Social Entrepreneurs - Ashoka

New Ideas ... Todd Cohen
Social Entrepreneurs
Web of connections fuels growth
J.B. Schramm wants poor
teenagers to get the help
they need -- and often lack -to
get into college. College
Summit, a Washington, D.C.,
nonprofit he created in
1996, held workshops last
year at 24 universities in four
cities to help 1,000 highschool
students apply to and
prepare for college.
As part of an expansion to
25 cities within 10 years, the
group will add three this
year and shift its focus from
serving students directly to
helping local communities
serve them. In evolving his
organization to do a better
job of changing the way high
schools and colleges support
underserved youngsters,
Schramm has had help from
Ashoka,an international nonprofit
based in Washington,
D.C., that aims to connect
social entrepreneurs.
By “social entrepreneurs,”
a term it says it coined 20
years ago, Ashoka refers to
founders of innovative
groups that aim to cause systemic
change in their fields.
“What Ashoka does is help
us build a network through
which we can have impact,”
said Schramm, in the second
year of a three-year Ashoka
fellowship.
Schramm is one of more
than 1,100 fellows Ashoka
has supported in 41 countries
since it was founded in
1980 by Bill Drayton, a former
McKinsey & Co.consult-
ant and former assistant
administrator for the U.S.
Environmental Protection
Agency.
Now, Ashoka itself is
changing. Founded to support
social entrepreneurs in
developing countries, the
group in 2000 launched its
first program serving the
United States and Canada. It
aims to apply lessons it has
learned globally to a society
rich in social entrepreneurs,
and then recycle their lessons
to the global network.
After spending two
decades refining the job of
finding and selecting fellows,
Ashoka also wants to
give them better technical
support and systematically
collect and share the lessons
the fellows learn.
A top priority, said
Sushmita Ghosh, Ashoka’s
president, is to “use the
wealth of knowledge in the
fellowships to empower
each fellow in a way they
could never have been
empowered if they had been
working alone.”
Tackling the isolation of
social entrepreneurs was the
idea behind Ashoka, named
for the 3rd Century B.C.
emperor of India — an early
social innovator -- and
launched in India with three
fellows in 1981. “Being a
founder and a leader can be
really isolating,” said Leslie
Crutchfield, director of
Ashoka’s new U.S. and
www.nptimes.com
Canada program. “It can be
lonely. You are doing something
that no one else is
doing. You’re at the head of
an organization where everybody,
externally and internally,
looks to you for answers.”
The U.S./Canada program,
which aims to have 32
fellows by the end of the
year and 100 within five
years, is creating “incubation
and acceleration” programs
targeting services to entrepreneurial
nonprofits based
on their stage of development,
said Crutchfield, who
co-founded and edited a
magazine for social entrepreneurs
before earning an MBA
from Harvard Business
School. She also was included
in The NonProfit Times
Power and Influence Top 50
for 1998.
Ashoka, for example, will
help “startups,” or groups up
to three years old, get their
501(c)(3) charitable status,
develop their boards and
secure their first big grants.It
will connect “mezzanine”
groups, or those ready to
expand nationally, with private
investors and with policymakers
who can help
them market their ideas and
tap public funds.
Consider Schramm. As an
inner-city high-school student
in Denver, a divinity
graduate student at Harvard
and director of an afterschool
center in Washington,
D.C., he found that low-
Reprinted with permission of The NonProfit Times. April 15, 2002, Vol. 16, No. 8
For subscription information, please visit www.nptimes.com
APRIL 15, 2002
income teens faced big hurdles
getting into college.
Because they didn’t go to
college themselves, he said,
their parents typically don’t
help “manage” the collegeapplication
process for their
children, whose high-school
guidance counselors are
overworked and not
equipped to play that role.
In 1993 he helped four
students at the after-school
center apply to and prepare
for college. Two years later,
he ran a four-day workshop
at Connecticut College in
New London for 35 high
school students and their
teachers. And in 1996, he
formed College Summit.
Schramm’s solution
involves “working both ends
of the college-access
pipeline,” he said. That
includes helping school districts
and colleges identify
students whose grades and
test scores may mask their
potential, and working with
those institutions to change
how they find and enroll
promising students.
The group also holds
workshops to help students
prepare college applications,
meet with counselors to pick
colleges and senior-year
courses, get faculty recommendations
and think
through the challenges they’ll
face in their senior year.
A big challenge for
College Summit, he said, is
getting “initial buy-in” from
local communities, particularly
school officials, colleges
and corporations. In 1998,
continued on next page

New Ideas
continued from previous page
when the group was running
workshops at 10 colleges in
seven states, a McKinsey
consultant donated some
time to assess the operation
and suggested the group
could be more effective by
concentrating its efforts in
fewer states.
So with $500,000 from
the John S. and James L.
Knight Foundation in Miami,
College Summit cut back to
four jurisdictions, Chicago,
Denver, the District of
Columbia and Miami.
Nearly eight of 10 students
that College Summit assists
have enrolled in college,compared
with less than five of
10 low-income high-school
graduates nationally,
Schramm said. And, eight of
10 College Summit grads who
enrolled in a college or university
either still were
enrolled or graduated within
six years, compared with a
college graduation rate of
roughly two in 10 for lowincome
black students, he
said.
As part of its plan to serve
25 communities within a
decade, the group this year
will launch operations in
Dallas, the Central Valley of
California and Charleston,
W.Va. It will begin shifting its
focus to equipping communities
to take on the job of
working more closely with
low-income teens.
In addition to providing
$150,000 over three years,
Ashoka has connected
Schramm to people who can
help him better cope with
the change he’s trying to
bring about, both inside his
own organization and in the
field of education,he said.“At
the heart of Ashoka’s insight
is the idea that leaders drive
social change, and leaders
have impact through networks,”
he said.
Ashoka, for example,
introduced Schramm to
Dallas Social Venture
Partners, a new spinoff of
Seattle-based Social Venture
Partners that has launched
College Summit in Dallas as
one of its first major initiatives.Ashoka
also introduced
Schramm to the Jenesis
Group, a Texas foundation
with offices in New York
City that is helping College
Summit develop and fund
the expansion of its operations.
As part of its own shift in
focus, the Center for Social
Entrepreneurship that
Ashoka developed in partnership
with McKinsey’s
office in Sao Paolo, Brazil, is
launching a business-plan
competition. The competition
will solicit applications
from 80 social entrepreneurs
in Brazil, pairing them with
business school students and
McKinsey consultants to
help develop their business
plans. It will then fund 10
winners, which will get free
McKinsey support in putting
their plans into practice.
Ashoka and McKinsey
also have opened an entrepreneurship
center in India,
and plan additional centers
at McKinsey offices in
Germany, Latin America,
Poland and Thailand.
Ashoka also is developing
professional alliances in the
United States with management
consultants, law firms
and lobbying firms that can
provide support and connec-
Reprinted with permission of The NonProfit Times. April 15, 2002, Vol. 16, No. 8
For subscription information, please visit www.nptimes.com
tions for its fellows. Those
alliances will serve as a
model that Ashoka then will
expand to serve its fellows
overseas.
“The reason we’re pioneering
it in the states is
because the social sector is
so advanced here,” said
Crutchfield.
Ghosh, who previously
helped run Ashoka’s operation
in India and founded
and edited Changemakers,
the organization’s print and
online magazine, said that in
addition to delivering products
and services to its fellows,
Ashoka aims to help
diversify investment in
social enterprise beyond
government and foundation
assistance by mobilizing citizen
and corporate support.
“Getting society ready to
contribute at a larger level,”
she said, “is what a citizenbased
initiative program
does�”
Todd Cohen is editor
and publisher of
Nonprofitxpress, an online
newspaper at www.npxpress.com.
He can be
reached at tcohen@ajf.org.