind the scenes. Not that it’s needed much.

Championing the voice of young people is not new for Ashoka We are proudly supporting many Ashoka Fellows who are already pioneering youth leadership in other ways. For example Michael Sani, founder of Bite The Ballot is bridging the gap between youth and politics using educational games, technologies and peer-topeer networks, with registering young people to vote as one key outcome. Lily Lapenna founded MyBnk to deliver financial education by young people and for young people, through banking and entrepreneurship workshops. And Shauneen Lambe founder of Just for Kids Law has been supporting young people to launch legal challenges against unjust barriers to higher education.

We also work in partnership with many of the UK’s school leaders who are doing all they can to educate young teenagers to be changemakers on a day to day basis. From Atlantic College in Wales where students from 90 countries come together to pursue peace and international dialogue to School21 in Stratford where students as young as 4 are taught through project based learning, around their local community.

At Ashoka we are working to empower all young people to lead social change, in other words to be changemakers. We see Undivided as changemaking in action. They now need your support. Undivided aims to engage a million under-30s from across the UK to crowdsource their demands and ensure that young people have a voice in shaping postBrexit Britain. Undivided will curate the top ten demands and, working with political connections and partner organisations, these will be presented to Parliament in January, with the aim of influencing the upcoming Brexit negotiations.

Regardless of how they might have voted, the campaign invites all under-30s to collectively shape post-Brexit Britain by sharing their demand at www.weareundivided.co.uk For the avoidance of doubt we take no political stance on Brexit as an organization, our support is about empowering young people to lead and take action, regardless of their perspective.

This article was first published on Medium.com/change-maker on 26th October 2016.

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AI, Big Data and the Future of Your Classroom In Conversation with Priya Lakhani, founder of CENTURY

Ashoka UK’s Meera Patel sat down with Priya Lakhani Founder and CEO of Century Tech to discuss what education looks like from the perspective of a tech startup.

Meera Patel: How do you view the education system today?

Priya Lakhani: I think it works for some but it’s very broken for many people, it’s a system based on the industrial revolution. There are significant pain points in the system: at its core the one size fits all delivery of education is simply inadequate, it isn’t working. So why do we do it? In a class when you’ve got an average of 30 individuals, a year group of 180, and on average 939 in an entire secondary school and you have to teach a curriculum in one academic year you are time pressured, and it’s limiting teachers enormously. The truth is that we know this system doesn’t suit the needs of every individual, we have

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Teachers are simply unable to do what they are meant to do. When we asked teachers why they came to teaching their answers included: to impart knowledge of a subject that they really enjoy, to work with young people and to inspire young people. In the present circumstances this is impossible

children who fall behind and children who are challenged. The other big issue that is really prevalent at the moment is teacher retention. On the front line nearly 75% of teachers are considering leaving their jobs and the majority of those, 82%, consider workload to be the biggest issues and that simply has to be addressed.

MP: So who is affected by these pain points?

PL: The pain points are in the school system, I’m talking about the delivery of education in both primary and secondary schools. The statistics I’ve just mentioned are for the UK but the idea of one size fits all education affects every child and every learner in every school. The children most adversely affected by this are in the state school sector where resources are more pressed. In terms of the workload crisis, the primary effects are upon the teachers but overworked, under-resourced and underpaid teachers ultimately impact learners too. Teachers are simply unable to do what they are meant to do. When we asked teachers why they came to teaching their answers included: to impart knowledge of a subject that they really enjoy, to work with young people and to inspire young people. In the present circumstances this is impossible, and if as our research suggests that 60% of their week is spent on admin then they’re not able to fulfil any of these goals. This disconnect has a huge impact on them and we’re now in a position where the most talented individuals are leaving their professions and leaving classrooms that need them and the children are directly affected.

MP: And how can we respond to that ?

PL: There are several ways to respond to that, there’s obviously a lot of talk in politics at a ministerial level about addressing teacher shortages and changing education. We have to be really clear about this, do I think that’s going to happen tomorrow? The answer is no. Whilst this is happening we have teachers, we have unions, we have head teacher associations crying out for change.

The way in which I’m trying to address these problems is through technology, it’s influenced every single sector in this world, but education is still slow to adopt. I’m interested in using artificial intelligence and big data technology combined with neuroscience and robust pedagogical methods to remove the one size fits all element of education and to lessen the admin workload for teachers.

The project I’ve been working on over the last two years, that we’ve just launched in September, has been overwhelming in terms of the results that we’ve been seeing in secondary schools. Century is a platform, designed to learn how the individual student learns. It’s content agnostic, so a student could log in to access anything from mathematics

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I think an ideal education is centred around a student, a system of personalised education can have an enormous impact on an individual.

to the happiness curriculum. A student will learn their strengths, their weaknesses and the way that they learn, and the platform will make smart recommendations for the student all by itself. The machine learning in the platform means that the platform will constantly learn how to make smarter and smarter recommendations every nanosecond that a user is on the platform anywhere in the world. It then takes that data and provides it in realtime to the teacher. This doesn’t mean lots of bar charts and spreadsheets, we analyse the data to offer actionable insights to teachers. Usually when a teacher walks into a classroom they are required to micro-assess, micro-mark to get the data from a student that they then need to enter into a spreadsheet to enter into the management information system, so that someone can eventually review it to find out if an intervention was necessary. In some great schools I’ve seen this happen in a day, in most schools this happens in a term and in some schools I’ve been in this happens on an annual basis. A child needed an intervention a year ago, because they didn’t understand the common denominator in fractions and it got lost through cumbersome management systems. With the use of the century platform that won’t happen any more. The purpose of Century is to reduce the admin overload on a teacher, it does not replace a teacher, it supplements a teacher. We believe we’ve built a product which allows the teacher to prioritise the human elements of their work.

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MP: Some people would say that what underfunded and resourced schools need is more capacity to invest in human contact rather than machine contact, how would you respond?

PL: I was in Kent recently and saw that there were 1400 vacancies for teachers currently and that those vacancies aren’t being filled. If we could have a world where every student had a full time teacher that would be great. I hope that engaging with artificial intelligence enables and big data enables us to incentivise teachers not to leave by changing the balance of their workload. But even if we did have enough teachers we still need to figure a different way of structuring workloads in schools, because 60% of their time is still going to be admin.

MP: Do you think a private company is the best vehicle to do this? Many people would argue that education should be completely neutral.

PL: Artificial intelligence and big data technology is innovative and it’s expensive, it’s really expensive to build. To build a platform like this you need to hire the best engineers, the best data scientists and the most outstanding cognitive neuroscientists and most brilliant teachers. Can a not-for-profit bring in that kind of talent and build an agile platform? I don’t believe we can. I think that working with angel investors is one of the things that has enabled us to do this.

MP: And so what does an ideal education look like?

PL: A wholesome education is centred around a student, a system focused on personalised education can have an enormous positive impact on an individual. This system wouldn’t just be about what a child needs to know today, but would teach a child important skills, such as how to think, how to ask questions, how to use resources and how to find the best solution. Students should have access to teachers every day who spend their energy inspiring, challenging and providing that all important pastoral care every child needs.

There are some really incredible schools - from ones that focus on project based learning to technology focussed schools and we must not forget them whilst examining the holes in the current system. There are places where positive steps are being made. My ambition and Century’s ambition is to ensure no child is left behind and no child is left under challenged. I have seen us make a huge impact on children’s lives using advanced technology and my challenge now is to scale this to all schools.

This interview has been condensed and edited.

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Weaving the #FabricofChange: the moral crisis of fast fashion Ashoka UK in partnership with Thomson Reuters Foundation and C&A Foundation

Each year, 80 billion pieces of clothing are purchased across the globe, which is 400% more than 10 years ago. Unsurprisingly these sales constitute a major financial market. The fashion brand Christian Dior is one of the biggest companies in the world - last year their sales totalled $41.6 billion, roughly equivalent to the GDP of Tunisia. The fashion industry is of increasing global importance but in the context of pressure to drive down costs and drive up profit margins there is an emergent moral crisis.

On the 24th April 2013 the Rana Plaza building in Bangladesh collapsed killing 1,129 people and injuring a further 2500. Attributed to a structural weakness, the incident was deemed the deadliest garment factory accident in history. The tragedies of the apparel industry aren’t simply confined to freak incidences. The structures that underpin consumption and production are deeply flawed. ‘Fast fashion’, the byword for cheap clothing that masks its social and environmental costs, demands a whole new meaning under the realisation

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Contemporary fashion is caught between public faรงades of flawless affordable perfection on catwalks, Instagram feeds and shop windows, and the inconvenient machinery that enables and underpins the illusion: sweatshops, toxic dyes and exploitation.

These wages are the result of an effort to cut costs by moving from country to country, finding the cheapest labour and least regulated workforce.

This cycle of exploitation is particularly targeted at women and migrant workers.

that in the US alone 14.3 million tonnes of textiles are discarded each year. The statistic is particularly painful, given the knowledge that the pressure to produce cheap cotton has been linked to the suicides of 250,000 farmers in India, the cheapest source of the material globally.

Whilst the Rana Plaza disaster is widely seen as a symbol of an industry in moral crisis, even the most cursory glance at the daily production of fashion confirms that this crisis is structural. Contemporary fashion is caught between public faรงades of flawless affordable perfection on catwalks, Instagram feeds and shop windows, and the inconvenient machinery that enables and underpins the illusion: sweatshops, toxic dyes and exploitation.

Understanding The Problems Hailing the shouts from protestors across Bangladesh and

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solidarity movements, such as the #whomademyclothes Twitter campaign, companies and governments have been responding to the events at Rana Plaza in a variety of ways: from sharing information on factory inspections to funding infrastructure projects. Despite the valuable work of many brands, it seems that many of the more agile, innovative solutions are coming from a new player in the fashion field: social entrepreneurs.

This was one of the key drivers behind Fabric of Change, an initiative launched by Ashoka and C&A Foundation to source, support and accelerate innovations for a fair and sustainable apparel industry. This three-year initiative is unlocking the unique power and potential of social entrepreneurs and their solutions to transform the apparel industry as a force for good.

Rooted in the perspectives of Ashoka Fellows and additional insights from industry experts, the Fabric of Change Social Innovation Mapping uncovers the barriers to and design principles for transformative change within the apparel industry.

Fabric of Change is now working to support, spotlight and accelerating social innovators and their solutions to these barriers.

Hidden from View – Conditions in supply chains are often obscured The Fabric of Change report found that at the heart of fashion’s sustainability problem was a visual obstruction; brands, consumers and regulation agencies simply can’t look back to supply chains and see where products come from. Fashion supply chains are notoriously decentralised, the scale of orders demanded by large retailers is usually way beyond the capacity of any one workshop. Factories such as Rana Plaza may be asked to make around 180,000 shirts per day at a price of around $0.20 or risk losing contracts and not being paid at all. The result is long chains of sub-contractors who are challenging to track and hold accountable. Even brands that invest in monitoring their supply chains “obtain only irregular and inaccurate information”.

“No one should die for Fashion” Looking at the profiles of the 5 factories housed in Rana Plaza and their 3639 workers, serves to illuminate trends in the industry more broadly. 80% of the workers were young women “18, 19, 20 years of age, working around 100 hours a week. The most junior staff took home 12 cents an hour, and the most senior sewers raised this to 24 cents an hour.

These wages are the result of an effort to cut costs by moving from country to country, finding the cheapest labour and least regulated workforce. This cycle of exploitation is

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particularly targeted at women and migrant workers, the most vulnerable in the chain.

Essential services such as childcare and healthcare are critical to the long-term wellbeing of low-income workers, helping them to have long term, quality of life. In the words of a placard held by one garment factory worker at the protests around the Rana Plaza collapse “No one should die for fashion.”

Making the Right Choices Unsurprisingly, considering the lack of knowledge that many corporations hold around their own supply chains, consumers aren’t particularly aware of the blood and sweat that is woven into their purchases. There is little information available to consumers at pointof-purchase that helps them to make decisions that align with their values. Whilst millions were horrified by the Rana Plaza disaster, it would be nearly impossible for a consumer to identify whether the next high street garment purchased came from that site or one very similar. Even when some information is available ethical products are frequently priced out of the reach of the average consumer.

Fighting the System The current fragmented and decentralized supply chains disincentivises companies from prioritising sustainability. The high profit margins promised by “fast fashion” have engaged companies in a system of “rapid fire production” where low costs triumph all other considerations. To create a truly sustainable fashion industry requires a consistent supply and demand of both sustainable materials and processes. We must transform a broken supply chain into a web of collective responsibility.

Finding the Solutions Ultimately the challenges facing the fashion industry are complex and multifaceted: the incentives of contemporary capitalism are intertwined with the challenges of development and the vulnerabilities of low income populations. Fabric of Change identifies, supports and give visibility to leading social innovators creatively and collaboratively tackling social and environmental issues within the apparel industry. But social innovators alone cannot solve these complex problems. Sector partners are crucial in enabling the impact and acceleration of these social innovators – together we can transform the apparel industry and spark a global movement for change.

This article was first published on trust.org on Wednesday 30th November 2016

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The gaps between societies, economies and education: In conversation with Andreas Schleicher, Director of Education and Skills, OECD

Ross Hall (RH): How does the education system today need to change in order to serve the world around it?

Andreas Schleicher (AS): The world is becoming increasingly ambiguous, volatile and the big change I see today is that it’s no longer enough to teach people something. Instead you need to have this kind of compass, and the navigation skills that tell you what is right and what is wrong. To answer questions like where do I go? How do I learn, not for an existent job but to create my job? That is the challenge for people today.

We find ourselves in the same situation that people with routine skills found themselves in the industrial revolution. A lot of people losing their jobs because the ways in which we used to work and think are no longer relevant. That’s what the digital revolution does to many of the skills that are very well established in education today. I think this is a phenomenon and this not the first time in history that we are seeing such paradigm shifts.

The question is, how do we respond to this, how do we equip people with those 21st century skills that are going to be very important for adaptation?

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We don’t lack really good schools, we lack strong education systems that make those good practices systemic.

Innovation is no longer about being great in your field of specialisation, inventing something, or doing it. It’s about you being able to connect the dots between people working in different fields, thinking across disciplines. In a way I think that is a fundamental flaw that we have in our education systems today, because everybody talks about social skills but at the end of the year we give students an individual certificate. The whole focus is on what one needs to know and that’s still important but we need to put greater emphasis on the other parts.

And therefore economic success today is very much about being able to collaborate, compete and connect with people different from you. I’m successful today because I can solve problems -I have the mathematics that I need and the literacy skills but the others skills that I use probably have a longer shelf life: think about curiosity, leadership, resilience, empathy. In the past it was about building relationships with your family, with your relatives, with the kind of networks that support you. Today success is about building relationships with people who may think differently from you, who may look at the world in a different way, who may come from a different disciplinary specialisation and work and think really differently.

It is a big challenge for people to connect, collaborate, compete with people who they don’t know and who might be quite different to us. It requires the capacity to see the world through different lenses, to appreciate different value systems, to respect

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different cultures. Those people who are able to do this find their way through this kind of world. Those people who struggle with this see the world as threatening and they see globalisation as coming to them rather than them being part of it. The key differentiator of a great school isn’t better maths or science, it is very much about those character skills, good institutions encourage them. The question is how you can make that success systemic? How can you make that kind of education, traditionally reserved for a small elite, become accessible to all? The gateways that we have in education, whether university admissions or school exams, have a huge influence on how we learn, how we teach and how schools operate. If we put the emphasis on 21st century skills in schooling, on critical thinking, on advanced reasoning skills.

At the end of the day when the university entry exams arrive, we give students a multiple choice test. That’s not going to work very well and that’s where part of the problem lies today. There is a misalignment between the gateways that define success and the learning environments that teachers often aspire to.

We have to acknowledge that the gap between what our societies and economies demand and what schools provide is actually becoming wider right now. The model of schooling that we use is not responding fast enough to the changes that occur. While there are people at the frontline like teachers and unions who will tell you the opposite they say “Stop! Stop! Stop! It’s going too fast!” Actually we need to move a lot faster on this, and what it actually requires is a kind of transformational change How do we actually think about the work organization in our schools? How do we think of career structures? How do we make teachers designers, not implementers, of instructional processes? Like many other professions, we need the development of new evaluation processes and we need to get a lot more of that in the schools from higher levels in the system. We also need a lot more responsibility for professional standards at the frontline and that’s a hard process to enact. But if you don’t get teachers at the frontline to understand the 21st century skills and the why and the how; why it’s not only knowledge, it’s not only metacognition, it’s not only skills… It’s character… If teachers don’t see that importance and if they don’t have access to the tools they need to develop those skills, you can have the best education system and it will make a very sort of idiosyncratic impact.

We don’t lack really good schools, we lack strong education systems that make those good practices systemic.

This interview was first published on Ashoka UK’s channel on Youtube.com

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Defining Social Entrepreneurship Sally Osberg, President and CEO of Skoll Foundation in conversation with Bill Drayton founder and CEO of Ashoka

Interviewer: How can we understand the term social entrepreneur?

Sally Osberg (SO): I think it’s easiest to understand the social entrepreneur through an example, and so I will provide one that doesn’t immediately come to mind for folks: Bill Foege. Bill Foege was a medical doctor, an epidemiologist working for the CDC when the World Health Organization and the Congress of Nations came together to eradicate smallpox.

He was on the front lines in Africa, part of an enormous public-private partnership that had determined they would vaccinate everybody in the world. He realized, as he was trying to carry out this mandate, just how vast it would be. The goal seemed to get further and further away.

He came up with an idea to really test whether you could vaccinate only those who had been exposed to smallpox. And so he tapped into a network that was readily at hand: ministers working throughout Nigeria. He put that network to work in identifying active cases of smallpox in villages throughout Nigeria, and then proceeded to vaccinate only those who had been exposed to the disease. And in those villages, smallpox receded.

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And then the question is how do you build the architecture that allows people to work together? That’s partly clarity of definition, it’s partly setting up practical mechanisms that actually allow people to work together across subjects, within subjects, across geography or not.

Armed with that information, he was able to bring that model to these partners in the WHO working all over the world. It was that innovation and it was that very resourceful way of addressing a problem at this level that led to the eradication of this horrific disease, the first disease to be eradicated in the history of the world. People don’t think of Bill Foege as a social entrepreneur, but that solution, and that experiment, and its success in shifting that equilibrium forever, that is to me quintessential social entrepreneurship.

Bill Drayton (BD): It’s a great example. Just a simple word, entrepreneur. This does not mean anyone who’s a good administrator, manager. It means, somehow, the whole system has changed. And that’s true in business or social or any other type of entrepreneurship.

That’s the first part of the definition.

The second is the word social. And I think that’s pretty straightforward. This person is committed from deep within to the good of all and therefore so is their work is. That’s not defined by subject matter, it’s fundamental pattern change or mindset change for the good of all.

As the rate of change accelerates in the world, which it is doing exponentially, we have many entrepreneurs, and more and more, but many of them are focused on the shareholders interests, or their own interests, or they’re just lazy and they don’t take everything into account, or maybe an ideological or religious point of view. They’re not meaning ill, but they can pull us off in very bad directions.

And so it is the social entrepreneurs who are pointing where we need to go, and pulling us back when we’re about to go off the cliff. Wherever anything is stuck, could be better, the entrepreneurs come up, when the timing is ripe. The power of the individual entrepreneur is enormous. The power of us working together is not only much, much greater—but absolutely essential.

Interviewer: What have you seen speaking of building that community, that’s come out of that community over years of building that, around the Ashoka fellows, and the hub of fellows?

BD: Out of the 3,600 Ashoka fellows, about 1,000 are focused on children and young people.. Overwhelmingly, 95% put kids in charge. Surprisingly, that leads to better math and better language scores, which is what most people measure. So that’s a very powerful pattern.

But it’s also a pattern that in a world of change is really necessary, because if you don’t

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have the ability to see, understand and contribute to change, to be a change maker, for heaven sakes, how are you going to contribute when that’s the game?

That pattern you get by looking at the focus group of a very small number of people who actually know what the future is, because great entrepreneurs build with history. It’s virtually the only focus group you can use that’s actually useable for the future. And then we work together to actually change how people think about growing up. What proportion of 12 and 14 year olds know that they’re a change maker? How can you know it, if you haven’t been practicing? All right, well then how do we actually work together to make that happen? That’s an example of one of the areas we’re working at the moment.

SO: I have been struck over the years by the way social entrepreneurs in the Skoll community, which is smaller, about a 100 versus your 3,500; how they find one another across the domains in which they’re working.

Sometimes it won’t just be the health entrepreneurs who come together because they share in common this knowledge of a system that has a number of challenges that need to be addressed. They come across organizations working towards smallholder livelihoods, and financial services, and women’s rights and girls education. Often it’s a set of values that connects them. A way of working in a very respectful way with the communities they serve. A way of challenging a top-down, technocratic, development paradigm.

And so it’s very interesting to me—and it’s one of the greatest sources of inspiration and knowledge for us as a foundation—to understand or to benefit from the deep understanding they have of these communities and these societies with whom they work so closely. We see some very interesting cross-domain community building, trust building, and knowledge sharing among the social entrepreneurs and feel deeply enriched ourselves by that.

BD: And then the question is how do you build the architecture that allows people to work together? That’s partly clarity of definition, it’s partly setting up practical mechanisms that actually allow people to work together across subjects, within subjects, across geography or not. The world that’s emerging is very likely human brain in that it has omni-directional connections that come together—from every point—that comes together selectively around whatever goal society needs.

This interview was conducted by the Skoll Foundation and first published on Skoll.org on 1st December 2016.

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This issue of The Ashoka Journal was produced with thanks to the support of Blackstone Charitable Foundation The Ashoka Journal Team: Editor: Meera Patel | Communications Ashoka UK Illustration & Design: Thomas Prestidge With special thanks to: Richard Collier-Keywood, Bill Drayton, Kris Herbst, Stephen

Kinnock, Priya Lakhani, Sally Osberg, Melissa Paramasivan, Reem Rahman, Ken Robinson, Tim Scheu, Andreas Schleicher, Amy Stursberg, Rob Wilson, Mel Young.

With thanks to our media partners

We’d love to hear from you: Ashoka UK 15 Old Ford Road London E2 9PJ UK Tel: +44 (0)20 8980 9416 Email: infouk@ashoka.org uk.ashoka.org Ashoka UK is a Registered Charity in England and Wales (1113246).

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