We started Ashoka here in India with a simple idea: that you needed social entrepreneurs to deal with problems that don't fit the business paradigm.
Bill DraytonPublic service and respect for ideas is a recurrent theme in both the American and Australian sides of my family.
Bill DraytonThe most critical variable [to becoming a change-maker] is one's willingness to give oneself permission. To break the mental chains that make us small because everyone tells us we cannot.
Bill DraytonListening is understanding. The skill of empathy is a must to be able to listen...One can listen better if one sees the whole.
Bill DraytonWe need to reverse three centuries of walling the for-profit and non-profit sectors off from one another. When you think for-profit and non-profit, you most often think of entities with either zero social return or zero return on capital and zero social return. Clearly, there's some opportunity in the spectrum between those extremes. What's missing is the for-profit finance industry coming in to that area. Look at the enormous diversity of the for-profit financial industry as opposed to monolithic nature of the non-profit world; it's quite astonishing.
Bill Drayton