Europe Youth Changemaker Leader

For a general introduction to Ashoka and how this leadership role fits into the European and global Ashoka work, see the broader context and overview text further below.

Over four decades of work, Ashoka has distilled four essential changemaking elements. Its mission now is to ensure that every person has an opportunity, from childhood, to master them. We realised that these changemaking skills are now as necessary as literacy was in the Industrial Age. They are essential for living and working in our fast-changing world.

• Conscious Empathy: The ability to be aware of and understand our own, other individuals’ and groups’ perspectives, and to use that understanding to recognise patterns over time and guide one’s actions to contribute to the good of all.
• Sophisticated Teamwork: The ability to contribute and thrive in a fluid ecosystem of teams that mobilises around a problem or opportunity.
• New Leadership: The capacity, as a leader, to envision, enable, and ensure that every player is an initiator and sees the big picture.
• Practicing Changemaking: The process of creating a novel solution to a social problem that is more effective, efficient, sustainable, or just than existing solutions and for which the value created accrues primarily to society rather than to private individuals.

You will lead Ashoka’s efforts across Europe to reform the institutions that shape how young people grow up to ensure every young person leaves secondary school having mastered these four changemaking elements.

Specifically, you will create strategic and deeply rooted partnerships with ministries of education, public school systems, teacher unions, educational publishers, teacher training schools and other relevant organisations to put changemaking at the core of their strategies. A key ambition is to quantifiably influence the education systems and youth-focused media to prioritise graduating changemakers through new curricula and syllabi and related teaching materials.

You will not do this alone. Ashoka has a wealth of proven tools to build strategic partnerships. For example, one core program – Ashoka Young Changemakers (AYC) – involves a rigorous selection process that engages directly with young people and supports them in becoming changemakers through the transformative experience of launching and leading their own community-minded ventures.

Success in the first year in this role would: (a) agree two partnerships with influential players and (b) advance at least one place-based model that is tracking to decreasing direct support from Ashoka. Within five years we would expect to see progress on two metrics that illustrate what societal paradigm change looks like in practice: (1) the percentage of secondary school students in Europe who self-identify as changemakers, and (2) the proportion of school leaders who define success by the extent to which their schools are graduating changemakers.

Ashoka’s vision is Everyone A Changemaker (EACH). We want the world’s most influential organisations to commit to working in ways that activate the potential for every individual to contribute for the good of all – i.e., to be changemakers.

We are recruiting three extraordinary leaders to lead our efforts to help influential organisations embed EACH as their core purpose. These individuals will join Ashoka’s global leadership group and report directly to Ashoka founder and CEO Bill Drayton and Europe Diamond Leader Marie Ringler.

This document is written for experienced leaders who might be interested in one or more of these full-time staff roles, or who may wish to nominate someone.

For more than 40 years, Ashoka has been identifying and connecting world-leading social entrepreneurs to drive systems-changing solutions to our biggest problems. We have learned from Ashoka Fellows how to create communities of changemakers, and how to create ecosystems of support for changemaking. Our job now is to help the world’s most influential organisations to benefit from these powerful insights.

The tools of our trade are conscious empathy, sophisticated teamwork, new leadership, and practicing changemaking. Amongst other things, they constitute our distinctive way to the egalitarian democratic promise of diversity, equity, and inclusion.

If you are ready, willing, and able to lead this work, we look forward to getting better acquainted, answering your questions, and asking some of our own.

Ashoka’s recruitment team wants to have an authentic, collaborative conversation with you that foregrounds your interests and aspirations as we reach for the fit between you and Ashoka.

As Ashoka enters its fifth decade, it is evolving from one world-changing “big idea” into a second one. It began in 1980 and led the vision on social entrepreneurship, a term it coined that has since been adopted globally. As Ashoka mobilises for its second big idea, it is a global network active in more than 90 countries comprising some ten thousand people – social entrepreneurs (Ashoka Fellows), staff, ex-staff, supporters, partners, and young changemakers.

The leadership positions that we are filling in Europe will steward Ashoka as it builds out idea two from idea one. What does this mean? What are these two ideas?

The first was that the rare individuals driven to change systems for the good of all are not well understood and are poorly supported by conventional sources – i.e., individual giving, organized philanthropy, and government – and that there was massive leverage to be realised in providing the types of support they most required. Ashoka gave these individuals an identity – “social entrepreneurs” – and over 40 years built a powerful global network to provide them bespoke support through a community that Ashoka calls the Fellowship.

These super-changemakers now number more than 4,000 in 90+ countries. Over 75% of Ashoka Fellows have changed patterns in their fields (e.g., the environment, human rights, cultural resilience) within five years of launch. Over half have changed national policy within the same five years. Ashoka has inspired hundreds of other organisations to take up similar models.

As the social entrepreneurship movement grew, Ashoka saw powerful patterns in how the Fellows worked. The most outstanding is that many Fellows put young people in charge by giving them the opportunity to lead change. Not only were these youth leaders making powerful impacts on important problems such as inequality, ill-health, and climate change. They were also gaining skills that gave them a critical advantage in life.

World-changing idea two, then, is that as it becomes self-evident to all that everyone needs to be a changemaker, there is massive leverage in helping the world’s most influential organisations to become makers of changemakers, in showing them how this is their best possible strategy.

Success in the first two years in these roles would involve using the Ashoka EACH playbook to: (a) agree two partnerships with influential players and (b) advance at least one place-based model to the point where Ashoka could begin to step back. Within five years we would expect to see the needle moving steadily on two metrics that illustrate what societal paradigm shift looks like in practice: (1) the percentage of young people in Europe who know that they are changemakers, and (2) the proportion of leaders in any organisation that define success by the extent to which they are cultivating changemakers.

Ashoka is a unique and special global organisation. You will have the opportunity to work with the most incredible Changemakers around the world and to be at the forefront of supporting young Changemakers. Come and join us.

Ashoka is an equal opportunity employer. We are committed to creating an inclusive and welcoming environment for every person who walks through our doors. All employment is decided on the basis of qualifications, merit, and business need. Ashoka celebrates and embraces diversity.