With over 30 years of expertise in social entrepreneurship, a global network and an online community of innovators, Ashoka, in partnership with InCommons, an initiative of the Bush Foundation, seeks to enable community problem-solving. This report reflects our collective effort in making steps towards achieving our goal.
-
A young person starts a community garden to address health disparities in his neighborhood; an environmentalist reaches out to farmers despite longstanding tensions; and a financier leaves a secure position to ensure his immigrant and refugee community have access to capital for starting new businesses. Taken in isolation these actions look unrelated – the ‘heroic’ efforts of a few talented individuals. Look closer, however, and you will see threads of commonality as these and countless others lead us to an “Everyone a Changemaker” future.
However, barriers are core components of a problem that, if changed, could allow for true systems-change. Barriers are not underlying causes that merely describe a situation. They must be moveable, actionable, and specific to the problem. The social entrepreneurs that we highlight in this report are addressing these issues at key leverage points with pragmatic, innovative solutions. Three of these barriers include:
-
Expert/idol culture & narrative: changemaking is outsourced to experts, the government and large citizen sector organizations or credited to individuals placed on heroic pedestals rather than community members; this hinder the process of creating pathways for change.
-
Conditions of problem-solving are overlooked: a common barrier to a thriving changemaker community is focusing on ‘solving problems’ rather than looking at the context in which those problems emerge; reflecting on whether the conditions for problem-solving have been put in place is a key component for enabling social change.
-
Problems aren't packaged for change: issues are rarely simple or straightforward in today’s complicated world; as a result, many people can feel paralyzed in the face of problem-solving, leaving little possibility for making a difference.
