Manifesto

Ashoka U believes that in order to prepare students and universities to thrive in and make a positive contribution to today’s world, higher education needs to shift from traditional (e.g., slow to change, siloed, risk-averse, hierarchical, rigid, bureaucratic) to more innovative and entrepreneurial (e.g., open to change, creative, collaborative, everyone contributing ideas). With increasingly rapid change in higher education, such as the proliferation of online learning and students’ desire for action-oriented education, universities need to adapt their ways of organizing and leading to stay relevant. 

The university of the future empowers students and all university stakeholders to be changemakers, firmly embeds changemaking into its culture and operations, and works to address both local and global challenges. 

Changemaker Campuses are leading the movement of millions of students, faculty, staff and administrators to bring the skills of changemaking to their education, research, work, and communities worldwide. As a network of approximately 45 diverse institutions globally, they are re-envisioning the role of higher education and the university in society at the systems level. 

Changemaker Campuses believe in: 

  1. Advancing higher education as a force for social impact; 
  2. Empowering students to lead and develop the skills of empathy, distributed leadership, collaboration and creative problem solving; 
  3. Investing in the continuous development of faculty and staff as educators and changemakers;
  4. The importance of empathizing, listening and communicating; 
  5. Building mutually beneficial partnerships with local and global communities; 
  6. Operating in socially and environmentally conscious ways to model changemaking for students and other institutions and contribute to the vitality of people and the planet; 
  7. Leading by example and actively sharing their learnings and best practices; 
  8. Measuring their impact and sharing results to advance the field of social innovation and changemaking in higher education; 
  9. Actively supporting each other and participating in new collaborations advancing the field of social innovation and changemaking in higher education that emerge out of the Changemaker Campus Network; 
  10. Contributing to an Everyone a Changemaker™ world.