A Lever Long Enough to Move the World

Really, all you need to know about Bill Drayton is this: His father was an explorer in the Sahara and British Columbia, and his mother a musician and impresario. That is Drayton: a creative explorer and promoter -- of ideas. And if his plan comes off, ideas will drive Ashoka's future. Ashoka is morphing into a knowledge-management organization, "the sum of its ideas," as Sushmita Ghosh, its president, puts it. Project managers in Virginia and elsewhere are charged with spotting emerging trends and connecting the dots. They apply solutions that have worked in one part of the world to problems in another, link together similar innovations to amplify their impact, and package ideas in ways that take them from local to global in reach. It resembles, in that way, the Catholic order of Jesuit priests, the only truly effective global service organization Drayton knows of.

Take a relatively simple problem, that of alpacas. In mountain villages of Bolivia, poor farmers with small alpaca herds traditionally have relied on unimaginably primitive production methods, using the edges of tin cans to shear wool. A local organization came up with an answer: a simple but efficient distribution system that grades wool, creating financial incentives for farmers to buy shears and wash the fiber -- eventually raising their incomes.

It's a great solution for Bolivian villagers. But what about alpaca farmers elsewhere in South America, or herders of similar livestock around the world? In fact, Ashoka has demonstrated the Bolivian model to sheep farmers on Nepal's Tibetan plateau -- and they understood it immediately. Making that sort of knowledge transfer happen all the time is something Ashoka is trying to systematize, so that global networks of small producers can constantly share innovations that improve their financial prospects.

Next big idea: Global partnerships between social entrepreneurs and business. To Drayton, these "hybrid value chains" are a no-brainer; the divergence of the consumer and citizen sectors was a "nonsensical historical accident" in the first place, and their reintegration is "profoundly important for the health of both." Business must use social networks to reach new markets. And the citizen sector needs the marketplace to gain financial sustainability.

Here's one example of such collaboration: Cemex, the big Mexican cement producer, has invented a plan that encourages families in urban slums to save for cement to build home additions, then provides them with discounted engineering services. Community activists love the scheme, since it promises to alleviate family abuse sparked by overcrowding. And it's great in principle for Cemex, which penetrates a difficult market and gets paid upfront, to boot.

But Cemex is having trouble retaining the reps it trains to promote the savings plan. So in the city of Puebla, Ashoka hooked the company up with Patricia Nava, an Ashoka Fellow who has created a Mary Kay-like network to provide sex education and AIDS prevention training. The strategy calls for Cemex to use Nava's existing distribution system, paying commissions to safe-sex educators when they refer cement customers. The partnership, Nava hopes, will "allow us to increase the life quality of many people while [creating] new alternatives to generate money for projects."

The bigger idea, yet untested: Cemex and other companies use Nava's network to sell other products. Or Cemex hooks up with similar social entrepreneurs to distribute cement across Mexico and elsewhere. Think of it as a matrix. "The challenge for us is finding ways to institutionalize this," says Valeria Budinich, the Ashoka vice president who oversees the initiative.

And the really bigger idea, the uebergoal, is that ultimately, innovative strategies like this one will spread themselves without Ashoka's help. "A hundred years from now, the field will know how to do this," Drayton says. "The pattern will be obvious. We'll be able to recognize a group of entrepreneurs coming up around the world on a new issue."

We will do so, he expects, because of structures and tools being established now. Already, Ashoka has launched the makings of a global accelerator for social entrepreneurs. McKinsey is providing management consulting, Hill & Knowlton the public relations expertise, and the International Senior Lawyers Project the legal support. It's also negotiating with several financial institutions to create new mechanisms for financing -- and it's toying with the notion of an online marketplace where entrepreneurs and funders could find each other. Drayton is even piloting a professional-services firm called Social Entrepreneur Associates -- like a McKinsey populated by citizen- sector professionals.