Fellows - Ashoka USA

Aaron Hurst

Catalyzing impactful pro-bono support

Aaron founded Taproot to mobilize business professionals to contribute their expertise to their communities and integrate service into business careers.

Abby Falik

Gap Years For Change

Preparing a globally-minded generation of leaders by embedding the bridge year into the American higher education system, unlocking students’ potential as global citizens, while also addressing the rising cost and questioned relevance of the American higher education system.

Adele Douglass

Better lives for farm animals

Changing the way food is produced by creating a market for humanely-raised animal products.

Ai-Jen Poo

National Domestic Workers Alliance

Garnering respect, important rights and protections for the last excluded workforce in this country: domestic workers.

Albert Fox Cahn

Surveillance Technology Oversight Project (S.T.O.P.)

Albert Cahn is the Founder of Surveillance Technology Oversight Project, or S.T.OP., a community-led response to the new wave of tech-enabled surveillance that is being deployed against marginalized communities in New York and beyond. S.T.O.P is building better oversight of rights-infringing technologies via litigation, legislation, and community education and mobilization.

Aleta Margolis

Teacher creativity improves outcomes

Investing in teachers to ensure schools make the most of children’s innate desire to learn by valuing creativity as much as their academic achievement.

Alexandra Bernadotte

Data for college success

Improving college graduation rates for students from low-income communities by bridging the data gap between K-12 education and U.S. colleges and universities.

Alisa Del Tufo

Communities against domestic violence

Developing local solutions to deep social challenges, such as trauma, poverty and other forms of exclusion, by revealing and supporting assets that enhance well- being

Alison Lingane

Project Equity

Alison is transforming small businesses into employee-owned companies that grow community wealth and address inequality.

Amelia Franck Meyer

Children need permanent homes

How can we improve outcomes for kids in foster care? By breaking the cycle of disruption and trauma

Ami Dar

Connections for social good

Pioneering the web-accessible marketplace for social action, making it possible for virtually anyone to act on their desire to change society for the better.

Amory Lovins

Energy efficiency and renewables

Through an approach called ‘natural capitalism,’ Amory is driving the efficient and restorative use of renewable resources into communities, the government, corporations, and beyond.

Amy Barzach

Kids with disabilities play

Amy created Boundless Playgrounds to start a movement toward building inclusive, developmentally advantageous playgrounds where children of all abilities can have the best opportunities for healthy development.

Amy Lemley

Homes for foster youth

Amy Lemley is addressing the growing problem of homelessness among teenagers who are too old for foster care but have neither a place to live nor the means to support themselves. Her work is helping former foster youth secure affordable apartments by providing them with microloans for housing start-up costs to get their “first place.”

Andrew Mangino

Fostering student passion

Introducing ”Dream Directors” into the American education system , – tasked with helping students to name whatever it is that they are passionate about and to design “Future Projects” to bring those passions to life.

Andrew Slack

Fandom for change

Unleashing the voice of today’s fan communities and using the power of popular culture to amplify the effectiveness of nonprofits and educators.

Andy Lipkis

Retrofitting cities, promoting trees

Retrofitting cities for sustainability by equipping citizens and governments with the tools to manage cities as one would a sustainable ecosystem.

Angela Coleman

Uplifting African-American Girls

Uplifting women and girls of African descent through a variety of innovative, culturally relevant and gender-specific approaches.

Angelou Ezeilo

Changing conservation's demographics

Angelou is cultivating a generation of youth of color to be stewards of our land and natural resources and ultimately shift the demographics of the environmental conservation movement.

Anne Basting

Forget memory, try imagination

Anne Basting is transforming the experience of aging and the stigma around dementia and memory loss by empowering older adults and their caregivers with new practices rooted in creative expression and community building.

Asher Hasan

Health insurance for emerging economies

Providing quality, private health insurance to low-income workers in emerging economies. The approach distributes cost and social responsibility among several stakeholders affiliated with the working poor.

Astra Taylor

The Debt Collective

Astra Taylor has championed a series of creative, systems-changing engagement opportunities for debtors nationwide to effectively push back against unfair debts, change policy, and build strong, local, and lasting solutions to the problem of economic inequality.

Atsumasa Tochisako

Microfinance around the world

Recreating microfinance and money-transfer industries to better serve and integrate the world’s new globalized poor, regardless of where they are.

Barry Barkan

Community in elder care

Unleashing elder power, building loving mutual-support communities, cultivating wisdom and promoting senior citizen activism that transforms nursing homes from institutions to person-centered communities.

Barry Zuckerman

Broader definition of healthcare

Broadening healthcare delivery to reach low-income families by focusing on the social as well as biological roots of patients’ illness instead of just the symptoms.

Ben Powell

Upskilling impact entreprenurs

Finding and investing in entrepreneurs whose businesses fuel change and spark economic growth in Central America, creating a culture of entrepreneurship devoted to local development.

Bernard Amadei

Engineering for global issues

Transforming the traditional model of engineering by revamping training methodology and integrating the field of engineering more closely with global issues such as poverty alleviation, hunger, and disease.

Betsy Krebs

Self-advocacy in foster care

Betsy created the Youth Advocacy Center help foster youth acquire the self-advocacy skills and professional mentorships they need to reach their goals.

Bill Jackson

Online guide to schools

Democratizing global policymaking by increasing the citizen sector’s role and uniting diverse global networks to address global challenges, particularly the effort to reduce the likelihood of war. Bill also convenes the Coalition for the International Criminal Court.

Brandon Dennison

Coalfield Development

Brandon is dramatically transforming the workforce development sector in Appalachia and beyond, with a model that creates new and viable economic markets, while simultaneously creating direct employment and personal development opportunities.

Bruce Bloom

Care for rare diseases

Improving patients’ lives quickly and safely by targeting small research investments to repurpose existing FDA-approved pharmaceuticals, treatments, and medical devices.

Bruce Cahan

Investing in sustainable resiliency.

Creating a high transparency, ethical bank for the social sector, that reconnects meaning and money by pegging interest rates and bank fees to customers’ environmental and social impacts.

Carol Shapiro

Leveraging communities to reduce crime

Building the capacity of government to leverage family and community assets to reduce crime and increase community well-being.

Carolyn Laub

Safe schools for LGBT youth

Providing a safer middle- and high-school environment for lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, and questioning youth.

Casey Fenton

Global travel community

Casey has created a worldwide travel community built on trust and appreciation of difference by orchestrating one-on-one interactions and homestays with strangers at mass scale.

Casey Woods

FORGE

Through Arms with Ethics, Casey Woods is leveraging law enforcement’s unique ability to speak to all sides on the gun issue by developing police-led proactive strategies that help build a national network of common-sense, consensus-building community safety partners that includes gun owners and gun sellers.

Charles Best

Supporting under-resourced schools

Pioneering a way for citizens to directly support educational projects in underresourced schools using an online marketplace where entrepreneurial teachers can post projects to be supported by private citizens.

Charles C. Daniels Jr.

Fathers Uplift

Dr. Charles C. Daniels Jr. believes that one of the best ways to support children growing up in fatherless homes is to support their fathers.

Chloe McKenzie

BlackFem

Chloe McKenzie is combatting wealth inequality through a new paradigm for financial education and policy, one that is honest about the financial trauma Black girls and girls of color and their families face.

Chris Balme

Personalized appreticeships for students

Reengaging middle school students in their studies through personalized apprenticeships in their dream jobs.

Christa Gannon

Preventing juvenile crime

Reducing juvenile incarceration and recidivism rates and changing the culture of the juvenile justice system by getting the system to listen to young people and turning it into a place of transformation for troubled youth.

Christina Fialho

Human connection for immigrants

Freedom for Immigrants is the only detention visitation network in the country monitoring the human rights abuses faced by thousands of immigrants held by Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE). Freedom for Immigrants has created a community-based alternative to detention that welcomes immigrants into the social fabric of the United States, instead of incarcerating individuals in the nation’s prison system.

Cindy Kaplan

Nutrition in orphanages.

Radically improving the nutritional outcomes of children living without families by recognizing that trauma changes their nutritional needs and by focusing on both what they eat and how they are fed.

Conchy Bretos

Affordable assisted living

Creating a new norm and low-cost options for elderly people to stay in their homes and receive care there, rather than move to often overcrowded, under-performing nursing homes.

Connie Siskowski

Support for caregiving students

Identifying, helping, and bringing national recognition to the children and adolescents in the United States who have dual roles as students and caregivers for ill, frail or disabled family members.

Cristi Hegranes

Training women journalists

Dale Bell

Public TV for social innovation

Showcasing and promoting citizen-inspired initiatives across the country, transforming public television into an interactive forum, which encourages discourse and social innovation

Dallas Wilson

Supporting fathers in prison

Helping non-custodial, incarcerated fathers reengage with their families and, upon release, reintegrate into their community as productive, contributing citizens by teaching job skills and providing fatherhood training.

Dana Mortenson

Education for global citizenship

Preparing students for citizenship and leadership in the 21st century by closing the global competency gap within K-12 education in the United States.

Daniel Ben-Horin

Online architecture fror community organizations

Facilitating the movement of technology to the citizen sector by creating an online community centered on the needs of the social sector.

Daniel Kish

Independence for the blind

Daniel Kish is transforming the blindness profession and the lives of people around the world through a model of perceptual navigation that is more respectful of blind dignity and purpose, easier to teach, learn, and use, and is more diversely applicable to all ages, cultures, backgrounds, and ability profiles.

Danielle Sered

Common Justice

Danielle has created the only prison diversion program in the country that provides alternatives to incarceration.

Daquan Oliver

WeThrive

Daquan has designed a culture of empowerment in schools by promoting entrepreneurial skills and spirit in classrooms across the nation.

Darell Hammond

Playgrounds for every child

Bringing together communities and corporate volunteers to build play spaces in low-income neighborhoods, establishing playgrounds and skateparks where they are most needed.

Darryl Holliday

City Bureau

Darryl Holliday is building a new model for participatory journalism that convenes, trains and pays community members to become civic changemakers.

David Anderson

Supporting families in crisis

Reducing child abuse and neglect by providing families in crisis with temporary alternatives to the child welfare system

David Bornstein

David Castro

Mentoring homegrown leaders

Building the capacity of marginalized communities by identifying grassroots leaders and teaching them the life skills to become agents of change.

David Domenici

Every youth can succeed

David created the See Forever school network to support inner city students with the educational, economical, and emotional support to break out of poverty and recidivism.

David Erickson

Affordable housing and rehabilitation

David created Samaritan Inns to provide homeless, addicted people with a longterm community-based recovery system.

David Flink

Learning differences without stigma

Building a youth-powered movement designed to combat the prevailing stigmas attached to learning differences while also equipping students with the tools and sense of personal efficacy they need to self-advocate.

David Green

Health care in developing countries

Enabling developing countries to produce, distribute, and service high-quality, affordable health care products.

David Levin

New models for education

Ensuring disadvantaged students’ academic success by securing contractual commitments by students, parents, and teachers, and by building a strong school culture of high expectations.

David Lubell

Welcoming communities for immigrants

David and Welcoming America are helping communities fearful or skeptical of immigration to understand how and why the U.S. can find pride in upholding traditions of being welcoming, at community and individual levels

David Wiley

Open Educational Resources

David is championing the concept of ‘open educational resources’ to reinvent how educational content is created, licensed, used, and improved—ultimately enabling college and university students to access to access radically improved class materials at dramatically reduced prices

David Wish

Inspired music education

Through an unconventional approach to music education, David is offering children and teachers heightened opportunities to engage with each other as fearless co-creators and active, inspired learning partners.

Denisa Livingston

Healthy food sovereignty

By shifting the focus from ‘unhealthy people’ to systemic challenges, Denisa is empowering Navajo communities to take control of food policy and lead a movement toward food sovereignty in Navajo Nation.

Derek Ellerman

Ending human trafficking

Derek created Polaris to put an end to human trafficking by engaging community members, law enforcement and policy-makers in a coordinated attack on the trafficker’s incentives – high profits and low risk of prosecution.

DeVone Boggan

Advance Peace

DeVone and Advance Peace are building a new system for community-led gun violence prevention. DeVone’s focus is on healing, nurturing, and building up the few young people responsible for the majority of gun violence so that they can become healthy and leave violence behind.

Dianna Oritz

Supporting survivors of torture

Helping torture survivors regain their sense of trust and community, and elevating their voices in the international campaign to end torture.

Dina Buchbinder

DJ Powers

Economic services for all

Making basic economic tools, like insurance, utilities, and credit, available and affordable by advocating on their behalf against the administrative agencies that oppress them.

Don Shalvey

Quality schools for all

Dan created Aspire to build clusters of high-performing charter schools in targeted underperforming neighborhoods.

Dorothy Stoneman

Youth building skills

Helping low-income youth transform their lives through service and leadership in their communities as they build affordable housing.

Dune Lankard

Conservation for Alaska

Promoting sustainable economic models that protect our natural resources, Alaska’s Indigenous culture, commercial fishing and unique subsistence way of life.

Earl Phalen

Out-of-school education

Through BELL, Earl transformed out-of-school-time into an opportunity for rigorous educational instruction to help close the achievement gap. Earl moved on to found and CEO Summer Advantage and Phalen Leadership Academies. He is now the Social Entrepreneur in Residence at UNC-Chapel Hill.

Eboo Patel

Interfaith community services

Instilling religious understanding and cooperation by building an interfaith movement of youth focused on common service to others.

Edgar Cahn

Social care networks

Offering a way for people to care for one another through traditional volunteer means by ‘banking’ their volunteer time for their own current and future needs.

Elisabeth Stock

Technology for education

Unleashing the enormous potential of the home learning environment to improve the academic and life-long success of low-income children and their families.

Elizabeth Hausler Strand

Architecture for earthquakes

Helping local government and international organizations engage and harness local talent and technologies to build homes that are earthquake resistant.

Ellen Goodman

Discuss end-of-life care

Establishing a new cultural norm in which individuals and families talk openly about their values and wishes for end-of-life care—particularly with those who will make decisions for them if they can’t make them for themselves.

Ellen Moir

Mentoring new teachers

Improving learning for students—and especially underserved students—in America by accelerating the effectiveness of new teachers through the world’s first corps of professional education mentors composed of expert teachers.

Elliott Brown

Supporting low-wage workers

Elliot created Springboard to helping low-wage workers develop the capacity to advance, while simultaneously showing employers the benefits of investing in their entry-level workforce.

Emily May

Ending street harrassment

Eric Dawson

Youth conflcit resolution

Building the next generation of peacemakers by teaching young people peacemaking skills, empowering educators and parents to model these skills, and creating social messages that raise expectations for young people to demonstrate empathy.

Eric Liu

Citizen University

Eric is leading a national civic revival at a moment when faith in American democracy and its institutions are at an all-time low.

Eric Rosenthal

Human rights for people with disabilities

Transforming the way countries and governments treat those with mental disabilities by demanding international recognition and enforcement of their basic human rights.

Erica Gerrity

Ostara Initiative

Erica is bringing high-quality birth care and health education to women in prisons, and transforming our criminal justice system in the process.

Esther Lardent

Civic engagement for corporations

Expanding and deepening the civic engagement of law firms and corporate legal departments

Fabrice Florin

Online tools for civic engagement

Providing reader-reviewed news on which citizens can rely by aggregating news stories that are rated for journalistic quality by news consumers themselves.

Fagan Harris

Developing talent citywide

Through a new citywide model for developing and retaining talent, Fagan Harris is activating networks to position talent as a city’s main “architecture” in which to invest, and in so doing upgrading the social impact sector’s capabilities, consciousness and collaborative capacity, thus empowering cities to solve their most pressing challenges.

Farhana Huq

ESL telenovelas.

Farhana created CEO Women to propel immigrant women into leading roles in business and life through innovative entrepreneurship education.

Fletcher Harper

Faithully decreasing wasteful consumerism.

Activating the values base of the religious sector to curb wasteful consumerism and set faith-based communities on a track to environmental stewardship.

Frank Altman

Transforming community development finance

Frank has been transforming community development finance in the U.S. by incentivizing mainstream financial institutions to funnel capital into-low-income communities across the country.

Gary Cohen

Better health industry practices

Assembling an international coalition to transform the global health sector by reducing health industry practices that harm the environment and contribute to disease.

Gary Slutkin

Preventing gun violence

Treating violence as an infectious disease and eradicating the norm of violence in the most dangerous of urban areas around the world.

George Askew

Medicine beyond clinic walls

George organized doctors to give expert, non-partisan, scientific consultation to policy-makers on the medical ramifications of social policies.

George McGraw

DigDeep

George works to ensure that every American has access to clean, running water forever through participatory engagement.

Gerald Chertavian

Solving America's skills gap

Empowering urban talent to reach their potential by connecting urban youth with corporations in need of skilled entry-level talent.

Gerald Gray

Holding torturers accountable

Gerald founded the Institute for Redress and Recovery with the goal of bringing torturers to justice in domestic and international courts, and providing clinical support to victims.

Gina Clayton

Sisterhood for criminal justice

Gina Clayton is building a loving and powerful community for the millions of women who have loved ones behind bars to end the harm of the American criminal justice system to women and families.

Gregg Treinish

Outdoor recreation for science

Adventure Scientists is harnessing the skill, motivation, and geographic reach of people who recreate in the outdoors – hikers, surfers, kayakers, mountain bikers and more – and applying it to rigorous data collection for the purpose of environmental stewardship and conservation.

Hamse Warfa

Blockchain for refugees.

Through BanQu, a disruptive innovation in the digital identity and financial inclusion spaces, Hamse and his co-founders Ashish Gadnis and Jeff Keiser are creating a paradigm shift in the way individuals and organizations (large and small) engage with refugees.

Harry Willand

Public TV for social innovation

Showcasing and promoting promising citizen-inspired initiatives across the country, transforming public television into an interactive forum, which encourages discourse and social innovation.

Herb Sturz

Quality after-school care

Redefining the way after-school care is delivered, funded, and institutionalized as an essential service for children.

Imran Khan

Supporting inner-city youth

Understanding that laws, policies and infrastructure have historically been designed to keep the low-income community from attaining a better quality of life, Imran Khan has identified how to increase the intrinsic motivation and skills of inner-city youth to counter these structures. By facilitating sustained interaction between the youth, the city and its citizens, Imran proves that experiential development has as crucial a role to play as cognitive development in the educational setting.

Jake Shapiro

Democratizing public media

Democratizing public media by creating an open architecture and marketplace that allows new producer entrants, delivers greater choice in programming, and guides the field from traditional broadcasting to a flexible and interactive multimedia approach.

Jane Leu

Skilled jobs for immigrants

Jane created Upwardly Global to engage employers in relationships that shift awareness, hiring practices, and company culture around immigrant inclusion.

Janelle Orsi

Law for sharing economy

Developing the legal infrastructure necessary for a new, resilient, sharing economy to thrive in the United States.

Jason McLennan

Quality built environment

Creating incentives and new practices so that the built environment improves health and well-being while increasing our access to a diverse and productive natural world

Jeff Dykstra

Solving food shortages

Creating incentives and new practices so that the built environment improves health and well-being while increasing our access to a diverse and productive natural world Through Partners in Food Solutions, Jeff Dykstra is forging unlikely alliances between the world’s largest and smallest food companies, freeing up latent human potential to build a more robust, secure global food system.

Jeff Edmondson

Bringing leaders together

Uniting local leaders within education, government, and the philanthropic community behind a common vision and measurable set of goals to improve educational outcomes from cradle to career.

Jeff Palmer

Healthcare for the poor

Creating a way to finance and deliver pharmaceuticals and healthcare for poor, uninsured, and semi-insured populations in the United States.

Jeff Parker

Dentistry for all

Developing the first viable non-profit model of dentistry that adheres to high standards of care in order to treat the millions of youth across the United States who currently do not receive oral health care.

Jelani Anglin

Good Call

Jelani Anglin is ensuring access to legal counsel at time of arrest for all Americans, including the most marginalized, creating a legal system where the right to an attorney exists in practice rather than in theory and, through equitable rights enforcement, combatting mass incarceration.

Jennifer Bailey

Faith for social justice

Jennifer Bailey is building more united, morally-rooted social movement infrastructure in the American South, and clear pathways for leadership and self-care for its most marginalized leaders. By combining the existing moral authority of religious institutions with a new wave of “moral imagination” from young, marginalized, faith-rooted leaders, Jennifer is re-building the bridge between social justice movements and the religious institutions that have historically fueled them.

Jennifer Pahlka

Tech for government

Bringing the resources – talent, ideas, tools, energy – and operating principles of the tech world to make government work for the people, by the people, in the 21st century.

Jerry White

Turning victims into survivors

Through a global peer support network and macro policymaking, Survivor Corps transforms victims of conflict into active survivors and leaders.

Jess Ladd

Castillo

Jess has designed a new victim-centered way to report sexual assault, identify repeat offenders, and provide institutions – beginning with universities – with relevant data to guard against and respond to the problem.

Jessica Sager

Quality early childhood education

Jessica Sager is transforming and professionalizing the field of family childcare by supporting the providers in radically reimagining how they see themselves.

Jessica Schreiber

Fabscrap

Jess has created a new model for managing textile waste at scale that encourages designers to weave the ethos of sustainability throughout their design cycles.

Jill Habig

Public Rights Project

Jill Habig is bringing justice to the law by closing the gap between the values expressed in our laws and the lived reality of our most underserved communities.

Jill Vialet

Play for all kids

Using the power of play to bring out the best in every kid, while creating safe, inclusive school environments that allow kids to thrive and discover their own superpowers, both in and out of the classroom.

Jim McCorkell

Closing college admissions gap

Putting an end to multi-generational poverty by recruiting recent college graduates as AmeriCorps coaches to support low-income students and make college success possible for them.

Jim Thompson

Positive youth sports

Working against the dominant conception of sports as a sphere for flamboyant and ruthless competition, Jim Thompson reestablishes competitive athletics as a space in which all youth can acquire the skills and values they need for lasting success.

Jimmy Wales

Open-source encyclopedia

Jimmy has revolutionized the field of information sharing and collecting through Wikipedia – a free, open source, multilingual online encyclopedia that is publically created and edited.

John Danner

Quality elementary schools

John created Rocketship Education to deliver quality education to low-income students by increasing the independence and efficacy of elementary-level charter schools.

John Marks

Soap operas for peacebuilding

Creating a full toolbox of methodologies for conflict prevention, including harnessing the power of the media and popular culture.

John Sage

For-benefit nonprofits

John started Pura Vida to create new approaches to capital formation and social enterprise, redefining the boundaries between for-profit and non-profit organizations.

Jonah Edelman

Supporting thriving children

Building a coalition of parents and other concerned citizens to make democracy work for children.

Jordan Kassalow

Glasses for everybody

Ensuring that every person has access to eye care by addressing the market failure for affordable eyecare in the developing world.

Jose Quiñonez

Communities becoming economic citizens

Helping financially excluded communities – particularly low-income and immigrant families – become visible, active, and successful participants in the U.S. financial mainstream.

Jose-Pablo Fernandez

Supporting Latino families

Providing Hispanic parents with educational opportunities that will enable them to become active agents of change to reduce dropout rates, transform communities, and ensure a better future for their families.

Joseph Marshall

Ending violence

Ending violence throughout the United States by treating violence as a communicable disease.

Joseph Williams

Supporting the formerly incarcerated

Joseph created New Creations to keep ex-prisoners out of jail through a cellular social structure, allowing ex-prisoners to find the support network, sense of solidarity and individual responsibility needed for success.

Josh Nesbit

Quality rural healthcare

Creating connected and coordinated rural health care systems by using mobile-phone based technologies to reinvent the role of the local community health worker.

Kara Bobroff

Native American Community Academy

Kara is reimagining an education system based on Indigenous traditions and prepares young people to shape their future.

Katherine Freund

Transportation for seniors

Creating an alternative solution to traditional public transit that allows older Americans to transition from driving to being driven through a whole-community solution to keeps aging populations mobile and active.

Katheryn Hall-Trujillo

Better birth outcomes

Re-creating pregnancy to improve birth outcomes for women of color in America by giving them the extended family and community support that only a “sisterfriend” can provide.

Katie Orenstein

Changing demographics of voice

Katie is changing the demographics of voice in America by increasing the number and diversity of ideas in our public discourse.

Katie Plohocky

Healthy Community Store Initiative

Katie is bringing fresh food to communities that lack them, catalyzing community engagement and local entrepreneurship along the way.

Katie Redford

Holding corporations accountable

Pioneering a body of legal mechanisms to hold corporations accountable for their complicity in human rights and environmental abuses perpetrated around the world, and increasing access to justice for victims of such abuses.

Katrina Spade

Recompose

Katrina is transforming our broken funeral industry with a new approach that reconnects death to natural cycles of life.

Kendis Paris

Truckers fighting human trafficking

Building an anti-human trafficking movement model beginning with the trucking industry that could be applied across every mode of transportation.

Kevin Kirby

Addiction recovery infrastructure

Building the infrastructure for a chronic care model of addiction recovery that engages communities and employers alike, breaks down silos between the two, and de-stigmatizes this age-old disease.

Kevin Long

Deaf people can succeed

Starting with the education system, Kevin Long is utilizing resources from developed nations to support, mentor, and train teachers in developing countries with teaching methodologies targeted specifically at deaf students. Through the work of his organization, Global Deaf Connection (GDC), these students are encouraged to gain higher education and become trained professionals.

Kohl Gill

Crowdsourcing intelligence from laborers

Labor Voices is facilitating more transparency in international labor markets by crowdsourcing intelligence from directly from laborers via mobile phone surveys and using it to push for changes within supply chains.

Kristen Tobey

Nutrition in low-income communities

Transforming nutrition standards in low-income communities by providing healthy, fresh school lunches, and changing attitudes of principals, teachers, and parents about what’s expected and possible for school food standards.

Kristin Hayden

Youth as global leaders

Empowering disadvantaged, minority American youth to become stronger leaders through language study in Arabic or Chinese, international learning experiences, leadership training and college preparatory assistance.

Kristin Richmond

Nutrition in low-income communities

Kristina Saffran

Project HEAL

Kristina is building a model for community-based peer support and care for people with eating disorders.

Lam Nguyen Ho

Community Activism Law Alliance

Lam Ho is changing the field of legal aid to make it more accessible and responsive to underserved communities and to strengthen its role as a vehicle for social justice.

Larry Rosenstock

Changing urban education

Creating diverse, project-based, urban public charter schools, and preparing teachers to eliminate traditional, segregating boundaries between technical, vocational education and liberal arts-style, college preparatory education.

Laura Emiko Soltis

Education for undocumented youth

Dr. Laura Emiko Soltis leads a modern-day freedom school for undocumented youth where students receive free college-level classes, college application assistance, and the social movement leadership training they need to determine the course of their own freedom struggle. Against a backdrop of Southern states that deny undocumented students equal access to public higher education, Freedom U is creating liberatory spaces for learning and advancing undocumented students’ human right to education.

Laura Wilson Phelan

Kindred

Laura is helping parents and school communities embrace the goal of “collective well-being”, which champions equity and aims to changes the lives of U.S. students.

Lennon Flowers

Talking about grief

Lennon Flowers is upsetting the current clinical approach that pathologizes grief with a universal, humanizing model that empowers deeper community and personal growth. Through The Dinner Party, people who’ve lost a loved one are transforming life after loss from a deeply isolating experience and culturally taboo topic to an extraordinary tool for connection and community-building.

Louise Davis Langheier

Sexual health education

Providing comprehensive health education to teens across the country through a network of volunteer peer educators.

Lynn Price

Keeping siblings connected

Lynn created Camp to Belong to reunite brothers and sisters placed in separate foster homes and preserve their sibling bond, and advocate on their behalf in public institutions and policies.

Marc Freedman

Staying engaged in retirement

Leading the call to engage millions of baby boomers in “encore careers” by combining personal meaning, continued income, and social impact to produce a windfall of human talent to solve society’s greatest problems.

Mark Edwards

Birth control choices

The high rate of unplanned pregnancy presents enormous challenges for women, families and society. Through Upstream USA, Mark and his colleagues are changing the culture of reproductive healthcare in the U.S. and pioneering a new model for ensuring all women receive same-day access to the full range of modern contraceptive methods.

Mark Hanis

Working against genocide

Mark created the Genocide Intervention Network to provide a permanent anti-genocide constituency in the United States, and to empower activists to advocate for human rights through the use of technology.

Matt Flannery

Person-to-person microloans

Building a citizen-based movement of microlenders through an online lending platform, providing lenders of average means the ability to loan small amounts to small-scale entrepreneurs living in emerging markets.

Matthew Johnson

Youth producing media

Matthew created Strive Media to build an inclusive and collaborative network of ethnic media outlets, bringing greater diversity to mainstream media.

Matthew Lee

Ethical international banking

Matthew Lee is linking the monitoring and advocacy work of international human rights and environment organizations to an American movement that seeks to promote ethical business practices in international banking.

Mauricio Lim Miller

Financial independence

Enabling low-income, working families to self-organize and support each other as they gain fiscal independence and confidence, moving them into roles as active consumers of social services who deliver feedback.

Megan Marcus

Educators as secure attachment figures

Megan Marcus believes that any educator in the U.S. can and must become a consistent, caring and responsive “secure attachment figure.” Through FuelEd, Megan is showing how educators, school leaders, teacher training colleges, and counselors can transform educator preparation, performance and retention as well as student achievement and development both cost-effectively and at scale through the power of relationships.

Melissa Malzkuhn

Motion Light Lab

Melissa Malzkuhn is the Founder of Motion Light Lab, which uses technology and storytelling tools to create sign language learning and literacy materials for Deaf children. Melissa’s work is also creating a space for Deaf culture to be sustained, supported, and empowered.

Michael McCullough

College opportunity for all

Developing and marketing a national database that serves as an online clearinghouse for colleges, graduate schools, scholarships and internships for low-income students.

Michael Turner

Increasing financial inclusion

Creating access to credit for traditionally excluded and unbanked groups through the use of alternative data, such as reliably-paid rent and utility payments.

Michel Nischan

Locally-grown healthy food

Catalyzing demand among low-income urban consumers for locally grown, healthy foods through a financing approach that fuels the growth and viability of small and mid-sized farms.

Michelle "Mitch" Hedlund

Michelle “Mitch” Hedlund

Making recycling easier

Aligning citizens and businesses around common environmental and economic interests by making recycling more comprehensive and removing the confusion around “green.

Michelle Mascerenhas-Swan

Ecological justice movement

Michelle is helping build a vibrant and proactive movement for ecological justice in the United States by equipping frontline communities with a unifying framework and a national network of support.

Michelle Miller

Coworker.org

Michelle is building a 21st Century labor movement that uses digital organizing methods to give voice and shift power to workers.

Mike Marriner

Students defining their own path

Helping students to “define their own roads in life,” by exposing them to an unlimited number of careers and pathways,and equipping them with the tools and skills they need to make those pathways a reality.

Mike O'Brien

Mike O’Brien

Community adults mentoring students

Providing an innovative human capital solution for public schools by enlisting the vast array of adults within a community to serve as mentors to help students develop critical skills linked to college success.

Molly Barker

Healthy lives for women

Leveraging the power of emotional and physical training, Molly founded Girls on the Run to help girls and young women break the cultural stereotypes preventing them from living healthy, authentic lives.

Molly Burhans

GoodLands

Molly is transforming the way the Catholic Church and other holders of large, non-contiguous lands are able to respond to climate change and its attendant crises, using new technology tools for informed environmental planning beyond the border of the nation-state.

Morgan Dixon

Health as a civil right

Combatting obesity in Black women by contextualizing health as a broader civil rights issue, meeting women at their point of need with a feasible first step, and turning healthy living into a service opportunity that trains community health leaders.

Nancy Henkin

Connecting youth and seniors

Helping communities bring generations together to identify issues of common concern and develop strategies that will promote interdependence and enrich the lives of all.

Nicholas Reville

Building democratic television

Building open-source, decentralizing tools for online media, putting people back at the center of culture, not corporations.

Nick Tilsen

Connecting youth with culture

Reconnecting younger generations of Lakota with their cultural and spiritual identities, leading them to become the energy behind a new era of community-led development.

Nina Simon

Of/By/For All

Nina is helping public institutions of all kinds become of, by, and for their own communities.

Noran Sanford

Flip the Prison

Noran believes that the major failing of our juvenile justice system is its inability to provide young people real opportunities to practice being different in their communities. Through GrowingChange and its “Flip the Prison” initiative, he is setting the standards for re-using shuttered state-owned prisons and giving local leaders, educators, legislators, law enforcement agencies, and young people themselves the opportunity and the tools to change their communities’ power structures and their lives.

Norman Atkins

Reinventing teacher education

Reinventing teacher education through a “nurse practitioner” model of teacher training that focuses on practice over theory, and that links teacher certification to demonstrated results in the classroom.

Oona Chatterjee

Communities coming together

Oona created Make the Road to empower residents to advocate for their rights and improve conditions in their neighborhoods.

Pamela Cantor

Schools supporting kids in poverty

Reengineering high-poverty schools to respond to the traumatic impact of poverty on students through student support systems, teacher training, and the promotion of high-performing school cultures.

Paul Bradley

Supporting manufactured home owners

Building a framework that enables and encourages homeowners to cooperatively buy, own, and manage the land on which their homes sit, transforming manufactured houses into appreciable assets.

Paul Rice

Paying farmers fair wages

Fighting poverty, promoting conscious consumerism, and creating sustainable development opportunities for farming communities around the world by certifying Fair Trade food products.

Paul Rieckhoff

Veterans' services for a new generation

Building a new type of veterans’ organization to meet the needs of a new generation of veterans, nurture the leadership potential of these veterans, and transform the national conversation around veteran issues.

Paula Daniels

Center for Good Food Purchasing

Paula is transforming our food system by helping large institutions approach food purchasing in ways that better reflect societal values of economic equity, environmental sustainability, and public health.

Paula Segal

Communities using vacant land

Paula Segal is reframing abandoned, neglected and un-programmed public land in cities as opportunity for multi-stakeholder community organizing. Her approach challenges residents to not accept ugly holes in their neighborhoods and empowers community groups with the tools, tactics, and experience to shape their cities. As her work spreads around the U.S. and the world, she is recognized as the pioneering advocate of the field of “community land access.”

Philipp Schmidt

Open source lesson plans

Philipp created Peer 2 Peer University as a revolutionary model for online learning by combining the best in open education with leading technologies for social networking and collaboration.

Priti Krishtel

I-MAK

Priti is democratizing the patent granting and oversight process in order to make life-saving medicines more affordable around the world.

Purvi Shah

Movement Law Lab

Purvi is building the field of Movement Lawyering so legal advocates can dramatically improve the lives of those who are most disadvantaged and support leading social justice movements in the US and around the world.

Rachel Armstrong

Farm Commons

Rachel is reforming legal services in a way that respects the client as a primary source of knowledge, inspiration, and solutions and helps changemakers thrive.

Rachel Lloyd

Fighting child trafficking

Creating a national reform movement and survivor-led model to change policy and public attitudes about the commercial sexual exploitation of children.

Rafael Alvarez

Jobs motivating youth

Changing the trajectory of life for inner-city youth by training and employing them to provide technical services to major corporations during their senior year in high school.

Raj Jayadev

Participatory defense

Growing a national movement to advance “participatory defense” whereby families and communities can effectively participate in the criminal defense process and transform the landscape of power in the court system.

Rajiv Vinnakota

Building better schools

Challenging traditional methods of public education by establishing boarding schools, funded by public-private partnerships, in low-income urban communities.

Rebecca Onie

Better health in poverty

Expanding doctors’ “prescriptions” to include housing, food, child care, and other basic resources necessary for low-income families to be healthy.

Rebecca Van Bergen

Supporting home-based workers

Rebecca van Bergen is transforming the lives of millions of home-based workers in the apparel and home design industries by bringing their profession into the formal economy.

Reginaldo Haslett-Marroquín

Regeneration Agriculture Alliance

Regi engages immigrant, young, small, new and established agricultural entrepreneurs in the US in refining and championing a global model for small-scale, poultry-powered (and planet cooling), scalable regenerative agriculture system.

Ashoka Fellows see a better future and

then Build It

Curious about becoming an Ashoka Fellow?

impact

Meet Ashoka Fellows

Yeshimabeit Milner