Prize Winner 2010

The winner of the 2010 Essl Social Prize - Bill Drayton - is founder and current head of Ashoka, a non-profit organisation which goal it is to find and support socially oriented entrepeneurs across the world. Over the last three decades Ashoka has succeeded in building a worldwide social network. To this day more than 2,500 Ashoka-Fellows in around 70 countries on five continents have been connected.

Now, Bill Drayton intends to use this network in order to implement tried-and-tested projects in other countries as well and to lift social innovations from a local or regional level to an international level as a result. For this purpose, the initiative “Ashoka Globalizer”, which is to be understood as a process of internationalization of social initiatives, was called into being:

• Selection procedure:
  25 of the over 2,500 Ashoka members world-wide have been selected as globalizers for this year.
  Selection criterion: It must be possible to implement the project on an international scale in regard to contents and organization. The globalizer process of Ashoka will be carried out every year in the future, new globalizers will be selected and consequently the social effect will be increased every year too.
  
  
• “Hofburg talks”:
  The 25 selected globalizers meet with 25 business entrepreneurs and philanthropists from all over the world. In individual talks, multi-annual business plans, schemes and implementation scenarios of the social entrepreneurs are discussed and further developed, and then the actually achieved widening of the social effect is measured.
  
  
• Ongoing exchange within the globalizer community via an Internet platform, the Mindshare Community, or meetings in person.

• Actual implementation of the selected projects with the help of the philanthropists and business entrepreneurs, aiming for a considerable increase of the number of people that profit from these initiatives.

• Performance rating determining the efficiency of the globalizer process: How many people are reached with the selected projects today, and how many people will be reached in one year and in five years? How many more countries will be included in the future?

The prize money of the Essl Social Prize is used to fund the entire Ashoka globalizer process, ranging from the first preparations to complete implementation in the year 2010.

Bill Drayton: “25 new Ashoka fellows go global with their activities year after year. In a few years, the whole initiative will have brought about a measurable improvement of their conditions of living for hundred thousand people”.