As a social studies teacher at a Bronx public high school, Charles Best discovered that teachers who needed learning materials for their students were having to dig into their own pockets to buy them for their classrooms. So he founded DonorsChoose.org, a website that for online, citizen philanthropy where teachers can list what the materials they need, and anyone can chose to donate the requested materials.

Haidy Duque, one of Colombia’s most celebrated serial social entrepreneurs, has a new project: she is helping the urban poor build customized, affordable homes from environmentally sustainable materials.

Duque is an Ashoka Hybrid Value Chain Fellow. Her organization, Por Una Vivienda Digna, has improved the lives of thousands since 2004 by providing impoverished communities with access to credit, technical assistance, and personalized financial education to strengthen budget planning processes for both individuals and families.

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.

How would you like to be able to move house -- packing, transportation, cleaning, moving materials removal, and gardening included -- without spending a dollar? If you lived in New South Wales, Australia, you could use shells, issued in points, to pay for everything but the gardening, which you would pay for with time.

Bangladesh has a garbage problem. Dhaka, a city of about 10 million has a particularly big garbage problem. Of the 3,500 tons of trash dumped each day, only half is picked up by the city. The rest is left to lie in the open streets of slums, marketplaces, vacant lots and riverbanks, attracting rats, clogging drains and threatening serious disease.