Ashoka - Innovators for the Public

Since 1980, Ashoka has pioneered the field of social

entrepreneurship, investing in more than 2,500 leading social
entrepreneurs – practical visionaries with systems-changing ideas --
known as Ashoka Fellows, in over 70 countries. Rather than building
one school or clinic in one community, Ashoka Fellows work at the
systemic level, transforming the way children learn or creating new
healthcare delivery systems. Ashoka then distills action-principles
that cut across the work of these social entrepreneurs and creates
frameworks for collaborative entrepreneurship to author global
change. These sector-tipping principles gained through our
innovative collaborative architecture, along with the role modeling
and recruitment of other innovators by Ashoka Fellows, represent
Ashoka’s core strategy for realizing its vision of “Everyone a
Changemaker.”™

The India office just set up a new hub in Bangalore and is looking for
new Change Leaders to head important programs in the
organization: Group Entrepreneurship, Changemakers and
Full Economic Citizenship.

Ashoka
is Hiring!
Qualifications

Ashoka has a rigorous screening process for hiring new staff. The ideal candidate will:

• Have a proven track record as an exceptionally entrepreneurial innovator, and at least 7

years of demonstrated leadership experience in the social and/or business sectors.
• Be highly conceptual, while wedded to action
• Be willing and excited to work globally across Ashoka’s complementary programs.
• Have strong communications skills, with an ability to work easily with top caliber business
and social entrepreneurs
• Be a strong team member within Ashoka’s global community

For a full description of Ashoka’s criteria in evaluating staff, please visit our website at http://
www.ashoka.org/careers

Application Process

Please email a resume to Maria Clara Pinheiro: mpinheiro@ashoka.org by Aug, 15, 2010
 Group
Entrepreneurship
Ashoka’s Fellowship Program is a network of 320 Fellows in India and over 2,500 Fellows worldwide, offering
services and opportunities designed to meet Fellows’ needs at all stages of their entrepreneurial careers. The
program supports its members with tools, personal and professional support, and enhanced entrepreneurial
opportunities. Collaborating across regions and fields, Ashoka Fellows achieve results more powerful than what
they could accomplish on their own. As a result of global collaborations, Ashoka is able to distill the most
effective patterns and unify them into a “mosaic”— a synthesis of the commonalities and intersections of key
principles that guide Fellows’ individual solutions. These overarching mosaics are then disseminated globally,
and form the basis of our programmatic initiatives specific to each
field of work, such as youth development. In this way, group
entrepreneurship not only helps Fellows become more successful, but
it also helps Ashoka identify cutting edge trends and implement them
more broadly.

Position Description

Ashoka is looking for a competent leader who can head its Group
Entrepreneurship program. The person is expected to provide the
necessary vision and roadmap to the program in order to create and
sustain a great community of Ashoka Fellows. He/she should develop
and maintain the necessary platforms and solutions/opportunities that create disproportionately higher value
than what these Fellows had created in past in their individual capacities. The leader should have the experience
and vision to sight opportunities to create innovative products and programs that bring Ashoka Fellows to work
together on large scale ideas that result in pattern-changing movements in the society.

Responsibilities

•Identify and build strategic partnerships with external agencies to support Ashoka Fellows
and their organizations
•Develop and execute appropriate training and orientation modules for Ashoka fellows
•Strengthen the Ashoka community in India
•Work with the marketing team to leverage the fellowship community in order to build a
strong Ashoka brand in India
•Develop the right platform and communication channels that not only ensures effective
collaboration among Ashoka Fellows but also creates mutually beneficial partnerships
between Ashoka Fellows and external agencies
•Manage program operations including budgeting, reporting and other administration issues

Please email a resume to Maria Clara Pinheiro: mpinheiro@ashoka.org by Aug, 15, 2010
Changemakers
Ashoka’s Changemakers is an online platform that assembles the entire ecosystem of change (innovators,
investors, enthusiasts and end-users) to find solutions to specific problems framed by investors looking to open
source a problem to a community that is likely to have the answers. By leveraging the knowledge in Ashoka’s
network of innovators, Changemakers helps its clients identify and frame the right questions to solve any social
challenge, and invites innovators to respond to the challenge through
open, friendly “collaborative competitions”. In doing so, it forms
surprising connections and unexpected partnerships across the globe
that turn the old “top down” ways of problem-solving upside down.
Anyone with an idea can get it refined and spread through
Changemakers. To learn more, please visit www.changemakers.com

Position Description

Ashoka’s Changemakers program is seeking a highly dynamic,

entrepreneurial leader to join the India team and take this successful
program to its’ full potential. During this rapid growth phase,
Changemakers is focused on developing the world’s go-to online
platform for innovators. Working across boundaries and sectors, these innovators would come to
changemakers.com seeking idea refining and collaboration, and in turn create strong communities of action.
This vision for Changemakers will involve engaging the other parts of Ashoka in developing an integrated model
of action and value.

Responsibilities

•Envisioning Ashoka’s Changemakers at full potential, and executing the growth plan
•Securing investment (through Changemakers’ existing fee-for-service model), as well as
foundation funding for powering a steep growth phase
•Leveraging all other Ashoka programs powerfully to maximize value
• Manage program operations including budgeting, reporting and other administration
issues.

Please email a resume to Maria Clara Pinheiro: mpinheiro@ashoka.org by Aug, 15, 2010
Full Economic
Citizenship
Ashoka’s Full Economic Citizenship team focuses on Economic inclusion of the low-income communities. FEC
works with Hybrid Value Chains (HVCs), which is a new operating framework for transforming markets by
leveraging the strengths of business and social actors. Ashoka pursues HVCs to end the exclusion of two-thirds
of the world's populations from global markets and to catalyze business, social and government actions that
will create the enabling conditions for everyone to become a Full Economic Citizen. FEC in India has launched
the Housing for All Initiative that aims to build an ecosystem for
affordable housing. Presently, there is a demand for 26 million new
homes in India and out of which over 90% is for sub-1 million Rupee
housing. Ashoka engages the for-profit developers to work with
Citizen sector organizations (CSOs) along with bringing together retail
finance providers, architects and project finance providers to increase
the supply of such housing. The pilot projects in Ahmedabad, Gujarat
have created over 2,000 new homes for the low-income sector and
the team continues to grow these pilots across cities presently. To
learn more, please visit www.ashoka.org/fec

Position Description

Ashoka’s FEC - Housing program is seeking an entrepreneurial leader to join the India team and replicate the
projects and program to its full potential. Presently the program needs to scale across various states of India
and eventually encourage replication to meet the growing demand for affordable housing. The position involves
travel to represent FEC team in national and international events. Ashoka takes a neutral role in bringing together
the various stakeholders for creating affordable housing, but at the same time takes an active role in mentoring
and working with each of the stakeholders. The person needs to understand the nature of business and at the
same time involves the community aspects while enabling creation of such affordable housing.

Responsibilities

•Market research, solution design and implementation/scale up plan

•Engaging decision makers from all stakeholders to pioneer the scale up of HVC applications
throughout India

•Creating and implementing a structure required to sustain and grow the affordable
housing solutions throughout India

•Systematizing and spreading the learning generated by India experience in close

collaboration with the FEC team

•Represent FEC in public events and market spread of the HVC concept

Please email a resume to Maria Clara Pinheiro: mpinheiro@ashoka.org by Aug, 15, 2010
Our People
Sushmita Ghosh
Ashoka: how have you created the Changemakers and Globalizer Programs?

Changemakers was first a print magazine and then an online magazine that contextualized stories of individual
social entrepreneurs in the framework of  broader social change principles. This Ashoka's depth and breadth
made it easy to extrapolate how change happens, and market this knowledge broadly. However, when the Open
Source movement gained traction in the software world, and the Wikipedia showed how a global community
could collaborate to build knowledge, I thought -- why not open source the knowledge frameworks drawn from
the social entrepreneur community for refining by any innovator around the world? This led to the reincarnation
of Changemakers as an online platform that assembles the entire ecosystem of change -- innovators, investors,
enthusiasts and end users -- to solve specific problems framed by
investors. By leveraging the knowledge in Ashoka’s network of
innovators, Changemakers helps its clients identify and frame the
right questions to solve any social challenge, and invites innovators to
respond to the challenge through open, friendly “collaborative
competitions”. In future, Changemakers aims to be the central
platform that any innovator can use to refine ideas and find
collaborators.

The Globalizer was born out of the questions - how can you introduce

the social sector to globalization in the absence of traditional market
forces  that enabled this in the for-profit sector? Can you invent a
permanent, self-adjusting architecture that serves that scaling
function?  And can that leverage the globalization process that business has already been through? The Ashoka
Globalizer attempts to create new market mechanisms by linking the supply of investible global social change
led by social entrepreneurs committed to making their work a world standard, to demand from globally
successful business entrepreneurs and corporations who are eager to enhance the changemaking element of
their core businesses on a global scale. See more: www.ashokaglobalizer.org

Ashoka: Why is Ashoka the right place for entrepreneurs like you?

Ashoka is a wonderful place to innovate because of  colleagues who are generous with their creativity and
connections, the networks that Ashoka's connected to, comprising some of the best business and social
entrepreneurs in the world, and the institutional culture of changemaking that  bridles at  the slightest hint of
bureaucracy.

A former journalist who served as Research Director and Executive Director of Maneka
Gandhi's national Indian news magazine Surya from 1979 to 1982, Sushmita served as
Ashoka's country representative for India from 1989 to 1997. During that time, she also
helped Ashoka launch its new programs in Latin America and direct its European
fundraising efforts. She founded Changemakers in 1992, which she evolved from a
magazine for social entrepreneurship to an online platform for open source problem-
solving. In 2008, Sushmita created the Globalizer Program that aims to leverage Ashoka’s
network of social and business entrepreneurs to link initiatives ready for global scale. She
also served as a President of Ashoka and continues as a member of Ashoka’s Leadership
Team