Ashoka Careers

Empathy Movement Leader
(Europe)

This role, the Empathy Movement Leader, aims to ensure that every young person masters the foundational skill of changemaking, namely conscious empathy, by the time they leave middle school.

Alongside the Youth Years Leader and Framework Change Leader, you will guide Ashoka as it unleashes demand for the now-necessary skills of changemaking, which in addition to conscious empathy includes three additional essential changemaking elements.

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

We are looking for an Empathy Movement Leader with a strong track record in shaping parenting practices and early education. How do you nurture an empathy-driven changemaking mindset in early child life? How would you form strategic and deeply rooted partnerships with ministries of education, public school systems, nurseries, teacher unions, specialist publishers (e.g., child-rearing, and early education)? What other strategic partnerships would you propose Ashoka seeks to form?

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 parents in Europe who actively nurture in their children to become a future changemaker, and (2) the proportion of leaders in the parenting practices and early years education fields who define success by the extent to which they are cultivating changemakers.

This is a senior leadership position. Successful candidates will have 15 years experience including a minimum of 5 years working in a leadership role in addition to guiding a system change to at least a national level. 

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 envision the world’s most influential organizations committing to working in ways that activate the potential for every individual to contribute for the good of all – to be changemakers. We are recruiting three extraordinary leaders to lead our efforts to help influential organizations to embed ‘everyone a changemaker’ as their core purpose.

These three new roles 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 nominate someone.

For the past 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. When it began in 1980, Ashoka set out to find and support social entrepreneurs, and coined the term that today is widely used across the world. As Ashoka mobilizes for its second big idea, it is a global network active in over 93 countries comprising some ten thousand souls – social entrepreneurs (Ashoka Fellows), staff, ex-staff, supporters, partners, and young changemakers. 

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

World-changing idea one was that the rare individuals driven to change systems for the good of all are not well understood and are poorly supported by the conventional sources of support for social progress – 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 the bespoke support to social entrepreneurs through a community that Ashoka calls fellowship.

These super-changemakers now number nearly 3,700 in 93 countries. Over three-quarters of Ashoka’s Fellows have changed the 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. The term “social entrepreneur” has become widely known.   

As the social entrepreneurship movement grew, Ashoka saw powerful patterns in how the fellows worked. The most outstanding of these patterns 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, but 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 become makers of changemakers, in showing them how this is their best possible strategy.

These two articles describe these two parts of Ashoka for a popular audience: New York Times columnist, David Brooks, Everyone a Changemaker. Forbes contributor Bill Meehan, Bill Drayton and Social Entrepreneurship: How a Social Movement is Changing the World...and Launching Another: EVERYONE A CHANGEMAKER.

What is it that I would do?

What is the strategy? What is it precisely that I would be expected to drive? What would I be accountable for? What would success look like?

You will realize strategic and deeply rooted partnerships with the world’s most influential organizations to put changemaking at the core of their strategies. What might that look like?

Let’s take a real case from our current work to shift the systems in which young people are educated. When we mapped these systems, we saw the following institutions were the most influential: ministries of education, public school systems, teacher unions, publishers, and teach training schools. Over several years, working at national and local levels in multiple countries we convened co-leadership teams across these organizations who after several years now fully own the task of reforming their education systems to prioritize graduating changemakers. Along the way new curricula and syllabi were produced, new textbooks written, special recognition was given for teachers who make changemakers, and most importantly thousands of young people stepped into their power as changemakers.

We have some proven tools to build strategic partnerships around EACH. One core element – 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. Introducing these young changemakers to strategic partners imbues a unique authenticity into the work of revisioning education to support changemaking. 

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 change 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 organization that define success by the extent to which they are cultivating changemakers.

We are furthest along in this work in Brazil, where the Brazil EACH Co-Lead Community is composed of 170 co-leaders, 31 of which are Young Changemakers, 4 are Ashoka staff, and the rest are Fellows, school leaders, partner team members (media/publisher teams, education school leaders, political unit teams, and co-leaders from education unions) and chosen partners in related fields. They are now organized in nine key “Changemaker Hotspots” across Brazil, where most of the action takes place.

What will your version of this paragraph look like when you write it five years from now? What transformative combinations will you make from Europe’s 650 Fellows in 25 countries, 120 staff, a wellspring of young changemakers, hundreds of supporters, and to-be-identified powerful institutions, your partners?

Empathy Movement Leader (Europe)

Given the societal mindset shift we work for, the role of the Empathy Movement Leader is focused on early childhood and mastering the foundational skill of changemaking, conscious empathy. Alongside the Youth Years Leader and Framework Change Leader, you will guide Ashoka Europe as it unleashes demand for the now-necessary skills of changemaking.

Youth Years Leader (Europe)

While the Empathy movement leader is focused on the systems shaping early years (up to high school), the role of the Youth Years Leader is focused on making teenage years ones in which they come to understand and step into their power as changemakers. Working alongside the Empathy Leader and Framework Change Leader, you will guide Ashoka Europe as it unleashes demand for the now-necessary skills of changemaking.

Framework Change Leader (Europe)

The Framework Change Leader seeds a new meta narrative for the world today – one in which the most valuable values and skills are those of changemaking for the good of all. Ashoka is seeking an entrepreneurial and creative regional communications leader with experience in generating widespread change in an area of focus. Together with Ashoka’s Europe communications and partnerships teams, you will recruit major media organizations – everything from the BBC to YouTube – to tell the most important story of our times – how we human beings overcome the cascading problems that we have made for ourselves by everyone becoming a changemaker for the good of all.