Through Essie Justice Group, Gina is harnessing the collective power of women with incarcerated loved ones to end mass incarceration’s harm to women and communities. Through Healing to Advocacy cohorts, base building and campaigns, and community-led research, Gina facilitates healing for thousands of women, builds community power and drives social change.

Via workforce development programs and even fatherhood training, Dallas is helping non-custodial, incarcerated fathers re-engage with their families and reintegrate into their communities as active changemakers and more present fathers.

Through his “participatory defense” movement, Raj equips those most impacted by mass incarceration to participate in the defense process within courtrooms -- including working alongside public defenders and developing social biography books or videos. The result is that friends and family members of those accused can make a real difference in case outcomes and shift the balance of power in our justice system.

Social entrepreneurs remain chronically underfunded, each leveraging limited financial resources for outsize social impact. Christina Fialho, for instance, launched an idea with just $122,000, and 8 years later, her organization not only protects 50,000 immigrants every day she co-authored the 2019 California Bill banning private, for-profit detention facilities and prisons. In the last 10 years, $1 invested in Ashoka Fellows has unlocked $140 in additional investment, accelerating their impact. The type of funding matters. Funding relationships built on trust and sharing a common purpose means donors can grant multi-year, unrestricted funds that enable innovators like Christina to impact systems. Funders and systems changers have identified strategies that work in this report.

Upon election, Ashoka Fellows join the largest network of social entrepreneurs in the world — for life. Changing systems is a lonely journey, and the Fellowship curated by Ashoka, built on rigor and trust, connects peers that see the world differently. It creates deep connections that nurture not just the systems changing, but also the social entrepreneurs’ well-being, with depression and burnout on the rise. Moreover, there is increasing evidence that effective change can only be achieved if the wellbeing of the change-maker is secure.

They need support in amplifying the powerful innovations so they are widely known and adopted. Amplifying their systems changing solutions enables them to gain the visibility & traction needed. It also accelerates the ability of systems changer to explore new opportunities for collective impact at a global scale.