What is Ashoka's Changemakers?

Changemakers.net is the world's first global online "open source" community that competes to identify the best solutions to social problems, 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 model aims to challenge the traditional focus of issues water and sanitation, human trafficking, and conflict resolution with a broader, more complete set of stakeholders.  The result is an engaged community that sparks new waves of innovation around problems stuck on conventional approaches—making a big difference, field by field.

Who Sponsors a Collaborative Competition?

Changemakers Collaborative Competitions are sponsored by motivated companies, organizations, and individuals who want to engage their networks and new communities around social challenges that represent opportunities to solve problems, sourcing innovative solutions from every part of the world, engaging participants from every level and sector of society, and driving issues to the next level of innovation.

Sponsors collaborate with Changemakers Team members to frame the central question for a competition, aligning the process to achieve desired outcomes. And then Changemakers does the rest: managing all administrative, technical, marketing, and competition judging responsibilities. The open sourcing process allows sponsors, and their communities, to engage with on-the-ground innovators in real time and help drive the field to a new level of innovation and action.

To learn more about sponsoring a competition contact Karin Hillhouse, Director of Partnerships, at 703.600.8297 or khillhouse@ashoka.org.

Read about some of our previous Collaborative Competition Sponsors below:

Nike

“Sport for a Better World Competition”

Ashoka’s Changemakers and Nike have partnered to open a worldwide search for projects that use the transformative power of sport to achieve real social change.

• 381 entries
• 70 countries
• 1700 discussion comments providing feedback and suggestions to the entrants

These numbers demonstrate the capability to source social change innovators from around the world, and connect them to the community of stakeholders around this issue.  The partnership benefits Nike by setting the stage to reach consumers and enthusiasts in a positive way.  Together, this partnership and the Changemakers community have the potential to shape the field of sport for change and bring real solutions to our most troubling social problems. 

National Geographic

“Geotourism Challenge”

National Geographic and Ashoka’s Changemakers developed the Geotourism Challenge to identify and showcase innovators (both individuals and organizations) that support the approach known as geotourism: tourism that sustains or enhances the geographical character of a place-its environment, culture, aesthetics, heritage, and the well-being of its residents.  The competition is sourcing global information on how to help destinations benefit from tourism while protecting the assets that make them special, ultimately furthering National Geographic’s commitment to the world’s distinctive places.

• 318 entries
• 82 countries
• 1,066 discussion comments providing feedback and suggestions to the entrants

Robert Wood Johnson Foundation

“No Private Matter! Ending Abuse in Intimate Family Relations”
“Disruptive Innovations in Health and Health Care: Solutions People Want” 
“Why Games Matter: A Prescription for Improving Health and Health Care”
"Young Men at Risk: Transforming the Power of a Generation"

The Robert Wood Johnson Foundation partnered with Ashoka’s Changemakers for four collaborative competitions to further the Foundation’s mission to improve the health and health care of all Americans.  The first competition sourced innovative solutions and catalyzed a community of changemakers to help eliminate intimate partner violence in the United States.  The second sourced the global health care industry for “disruptive innovations”: technologies, processes, or business models that bring to market a product or service that is much more affordable and much simpler to use than what is currently available.  Eleven competition entrants were invited to submit proposals to RWJF's Pioneer Portfolio for support from a pool of $5 million in grant funding.  The third competition sourced new ideas for how best to improve health and health care through digital game technologies on- and offline.  The fourth looked to transform an established field with innovation to help an entire generation of young black men at risk of failing to reach their fullest potential.

The total number of entries submitted for the four competitions was nearly 1,000.  The Changemakers model provided the successful and efficient platform that put the power to accelerate innovation and improve impact into to the hands of the innovators and their sponsors.