Funding opportunity, discovered by "La Maison Verte"

Ashoka is a global organization that accelerates social change by identifying and investing in leading social entrepreneurs. Building on twenty years' success identifying and investing in social entrepreneurs around the globe, Ashoka is now able to begin investing in leading Canadian social entrepreneurs.

Over the next five years, Ashoka will find and elect between 20 and 24 leading Canadian social entrepreneurs across the country to its international fellowship, helping them launch and/or spread their exceptionally promising new ideas for social change. Social entrepreneurs have the creativity that enables them to envision new and better ways to address persistent social problems and the entrepreneurial skill and determination required to bring their ideas to fruition.

As part of the Ashoka Fellowship, Canadian Fellows will play a key role in importing promising social innovations and as a gateway through which their colleagues around the globe can gain greater access to Canada's most creative thinking on social problems. By finding and investing in this steady flow of important social innovations and the committed social entrepreneurs behind each, Ashoka Canada hopes to strengthen Canada's ability to respond to its most pressing social challenges and provide a fresh complement to existing efforts.

About Ashoka

Ashoka's mission is to develop the profession of social entrepreneurship around the world.

Leading social entrepreneurs (Ashoka "Fellows") work in every area of human need and are found in every country around the globe. What defines them and their work, and what Ashoka demands of its Fellows, is the highest standard of innovation, entrepreneurial skill, creativity, social impact and human ethics.

Ashoka invests in people. It is a global non-profit organization that searches the world for social entrepreneurs—extraordinary individuals with unprecedented ideas for change in their communities. Ashoka identifies and invests in these social entrepreneurs when no one else will. It does so through stipends and professional services that allow "Ashoka Fellows" to focus fulltime on their ideas for leading social change in education and youth development, health care, environment, human rights, access to technology and economic development.

Ashoka first began electing leading social entrepreneurs to its global fellowship in India in 1982. Today, 20 years later, the fellowship comprises more than 1,200 leading social entrepreneurs in 44 countries throughout Asia, Latin America, Africa, Central and Eastern Europe and the United States. All Ashoka funds are privately raised from individual donors and private or corporate charitable foundations.