Blogs

Albina Ruiz was honored as an Ashoka ChangemakeHER, Changemakers's inaugural celebration of the world's most influentual and inspiring women. Find her fellow honorees' voices here.

Interview by Lorena López, Ashoka Changemakers

Albina Ruiz, founder of Ciudadsaludable.org, created a system of micro businesses that are dedicated to collecting and processing urban waste, promoting cleaner and healthier cities in Peru. Perhaps their most important success has been dignifying the job of garbage collectors, who have been included in a formal and decent employment system with social and pension payments. Here, Albina shares her entrepreneurial experience and she has succeeded in improving the living standards for many people.

What are three strengths that make a change agent successful? Perseverance, ethics, and a certain dose of craziness. And above all, you must love what you do, because you need to be a little crazy and truly love what you do in order to achieve changes within the system.

Becky Buell and Sophia Tickell were honored as Ashoka ChangemakeHERS, Changemakers's inaugural celebration of the world's most influentual and inspiring women. Find their fellow honorees' voices here.

Becky Buell (BB) and Sophia Tickell (ST) are co-founders and co-directors of Meteos, a globally networked non-profit company which works with institutional investors, governments, global companies, NGOs, labour unions and entrepreneurs.

Who are your favorite changemakers?

ST: The people that most inspire me are unsung heroes – people like the human rights workers I met in Colombia - but they tend to be the ones that don’t get recognition and publicity.

BB: The waste pickers in Sao Paolo, for example. They’ve actually managed to make an economy out of recycling, and they are incredibly enterprising, politically influential  people. But the people who get the awards for this kind of work are the ones that attract financing, the ones that have a business model. The waste pickers are invisible, but are the true changemakers.

Cheryl Dorsey was honored as an Ashoka ChangemakeHER, Changemakers's inaugural celebration of the world's most influentual and inspiring women. Find her fellow honorees' voices here.

Cheryl Dorsey is a pioneer in the social entrepreneurship movement. She is the president of Echoing Green, the global nonprofit that unleashes next generation talent to solve the world's biggest problems.

★★★

Who are your favorite changemakers?
Dr. King. Nelson Mandela. Oprah Winfrey. 

What are the qualities that made them successful?
Integrity, strength, and courage.
All three of these figures gave their lives to make the world a better place. They are extraordinary examples of leadership. The magic of leadership has to do with the way a leader makes the rest of us walk a little bit differently in the world. All three of these icons are amazing examples of how leadership led to serious normative shifts in terms of what we consider to be right and just.

What can the social entrepreneurship sector learn from those changemakers?
To achieve wide-scale social change we have to engage the world of politics – this is what Dr. King and Nelson Mandela did so well. You are never going to get to the level or scale of change that is necessary unless we engage the political realm. But so much of the social entrepreneur’s narrative is, “We do our work because the government can’t do it.” But by always linking social entrepreneurs to government dysfunction, we put an unnatural barrier between social entrepreneurs and government. Social entrepreneurs can be critical, we can be skeptical, but we must engage.

Risa Lavizzo-Mourey, M.D., M.B.A., was honored as an Ashoka ChangemakeHER, Changemakers's inaugural celebration of the world's most influentual and inspiring women. Find her fellow honorees' voices here.

Video blog featuring Risa Lavizzo-Mourey, M.D., M.B.A., President and CEO

Sara Diestro was honored as an Ashoka ChangemakeHER, Changemakers's inaugural celebration of the world's most influentual and inspiring women. Find her fellow honorees' voices here.

by Sara Diestro, Founder of Peru's Sport and Life

Diestro, founder of Sport and Life schools in Peru, uses soccer as a tool to improve the lives of at-risk youth so they can create a better future for themselves. She also gives a voice to women and encourages them to fight for their rights.

What three qualities are needed by an agent of change to succeed?
A contagious conviction and passion for change; talent for organizing and educating; and being optimistic—always giving hope and maintaining a positive outlook.

Eva Walusimbi was honored as an Ashoka ChangemakeHER, Changemakers's inaugural celebration of the world's most influentual and inspiring women. Find her fellow honorees' voices here.

by Katherine Lucey, Founder and CEO, Solar Sister

"The women in my village have so many problems,” said Eva Walusimbi of Mityana, Uganda. “They are poor. Many are single mothers. Many are so young because they have children before they are even old enough to finish school. They struggle."

"I used to think that it was a Uganda problem, or an African problem. But now I know that it is a problem for women all over the world. We need to have opportunity and hope. This is why I am a Solar Sister, to help the women in my village, and to give them hope."

Eva is one of the first women I recruited to be a Solar Sister Entrepreneur. She is a leader in her community and she serves as a role model to the other women. She began selling solar lamps to bring the benefits of solar light to her community. She quickly built a successful business, and she is proud of the income she brings into her family. 

But Eva didn't stop there. She reached out to women in her community to help them become Solar Sister entrepreneurs as well. 

Carie Lemack was honored as an Ashoka ChangemakeHER, Changemakers's inaugural celebration of the world's most influentual and inspiring women. Find her fellow honorees' voices here.

by Evagelia Tavoulareas, Ashoka Changemakers

On September 10th, 2001 Carie Lemack was working in Boston and applying to business schools.  She had no experience in non-profit management – today she is co-founder of two non-profits. She had no experience in film production – today she is the Executive Producer of an Oscar-nominated film. In one decade, Carie Lemack accomplished more than many achieve in a lifetime.  But on September 10th, 2001 Carie was not working toward any of these achievements.

Then came September 11th – the day her mother was killed when the plane she was on was crashed into the World Trade Center.

Sarah Ost was honored as an Ashoka ChangemakeHER, Changemakers's inaugural celebration of the world's most influentual and inspiring women. Find her fellow honorees' voices here.

A version of this blog post by Sara Ost, Publisher and Editor-in-Chief, EcoSalon.com, was featured on her Web site.

Every few years, I get what’s known in the parlance as a wild hair. These are more than mere hankerings, yens and yearnings. I feel them before I understand them, but by now I know better than to question them. The result of this is always swift, powerful change. I happened to drive to Los Angeles on a Saturday in order to get some EcoSalon matters squared away, and halfway down the 5, it happened. I realized the real reason for the trip was something else entirely. Hello, wild hair.

Astrid Aafjes was honored as an Ashoka ChangemakeHER, Changemakers's inaugural celebration of the world's most influentual and inspiring women. Find her fellow honorees' voices here.

by Astrid Aafjes, Founder and Executive Director, Women Win

What does the woman of the future look like?
A woman of the future has the full ability to exercise her rights. She is heard when she speaks. She is a leader and a valued member of her community. A woman of the future has economic independence and autonomy.

Heather E. Cameron was honored as an Ashoka ChangemakeHER, Changemakers's inaugural celebration of the world's most influentual and inspiring women. Find her fellow honorees' voices here.

by Heather E. Cameron, Founder of Boxgirls International, Professor of Education at Freie Universität Berlin, Germany, and University of the Western Cape, South Africa

Creating and seizing opportunities – that is what Olympic boxing is about – and social change. Boxgirls uses amateur boxing as a tool to help girls and young women discover and develop their strength to become leaders in their communities.

Carolina Nieto was honored as an Ashoka ChangemakeHER, Changemakers's inaugural celebration of the world's most influentual and inspiring women. Find her fellow honorees' voices here.

by Natalie Zuñiga Gogny, Ashoka Changemakers

Carolina Nieto’s organization Saber para la Vida is empowering women entrepreneurs in Mexico and throughout the world by building a movement called “Women Changing the World.” Nieto works with women who make handmade products to integrate them into the world economy, and to allow them to fulfill their dream of making a dignified living from their work. At the same time she works with women in cities to help them realize their dreams of designing and selling products that contribute to the growth of other women.

Melinda French Gates was honored as an Ashoka ChangemakeHER, Changemakers's inaugural celebration of the world's most influentual and inspiring women. Find her fellow honorees' voices here.

by Melinda French Gates, co-chair and trustee of the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation

Melinda visits a math classroom at Green Dot's Animo Pat Brown Charter High School.

On a recent trip to Kenya, I visited a family planning clinic in Korogocho, an urban slum in Nairobi.  For women in poor communities, where getting food or basic health care is a struggle, family planning becomes even more urgent. The line at the clinic was out the door, with about 50 women waiting for their family planning supplies.

Judith Rodin was honored as an Ashoka ChangemakeHER, Changemakers's inaugural celebration of the world's most influentual and inspiring women. Find her fellow honorees' voices here.

by Judith Rodin, President, Rockefeller Foundation

Women do two-thirds of the world’s work, yet earn only five percent of the income. Women harvest 90 percent of the world’s food, yet own only one percent of the world’s land.  Women are three times as likely as men to work in informal economies. And abuse and sex trafficking remain commonplace, while women across the globe still lack basic legal rights and protections.

At the Centenary of International Women’s Day, we are  compelled to reflect upon these realities and to envision what more we can do in the next 100 years to nurture and scale innovative approaches to the myriad challenges still facing the women of the world.

At the Rockefeller Foundation, we have found that identifying and scaling innovation, and applying it to seemingly intractable problems, can be incredibly effective for a wide range of issues.

WEEK FOUR Highlights:

• Sara Diestro, founder, Sport and Life
  Diestro is a Peruvian social entrepreneur, a specialist in football strategies for social development, and a founding partner of Street Football's South American network. She uses soccer as a tool to improve the lives of at-risk youth so they can create a better future for themselves. She also gives a voice to women and encourages them to fight for their rights.
  
• Diana Wells, president, Ashoka
  Wells has supported and witnessed the work of nearly 3,000 social entrepreneurs around the world in every sector and at every level of changemaking. She shared some of her insights, from generating a spark of inspiration to creating global impact.
• Risa Lavizzo-Mourey, president and CEO, Robert Wood Johnson Foundation
  Lavizzo-Mourey spoke about transformative social change and her journey and commitment to improving health.
  
• Cheryl Dorsey, president, Echoing Green
  Dorsey shared her insights about the unique challenges women face in the field of social entrepreneurship.
• Sikha Roy, founder, SRREOSHI
  Roy discussed facing on-the-ground realities while working with rural communities and shared advice for budding social entrepreneurs.
• Becky Buell and Sophia Tickell, co-founders and co-directors of Meteos
  Meteos is a globally networked non-profit company that works with institutional investors, governments, global companies, NGOs, labour unions and entrepreneurs. Buell and Tickell talked about their theory of change and the importance of networks and collaborative relationships.
• Gloria de Souza, Ashoka fellow and founder
  De Souza was the very first Ashoka fellow ever. She pioneered experiential education in her native India and serves as a shining example of the role women social entrepreneurs have played in leading the transformation of entire systems.
• Karen Dillon, editor, Harvard Business Review
  During Dillon’s tenure as the editor of the Harvard Business Review, the magazine has been honored twice as a finalist in the category of General Excellence at the National Magazine Awards. She shared her strategies for success and her thoughts about the invaluable mentors that helped her along the way.
• Albina Ruiz, founder, Ciudadsaludable.org
  Ruiz has helped dignify the job of garbage collectors in Peru through a system of micro businesses that are dedicated to collecting and processing urban waste as a way to promote cleaner and healthier cities. She discussed her entrepreneurial experience and how she has succeeded in improving the living standards for many people.
• Bea Pellizzari, founder and strategic director, La Usina
  Pellizzari has dedicated 18 years of her life to transforming the public image of people with disabilities. She founded La Usina in 2002 on the principle that diversity yields collective enrichment.

★★★

CHANGEMAKEHERS WEEK FOUR KEY THEME: LEARNING HOW TO GLOBALIZE

If you are not having unintended consequences, you are doing something wrong.

It’s the last week of the March campaign. We’ve heard from some incredible women. Women that have offered their guidance to help us navigate our own changemaking. But globalizing is a topic that hasn’t received much attention here yet. Beyond the spark of an idea, and the sustainability of the model, comes a far greater challenge: How do you globalize?  

Social entrepreneurs start out with a focus on local needs. Often, they develop a solution that is deeply context-dependent. As a result, the challenge of growing to a global scale is one of understanding how to leverage your core innovation for a larger unit of scale. Quite simply, that means having a vision for how to address global needs, and working backwards to develop pathways outward from your model that can help you reach that vision. 

This process might surprise you. Some elements of your organization may no longer be necessary. Recognizing this, and having the ability to let go, is critical. Don’t be afraid to liberate your core. What aspects of your organization need to be leveraged? Which ones need to be culled? Ultimately, what is your absolutely core hypothesis – and how can you grow this?

As one of our Ashoka Globalizer Fellows remarked, “It’s important to destroy some of the idols of your organization.”

The challenge for the social entrepreneur is one of creative destruction. In the commercial realm, the goal is growth by replication, but in the citizen sector, it’s a more subtle strategy. It’s not just about pushing out a model. It’s about becoming a magnet. That requires a great transformation in the mindset of many social entrepreneurs. You are no longer championing your model, but enabling its pollination.

So what allows for successful pollination? A lot of it comes down to framing. You need your model to be adapted. So that means creating an opportunity for other people. Whether you are creating space in your organization for other entrepreneurs, or enabling people in other countries to adopt your model – carving out that opportunity space begins as a simple framing exercise. 

Framing is an invitation to others. So let’s learn from those who are successful at it. Take the organization Meetup, a group with more than 7.2 million members that mobilizes local communities to “meet up.” Their success at mobilizing people has to do with a simple invitation. The word most repeated on their website, “let’s…”

So what is your “let’s?” What opportunities do you have for others? What are you inviting people to participate in? Global opportunities come from global invitations – so how are you working to get people to RSVP?

★★★

WEEK THREE Highlights:

• Heather E. Cameron, founder of Boxgirls International, Professor of Education at Freie Universität Berlin, Germany, and University of the Western Cape, South Africa
  Cameron spoke about how boxing training teaches girls skills that translate into powerful tools for success in the real world and for enacting social change.
• Teresa Clarke, chairman and CEO of Africa.com 
  Clarke revealed how the lessons she learned as a managing director in investment banking at Goldman Sachs prepared her for success in launching a social enterprise.
• Astrid Aafjes, founder and executive director, Women Win
  Aafjes discussed how she successfully designed an effective girls sport program that addresses economic empowerment and gender-based violence.
• Lauri Elliott, CEO, conceptualee, Inc., USA
  Elliott is a business strategist focusing on global business, innovation, technology, new ventures/start-ups, emerging markets, and SMMEs. She revealed the strategies that were key to her successful launch of a startup for social change.
• Sara Ost, publisher and editor-in-chief, EcoSalon.com
  Ost shared her journey as a changemaker and the inspiration that empowers her work.
• Carie Lemack, co-founder of the Global Survivors Network, and executive producer of Killing in the Name
  Lemack co-founded Families of September 11 and the Global Survivors Network (GSN). Since its founding in 2009, the network has generated global attention, coordinated and inspired events around the world, and created an Oscar-nominated documentary that tackles the taboo subject of terrorism.
• Katherine Lucey, founder and CEO, Solar Sister
  Lucey profiled Eva Walusimbi, one of the first entrepreneurs of Solar Sister.  As a team leader for entrepreneurs in her community, Walusimbi's work with Solar Sister helps to provide economic opportunities to many women and provides light and resources to the 1,600 orphans and other vulnerable children at Uganda’s Maranatha schools, which she established with her husband in 1989.
• Raquel Barros, Founder, Lua Nova
  Barros spoke about Lua Nova's work transforming the lives of young, at-risk mothers. Lua Nova allows young mothers and their children to rediscover citizenship and self-esteem so they no longer are excluded from society, through innovative career and construction training, income generation workshops, health care, psychotherapy, and remedial classes.
   

★★★

CHANGEMAKEHERS WEEKS 1 - 3 KEY THEMES:

Ashoka’s commitment to Everyone A Changemaker™ means we can leave no person behind. We hope to awaken all individuals to their inner power and potential to create enduring change. That’s why the ChangemakeHERS campaign is offering words of advice and encouragement for innovators at all stages of their efforts.

To complement the outstanding voices of the women who have shared their insights so far, here is some of our own guidance to social entrepreneurs and the institutions that support them. Below we’ve outlined four key principles that we believe are critical to the evolution of the social entrepreneurship sector as it stands today.

Christine Grumm was honored as an Ashoka ChangemakeHER, Changemakers's inaugural celebration of the world's most influentual and inspiring women. Find her fellow honorees' voices here.

by Christine Grumm, President and CEO of Women's Funding Network

The news of this past year in philanthropy has focused on billionaires engaged in two different types of giving. On one side Warren Buffett, Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg, and Bill and Melinda Gates are giving millions to causes like education and health. On the other, George Soros and the (Charles and David) Koch brothers – opposite ends of the political spectrum from left to right – are using their philanthropy to build movements to achieve their visions. Those of us supporting equality for women and girls must take note.
 
Leaders in women’s philanthropy realize we must scale up our movement building. The Women Moving Millions Campaign -- our partnership with visionary philanthropists Swanee and Helen LaKelly Hunt – is just the start of what we can achieve through our collective power. In 2009 the campaign exceeded its goal of raising $150 million in gifts of $1 million and more that went to improving the lives of women and girls.
 
The movement building philanthropy practiced by Soros and the Koch brothers shows transformative change is not possible if the infrastructure is not in place. From think tanks and policy groups to sustainable women’s organizations on the ground to support for organizing efforts, communication campaigns to networks and research -- all of these need to be in the mix, if we are serious about making a difference that will make history.

Jess Weiner was honored as an Ashoka ChangemakeHER, Changemakers's inaugural celebration of the world's most influentual and inspiring women. Find her fellow honorees' voices here.

by Jess Weiner, Author, Self-Esteem Expert, Consultant, and Media Personality

I believe everyone has an opportunity to make a difference in the world.