Ashoka Careers

Youth Years Leader (Europe)

Over four decades of work, Ashoka has distilled four essential changemaking elements. It’s mission now is to ensure that every person has an opportunity, from childhood, to master them. We realized 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.

At Ashoka, we believe the following elements are essential for living and working in our fast-changing world:

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 skill 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 organizations to put changemaking at the core of their strategies. A key ambition is to quantifiably influence the education systems and youth-focused media to prioritize 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. In the past, Ashoka strategic partners have enthusiastically participated in selecting these young changemakers, and in some occasions have involved them in the work young changemakers, and then they involve them in the work of co-creating a new model of education, changemaker education.

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. 

To apply for this role click the blue Apply button on this page.

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Everyone A Changemaker in Europe

We are looking for extraordinary leaders

Ashoka’s vision is Everyone A Changemaker (EACH). We want the world’s most influential organizations 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 organizations 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 organizations 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.

How did Ashoka get here?

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 mobilizes 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 realized 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 organizations 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.

Over more than a decade of work, Ashoka has distilled four essential changemaking elements. Its mission now is to ensure that every person has an opportunity to master them. We realized 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. 

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 organizations to become makers of changemakers, in showing them how this is their best possible strategy.

The following two articles describe these two parts of Ashoka for a popular audience: