Leadership Team | Ashoka.org (original) (raw)

Bill Drayton, C.E.O. and Founder

Bill Drayton has been a social entrepreneur since he was a New York City elementary school student. He was born to a mother who emigrated from Australia as a young cellist and an American father who, also unafraid to step into the unknown, became an explorer at an equally young age. Public service and strong values run through the stories of both parents' families -- including several of the earliest anti-slavery abolitionist and women's leaders in the U.S. These family influences, the rich diversity and openness of life in Manhattan-as well as America's deep cultural concern with equity, which flourished during the Civil Rights years-all interacted with one another and with Bill's temperament to plant Ashoka's earliest roots.

In elementary school, Bill loved geography and history and was equally unmotivated in Latin and math. His real passion in those years went to sailing, and starting and running a series of newspapers in his school and beyond. In high school he created and built the Asia Society into the largest student organization. By high school he was also a NAACP member and actively engaged in and deeply moved by civil rights work. At Harvard he founded the Ashoka Table; and, at Yale Law School, he launched Yale Legislative Services which, by the time he graduated, engaged one third of the student body in helping key legislators throughout the northeast design and draft legislation.

Bill's deepening commitments to Asia, especially South Asia, and to civil rights were closely linked. Martin Luther King, Jr. followed Mahatma Gandhi's way, and anyone concerned with inequity within the U.S. could only be more disturbed by the greater inequalities between the world's North and South.

Once focused on such a chasm, any entrepreneur would have to ask: "What can I do?" At Harvard and Oxford, Bill did ask. Fully appreciating how central to significant change ("development") entrepreneurs are, his answer was the Ashoka idea.

Bill is also a manager and management consultant - choices that also grow from his fascination with how human institutions work. Although he loves and thinks first in historical terms, he is trained in economics, law, and management, the three key-interventionist disciplines. He was a McKinsey and Company consultant for almost ten years, gaining wide experience serving both public and private clients.

For four years, he was Assistant Administrator at the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency, where he had lead responsibility for policy, budget, management, audit, and representing the environment in Administration-wide policy development, notably including budget, energy, and economic policy. He successfully "intrapreneured" a series of major innovations and reforms in the field, ranging from the introduction of emissions trading to the use of economics-defined incentives to remove the advantage of delaying compliance. Later he founded and led Save EPA, an association of professional environmental managers that helped Congress, press, administration, citizen groups, and public understand and the block much of the radically destructive policies proposed by the Administrator Ann Gorsuch and others. Bill also founded and led Environmental Safety which helps develop and spread better ways of implementing environmental laws.

He also served briefly in the White House, and taught both law and management at Stanford Law School and Harvard's Kennedy School of Government.

He is currently significantly involved as board chair of Get America Working! and Youth Venture, both major strategic innovations for the public good.

Bill has received many awards for his achievements. He was elected one of the early MacArthur Fellows for his work, including the founding of Ashoka. Yale School of Management gave him its annual Award for Entrepreneurial Excellence. The American Society of Public Administration and the National Academy of Public Administration jointly awarded him their National Public Service Award, and the Common Cause gave him its Public Service Achievement Award. He has also been named a Preiskel-Silverman Fellow for Yale Law School and is a member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. Most recently in 2005, he was selected one of America's Best Leaders by US News & World Report and Harvard's Center for Public Leadership. In the same month he was the recipient of the Yale Law School's highest alumni honor, The Yale Law School Award of Merit- for having made a substantial contribution to Public Service.

For inquiries regarding Bill Drayton's avaliability, please contact:

Diana Wells, President

Dr. Diana Wells, Co-President of Ashoka, joined the organization in the 1980s after graduating from Brown University with a degree in South Asian Studies. As an undergraduate, her year-long study abroad in Varanasi, India led her to see the need for local solutions to solve global problems. This insight brought her to Ashoka and inspired her to create one of Ashoka's core programs, Fellowship Support Services, (now Fellowship) which not only supplied Ashoka’s social entrepreneurs with a wide array of information, resources and services, but at the same time connected them to one another and their ideas in a globally expansive context. Taking a leave to pursue a Ph.D. in anthropology, she was named both a Fulbright and Woodrow Wilson scholar. Her ethnographic research focusing on understanding how social change happens as a local articulation of a global social movement resulted in her dissertation: 'Between the Difference: The Emergence of a Cross Ethnic Women’s Movement in Trinidad and Tobago.'

Having her PhD in hand, Diana returned to Ashoka to provide leadership for the worldwide process of sourcing and selecting leading social entrepreneurs as Ashoka Fellows. In addition she was given strategic and operational responsibility for Ashoka’s geographic expansion and the significant increase of Fellow elections; to its current total of 1800. She has contributed to the field of social entrepreneurship by implementing a widely respected tool for "Measuring Effectiveness", which is one of the first standard tools to measure the impact of social entrepreneurship.

She is on the Advisory Board for Center for the Advancement of Social Entrepreneurship (CASE) at Duke’s Fuqua School of Business and on the Board of GuideStar International. Her Ph.D. is from New York University (2000), and her undergraduate degree from Brown University (1988). She has taught at Georgetown University on Anthropology and Development and has both authored and edited numerous journal and book publications including two compilations on social movements in the United States.

Most recently, Diana was celebrated as one of 10 winners of the first annual Women to Watch award, by Running Start, a Washington, DC based organization that empowers young women to be political leaders.

She lives in Arlington, VA with her husband Paul, her son Toby and her mother Elaine.

Sushmita Ghosh, President Emeritus

Sushmita Ghosh completed a five-year term as President and continues as a member of Ashoka’s Leadership Team. She directs the highest levels of Ashoka programs for top business entrepreneurs and leads both the Global Academy for Social Entrepreneurs and Changemakers. Sushmita currently splits her time between Arlington, Virginia and Calcutta.

Sushmita graduated at the top of her class at the University of Dehli. She served as Sub-editor, Research Director and Executive Director of Maneka Gandhi's national Indian news magazine Surya from 1979 to 1982. She then started her family and moved on to a successful career as a freelance journalist. She freelanced for a number of major newsmagazines and newspapers in India, including The Times of India, The Hindustan Times, Business Standard, and Sunday Magazine.

Sushmita served as Ashoka's country representative for India from 1989 to 1997. During that time, she helped Ashoka launch its new programs in Latin America and direct its European fundraising efforts. Sushmita also founded Changemakers, a magazine for social entrepreneurship in 1992, now Changemakers.net website. Subsequently, Sushmita became International Vice President of Ashoka and Executive Director of Changemakers and then Ashoka President. Sushmita is a board member of several non-profit organizations in India, including the Consumer Unity and Trust Society, the Energy Environment Group, and Gender Action and Advisory, and a council member at the American India Foundation.