Youth Venture

Youth Venture grew out of insights gained through the experience of our 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.” Check out www.ashoka.org for more on Ashoka.