What We Do

“What’s next for higher education? We need colleges and universities to produce research that accelerates solving the world’s most difficult problems, and we need graduates equipped, not only to cope with our world’s increasing rate of change, but to drive change through social innovation and entrepreneurship.”

—Marina Kim

Executive Director, Ashoka U

Our vision is for colleges and universities everywhere to become more innovative and entrepreneurial through the institutional change efforts of a campus change team. In Ashoka U terms, we want every university to be a Changemaker Campus.

All of our programs are aligned with three systems-change strategies:

1) Develop and Empower Higher Education Change Leaders

  • Using Ashoka’s criteria for Ashoka Fellows, we identify and select campus change leaders who want to transform their campus ecosystem.
  • Ashoka U then supports campus change leaders to recruit campus change teams.

2) Advance Universities as Campus-Wide Hubs of Social Innovation

  • Ashoka U advises and supports campus change teams to create an institutional change strategy that builds campus-wide awareness and engagement with social entrepreneurship and social innovation.
  • Ashoka U connects campus change teams with a community of peers to share lessons learned and promising practices.
  • Ashoka U uses the Ashoka platform to highlight the work of change leaders, campus change teams, their institutional change strategies and campus innovations.

3) Catalyze Universities as Co-Creators of Social Change

  • Ashoka U offers a network of social entrepreneurs to collaborate and advance the institution’s social impact.

This is not necessarily a linear growth process: we offer opportunities for colleges and universities to join Ashoka U as part of any of these three strategies.

Using this approach, Ashoka U is effectively building the case that an innovative, entrepreneurial, and world-changing higher education sector is possible and provides models and resources to accelerate universities with higher education change leaders that share this vision. Learn more about our results.

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