“Karen is transforming the UK job market by opening up opportunities for flexible and part time roles.”
The Idea & Strategy
In 2005 Karen founded Women Like Us to provide career support to women who had dropped out of the workforce or been forced to take jobs beneath their skill-level in exchange for flexibility to cater for their families. Last year Karen launched Timewise Jobs and Timewise Recruitment, the UK’s only jobsite and recruitment agency exclusively focused on flexible and part time roles.
“Ikhalayami designs, implements and builds affordable upgraded shelters that are fire and flood retardant, easy to transport and quick to build. It reconfigures the layout of informal settlements to ones that are more regularized.”
The Idea & Strategy
The Idea & Strategy
“Now, Mel is aiming to grow the movement to reach up to 1,000,000 people per year. To do this, he launched The Homeless World Cup Supporters Club: a virtual million seats stadium filled with people who believe in the power of football.”
The Idea & Strategy
You may have childhood memories of playing outside for hours with your friends until you were called to come in for dinner. Unfortunately, many children aren’t playing that way today. Playgrounds, schoolyards, neighbourhoods, and parks aren’t as busy they used to be.
Editors's Note: This article was written by Paige Elenson. Elenson is the Executive Director of Africa Yoga Project (AYP), a movement that empowers the youth through the transformative power of yoga. A native New Yorker and former Wall Street consultant, she has been teaching yoga for over a decade. Elenson’s incisive skills as a businesswoman, spiritual activist and yogini inspired her work with AYP. This article first appeared on Fair Observer on August 29, 2014.
Editors's Note: This article was written by Maria Khwaja. Khwaja is the Founder of Elun, a nonprofit organization dedicated to teacher education in the developing world. Khwaja is also a teacher and completed her Master's in Education at Oxford University. This article first appeared on Fair Observer on September 25, 2014.
Lisa Bennett writes about how empathy can be tapped as a powerful force for creating change.
Bangalore, India -- Four road safety entrepreneurs have been selected as winners in the innovation challenge “Safer Roads, Safer India: Game Changing Innovations that Save Lives.” Their projects were evaluated by an expert panel of judges and chosen as the top solutions from a pool of more than 80 entries that activate citizenship, improve governance to be more responsive, update infrastructure, and use technology to protect drivers, passengers, and bystanders.
“We’re trying to change education in a positive way, that’s the overarching goal,” said Jan von Meppen. “Basically, we’re trying to achieve that by using storytelling to put learning content into context with the real world.”
"Ewa created distribution channels for last-mile communities who need access to products and technology, in 14 countries."
The Idea and Strategy
Ewa Wojkowska has created distribution channels that engage local civil society channels, organizations, cooperatives, savings and loans groups, local kiosks, funders, investors and technology producers to ensure that last-mile communities have access to much-needed appropriate technologies to address their basic needs. These technologies include water filters, solar lights and fuel efficient cook stoves.
We asked you to share your ideas for a healthier Canada and your response was tremendous. The Play Exchange received an astounding 422 ideas from across Canada for empowering people to make healthier choices. We thank everyone who participated for sharing your solutions for promoting active, healthy living!
Professor S., a university professor in Berlin, has invented the world’s first functioning time machine. Unfortunately, it has malfunctioned and he’s stuck in the past with his Ph.D. research assistant, Jeanette. It’s up to students in seven elementary schools in Germany to help bring the pair home.
Young people everywhere crave having a purpose in our rapidly changing world. This has serious social, economic, and political implications for the sub-Saharan Africa region because it is on track to have the largest youth population in the world by 2050.
The Idea & Strategy
Earlier this year, UL partnered with Ashoka, a global network of change makers, and launched the Safer Roads, Safer India: Game Changing Innovations that Save Lives challenge to increase public awareness of road safety challenges, crowd source solutions, and accelerate the rate of positive change. The Safe Roads challenge is part of a pilot being tested across India, with a focus on Bangalore, the country’s third-largest city.
Editor's Note: Below is a Q&A with Timothy J. McClimon, president of the American Express Foundation and vice president for Corporate Social Responsibility, American Express. Read more about the Ashoka American Express Emerging Innovators Bootcamp on the 2014 Emerging Innovators Campaign homepage.
Members of Canada’s Aboriginal population are at a higher health risk than other Canadians. They are more prone to diabetes and 50 percent more likely to develop heart disease.
We recently ran a Twitter chat to discuss how learning projects with a focus on play and whole-child development can make prepare young people in Asia to succeed in the 21st century.
“Regular exercise prepared me well for the demands of astronaut life, and it will prepare explorers of the future for their challenges,” said Robert Thirsk, former astronaut with the Canadian Space Agency and director of the board for LIFT Philanthropy Partners.
We’re honored and thrilled to announce the expert judges of the Building Vibrant Communities challenge! They are:
Cedric Brown: Managing Partner, Kapor Center for Social Impact
While statistics show that participation in sport and physical activities is important to a person’s overall health, but how do we ensure all Canadians have access to these opportunities?
Editor's Note: This Article was written by George W.Bakka. Bakka is Ugandan entrepreneur and the founder and CEO of Angel's Hub and a Segal Family Foundation partner. He is also an Acumen, Anzisha and Educate! Fellow. This article originally appeared on the Huffington Post Blog on August 8, 2014.
Photo courtesy of Tanoker - Ledokombo, a learning project in Indonesia that offers lessons in reading, writing, and mathematics, as well as sports, cooking, dancing, art, and music at the request of children.
There’s no such thing as starting too early when it comes to forming healthy habits, according to the Healthy Beginnings for Preschoolers 2-5 team. They provide resources, training, and guidance to early learning practitioners that help ensure preschoolers are learning healthy eating habits and keeping active from an early age in in British Columbia, the Yukon, the Northwest Territories, and Quebec.
Finalists will be revealed on 9/3! Until then, we’ve rounded up top stories about empathy making waves as a powerful driver of change in communities. (Photo: NERDS (Native Education Raising Dedicated Students) is a Semi-Finalist of the Building Vibrant Communities challenge and is featured on the Ashoka Changemakers Instagram this week!)
But first, a few announcements:
We have to change the way the next generation of children learn, think and interact with people and the environment (both built and natural).
“This world requires a new paradigm for growing up and therefore also for education,” Bill Drayton wrote last year in Stanford Social Innovation Review.
An astonishing 90 percent of assaults are committed by repeat assailants, and only 22 percent of sexual assaults on campuses are reported to authorities, according to estimates. Victims of sexual assault on college and university campuses need a safe space where they can report assailants in a transparent and confidential way —and where they can help put an end to what is often an ongoing cycle.
A former high school teacher, Jordyn Lexton recalls telling a student in her English class, “that, with hard work and over the course of time, he could achieve his goal of becoming an architect.
“As the words left my mouth, another student respectfully objected, telling me I was ‘selling dreams’,” Lexton said. “In that moment, I realized I needed to do more.”
Empathy—that seven-letter word seems to be everywhere these days.
Editor's Note: This article was written by Oluseun Onigbinde. Oluseun is the Co-Founder of BudgIT, a public data visualization startup that makes the Nigerian budget simpler and an Ashoka and Knight Innovation Fellow. This article first appeared on Fair Observer on August 6, 2014.
When it comes to healthy living, changing age-old habits is not always easy. Today in Canada, one in four children is overweight or obese, and less than 7% of children are physically active each day.
You know that India ranks first in the world for deaths caused by traffic accidents. You know that most of the deaths are pedestrians. And you know that UL and Ashoka have come together to surface the most innovative solutions that are making roads in India safer.
Without decisive action, today’s children could become the first generation of Canadians to have shorter life-spans than their parents. The growing twin epidemics of physical inactivity and unhealthy eating is placing the health of Canadian children at risk and threatens to be a massive driver of heart disease, stroke and soaring health costs in the future.
Lisa Bennett on why people avoid engaging in the fight against climate change--and how empathy can be tapped as a powerful solution. This article originally appeared on Forbes.com.
"The 2015 goal to halve the proportion of people living without sanitation is running 150 years behind schedule.”
—WHO/UNICEF Joint Monitoring Programme for Water Supply and Sanitation 2010
In the next 40 years, food production needs to go up by 70% if we are to be able to feed future populations. Lucas Simons, founder of SCOPEinsight has a solution to professionalise the agricultural landscape.
Every child—regardless of physical condition—deserves the opportunity to develop to their fullest potential. This is the vision of Be Your Best (Choisir de Gagner).
Editor's Note: This article was written by Tsega Belachew, Global Content and Engagement Manager for Ashoka: Innovators for the Public. This article was first featured on AllAfrica.com on 29 July 2014. RLabs, founded by Marlon Parker, is an innovation movement that transforms youth in troubled communities, gangsters, dropouts and ex-convicts, into changemakers.
From a pool of more than 200 entries, the short-listing team at Ashoka Changemakers has selected 86 Semi-Finalists of the Building Vibrant Communities: Activating Empathy to Create Change challenge.
Video caption: Early Entry Prize Winner and Semi-Finalist iLead+Design submitted this video illustrating its unique model for teaching students empathy skills and how to use design thinking to solve problems.
The founders of Avanti, a social venture based out of India, are working to bridge the skills gap and empower millions of children to transform their future educational prospects.
How many times have you been told to exercise more, to eat a little healthier or to sleep a little longer? And how many times have you actually got out there and done it? Probably not as often as you’d like.
What is needed to get people to actively support environmental sustainability?
“Marketing,” says Kevin Davies, Ashoka American Express Emerging Innovator and founder of Green Start, an organization committed to reducing waste in Calgary, Canada and educating Calgarians about the impact of their personal decisions on the environment around them.
“I believe that marketing could well be the missing piece of the puzzle. I believe in marketing as a force for good.”
Project Happiness (PH) teaches students the skills to build emotional resilience, self-awareness, and empathy. Informed by neuroscience, positive psychology, and mindfulness, PH “teaches kids to be happy and strong from the inside” and helps adults strengthen social and emotional skills as well, said founder Randy Taran.
