Building on Ashoka’s 26-year history of discovering and funding social innovators, “Changemakers” developed an online community to expand the search for social solutions. Originally based solely around online competitions, in response to our community’s needs we are now building a set of tools so that our community can continue to engage and communicate beyond and outside of the competition process.
“Changemakers” is a global community of social innovators seeking to discover the cutting-edge innovators from around the world. We have built the world’s first global online open-source community that competes to discover the best social solutions, and then collaborates to refine, enrich and implement those solutions. “Changemakers” begins by providing an overarching intellectual framework for collaborative competitions that bring together individual social change initiatives into a more powerful whole.
To keep the framework dynamic, the online “Changemakers” community identifies and selects the best solutions and helps refine them. The result is global action frameworks, drawing on the work of social entrepreneurs, which seed collaborative action and visibility on a global scale— making a big difference, field by field.
The Open Sourcing Social Solutions model aims to challenge the traditional focus of issues such as human trafficking and conflict resolution with a broader, more complete set of stakeholders. As such, each one serves as a platform for building a practitioner- and investor-engaged community that sparks new waves of innovation around problems stuck on conventional approaches.
As the diverse group of stakeholders come together and see the way their work and concerns overlap and inspire each other, unexpected and important outcomes typically ensue, which the “Changemakers” model makes possible but could never predict.
“Changemakers”‘ collaborative competitions have produced new partnerships between India’s largest bank and one of India’s largest rural women’s programs; the connection of thousands of rural farmers to low-cost healthcare providers; and the scaling of an affordable Thai housing solution by the world’s largest cement manufacturer. These are just three examples that represent the strength inherent in a change-making community. And they signal the way an entire sector can broaden its focus and integrate a powerful set of solutions and stakeholders bent on change.

Links: http://changemakers.net

Changemakers is a global team of approximately 30 individuals. We have a global community of 60,000 registered users, who range from grassroots innovators to professional organizations working on solutions to pressing global needs.