{"id":10225,"date":"2019-12-19T14:18:41","date_gmt":"2019-12-19T13:18:41","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/programmeoctave.com\/?p=10225"},"modified":"2019-12-19T14:29:42","modified_gmt":"2019-12-19T13:29:42","slug":"are-you-a-change-maker","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/programmeoctave.com\/en\/10225\/are-you-a-change-maker\/","title":{"rendered":"Are you a change maker?"},"content":{"rendered":"[vc_row no_margin=”true” padding_top=”0px” padding_bottom=”0px” bg_video=”” class=”bargeo_single_header” style=””][vc_column fade_animation_offset=”45px” width=”1\/1″][\/vc_column][\/vc_row][vc_row padding_top=”0px” padding_bottom=”0px”][vc_column fade_animation_offset=”45px” width=”1\/1″]\n
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Are you a change maker?<\/h1>\n <\/header>\n [\/vc_column][\/vc_row][vc_row inner_container=”true” padding_top=”0px” padding_bottom=”0px” bg_video=”” class=”” style=””][vc_column fade_animation_offset=”45px” width=”1\/1″][vc_column_text]\n

\u201cBe the change you want to see in the world.\u201d Gandhi\u2019s famous words could be a motto for the movers and shakers of this world, AKA \u201cchange makers\u201d. But who really are these people who want to help the world go in the \u201cright\u201d direction? What do they want to achieve? How do they think they can achieve it? The Octave webmagazine investigates.<\/p>\n

Is a change maker a social entrepreneur?\u00a0<\/strong><\/span><\/h5>\n

The Ashoka principle<\/strong><\/p>\n

Bill Drayton, founder of the Indian NGO Ashoka in 1980, is said to have coined the term \u201cchange maker\u201d. During his time as a student at Harvard fifteen years earlier, Drayton launched the Ashoka Table dinner initiative, which involved political, economic and religious leaders answering questions from students about the world as they saw it. The name of the project derives from Sanskrit, and means \u2018the absence of sadness\u2019. It was also the name of a third-century emperor during India\u2019s Maurya dynasty. Ashoka is remembered as the first pacifist leader: he brought prosperity to his kingdom by transforming its society and culture and encouraging respect for all communities. He brought about solidarity between rich and poor, and encouraged trade as an alternative to wars.<\/p>\n

Drayton learned about Ashoka\u2019s ideology through his admiration for Mahatma Gandhi, who also cited the emperor of ancient India as one of his sources of inspiration, as well as the author Leo Tolstoy and the artist and economist John Ruskin. Also influenced by Martin Luther King, Drayton gradually became certain that peace and prosperity must go hand in hand, and bring about justice and solidarity,\u00a0<\/strong>empowerment<\/strong><\/a>\u00a0fellowship,\u00a0<\/strong>trust<\/strong><\/a>\u00a0and hope. He was also driven by the belief that everyone can play a part in transforming the economy and society in a positive way<\/strong>.<\/p>\n

When he graduated, Drayton spent a few years working for McKinsey, then the US Environmental Protection Agency before embarking on his large-scale project: an NGO that would bring together everyone involved in social innovation, with a view to implementing initiatives to transform behaviors, production and distribution models, even entire social structures. Ashoka was founded, and media coverage for the NGO helped to popularize the term \u201csocial entrepreneur\u201d.<\/p>\n

Social entrepreneurs, new-generation value creators<\/strong><\/p>\n

In actual fact, Drayton wasn\u2019t the first to use the term \u201csocial entrepreneur\u201d: its first occurrence dates back to 1972 when it was suggested by the sociologist Joe Banks while he was working on how the responsibilities of \u201csocial workers\u201d had evolved in the America of the 1930s. During the seventeenth century, social workers were charitable people. They became activists during the nineteenth century, and public servants after the Great Depression. And in the future, as Banks has been saying since the 1960s, they will be entrepreneurs. That is to say\u00a0an economically measurable, global creator of value, whose social impact is tangible and has the power to transform uses, behaviors and cultures<\/strong>.<\/p>\n

Change making in action<\/strong><\/span><\/h5>\n

The pillars of social innovation<\/strong><\/p>\n

This vision of social entrepreneurship spotlights the three pillars of change making:<\/p>\n