The BetterWorld team is so excited to be on the ground floor of Ashoka’s U.S. Youth Venture pilot in the SF Bay Area. The program, led by ED Amy Wilson, has already invested in a number of East Bay entrepreneurs and is now shifting into high gear, having just added an amazing and diverse group of changemakers to its steering committee and setting firm goals of becoming the example for other Ashoka Youth Ventures to launch in the U.S. BetterWorld is proud to be assisting YV with donation dollars and volunteer hours helping to ramp up the efforts in the Bay area.
Youth Venture invests in young people, enabling them to launch their own sustainable social ventures, and then connects them into a global network. The ventures are entirely youth-initiated and youth-led. Youth Venture grew out of insights gained through the experience of the Bay Area Ashoka Youth Venture sister organization, Ashoka: Innovators for the Public.
Ashoka is the first, largest and fastest growing global association of social entrepreneurs – individuals with innovative and practical ideas for addressing the world’s most intractable social challenges. Since 1980, Ashoka has pioneered a movement of social entrepreneurs by developing the concept of social entrepreneurship and then helping more than 1,800 leading “adult” social entrepreneurs, known as Ashoka Fellows, to launch their system changing ventures in more than 70 countries.
Ashoka developed the concept of Youth Venture by harnessing the innovations of Ashoka’s Fellows in the field of youth development. In light of both the Fellows’ work and their own youth experiences, Ashoka realized how critical it is to give young people the tools and space to take initiative. Ashoka thus created Youth Venture to build a movement of young social changemakers. By enabling and inspiring young people to learn to take initiative from an early age, Youth Venture will make it possible for exponentially increasing numbers of people to lead and learn again and again throughout their lives, leading to Ashoka and Youth Venture’s vision of “everyone a changemaker.”
For more information on the Bay area Youth Venture, click here and visit www.ashoka.org for more on Ashoka.
In service,
Jacob, Salem and Matt
Posted in: Events Volunteering
