What do you get when you bring together some of today’s brightest business minds with a few of the world’s leading social entrepreneurs? The answer is simple — the Ashoka Globalizer program, an accelerator that provides resources and tools to enable socially-minded innovators to scale their systems-changing solutions and achieve an even more powerful impact. Building on our support of the Ashoka Changemakers program, we’re thrilled to announce that we’re taking the next step in our engagement to support the organization’s Globalizer program.
The initiative draws upon Ashoka’s network of 3,000 Fellows in 70 countries, bringing together a select group of social entrepreneurs who, with the right assets and advisors, are ready to scale their innovations to have global impact. Program participants are paired with counselors like Dan Austin (former vice president and general manager of The Wall Street Journal), Jerry White (a co-recipient of the Nobel Peace Prize), and Esther Dyson (one of the founding figures of the internet) to receive guidance, insight and counsel on opportunities for worldwide expansion and actionable strategies to achieve their visions.
Past Globalizer Fellows have helped combat low demand for locally produced food in rural communities by creating guaranteed market hubs in parts of Africa, as well as created technology platforms that provide financial, health and agricultural services to rural, bottom-of-the-pyramid customers in South Asia, Africa and South America. The Globalizer program has been beneficial for these Fellows and many others. For Mike Feerick, Founder of ALISON, the inputs he received from Globalizer strategy partners, advisors and Globalizer peers, helped him to re-structure his management team, measure his results more effectively and ultimately double the number of users of his platform from 500,000 to one million in the year following his Globalizer Summit participation. In addition to Ashoka’s Fellows, we’ll have the opportunity to invite other innovators with whom we have partnered – such as Samasource and Grameen Foundation. We believe this will be a great opportunity for the social entrepreneurs to learn from their peers and form a valuable network.
The Ashoka Globalizer program will culminate in a three day Summit where Fellows, advisors and strategy partners will gather to discuss and debate scaling ideas, and, in some cases, start putting the necessary pieces in motion. We’re currently exploring potential dates and locations for this summit. Through this process and partnership, we’re pleased to deepen our collaboration with Ashoka as we continue to identify high-impact opportunities to accelerate and catalyze global economic opportunity.
Stay tuned for more updates on the Ashoka Globalizer program!