Definitions & Frameworks
Definitions
WHAT IS A CHANGEMAKER?
A changemaker is someone who imagines a new reality, takes action and collaborates with others to bring that new reality into being for the good of others.
WHAT IS CHANGEMAKER EDUCATION?
An education that helps students build their identities and capacities as collaborative agents for change and gives them multiple opportunities to practice changemaking.
WHAT IS A CHANGEMAKER CAMPUS?
A higher education institution that enables and empowers students, faculty, staff, senior leaders, and the surrounding community to be changemakers. It embraces changemaking as an institutional framework.
WHAT IS A CHANGEMAKER ECOSYSTEM?
A Changemaker Ecosystem engages the entire community in developing changemaking capacity to address local and global problems collaboratively. Higher education ecosystems include students, faculty, staff, and alumni. They also include school districts, families, the private sector, citizen-sector organizations, governments, communities of faith, and the media.
Frameworks
CHANGEMAKER EDUCATION FRAMEWORK
Changemaker Campuses provide all students with the opportunity to experience changemaker education, one that cultivates core skills for effecting systems-level change: conscious empathy, changemaking leadership, organizing open fluid integrated teams of teams, and changemaking practice.
These competencies and its subdimensions (described in the Ashoka Changemaker Index section), help students go beyond symptoms to address root causes of social problems and lead in a way that empowers others to be changemakers.
A changemaker education prioritizes learning by doing, student-driven experiences, the building of a changemaking ecosystem that mobilizes around problem and opportunity, as well as supporting the development of the whole person.
CHANGEMAKER INSTITUTION FRAMEWORK
A Changemaker Campus embraces changemaking as an institutional framework. This means that its values, culture, structures, and strategies promote and enable empathy, organizational fluidity, and collaborative leadership.
CHANGEMAKER ECOSYSTEM FRAMEWORK
Changemaker Ecosystems are truly dedicated to ensuring that everyone in the community knows that they are a changemaker and that everyone is empowered to creatively address social issues. Leaders in the higher education institution are partnering with leaders in businesses, school districts, the media, and other key community institutions. Students, faculty, staff, and alumni are collaborating with stakeholders at all levels in these institutions to creatively solve problems. Changemaker ecosystems engagement with social issues and opportunities is effected both locally and globally.