Ensuring Your Kids are Changemakers
Summary
In 2016, Ashoka, the world’s community of leading social entrepreneurs, together with Ashoka Fellows, Youth Venturers, Changemaker Schools, Changemaker Campuses, and other partners, committed to launch a global Your Kids program to ensure that all kids become practiced and confident changemakers. Ashoka will offer a kickoff Your Kids workshop at the 2016 CGI Annual Meeting open to any CGI member who would like to learn how to help a young person they love become a changemaker and will offer additional individually tailored workshops for interested CGI member organizations, including follow-up services including Peer to Peer Allies for their young people and complimentary webinar support. Your Kids will inform a global audience about a new definition of success when growing up and help companies help their staff become changemakers throughout their lifetimes.
Approach
Ashoka, the world’s community of leading social entrepreneurs, together with Ashoka Fellows, Youth Venturers, Changemaker Schools, Changemaker Campuses, and other partners, will launch and develop a global Your Kids Commitment to ensure that all kids become practiced and confident changemakers. This requires young people, parents, and educators to see and understand the new reality that we are entering and to embrace this new paradigm for growing up.
Ashoka will offer a kickoff Your Kids workshop at the 2016 CGI Annual Meeting open to any CGI member who would like to learn how to help a young person they love become a changemaker. Ashoka will offer additional individually tailored workshops for interested CGI member organizations. To the extent possible, Ashoka will offer CGI members follow-up services including Peer to Peer Allies for their young people and webinar support.
Ashoka will help any educational leader or CGI member who is also an education board member see the broader field of education reform of which Your Kids is a part. We will work with school districts to help superintendents integrate the changer skills into STEM and Common Core curriculum. We will equip teachers with the framework of empathy, teamwork, leadership and changemaking. Ashoka will lead teams of teachers within the district to become changemakers themselves and then to write the lesson plans for skill integration to be used across the district. We will also deliver the Dream it Do it! methodology for teachers to use with middle and high school students to help them provide a launching pad for students to pursue changemaking in their schools and communities.
The greater Your Kids goal is to inform a global audience about a new definition of success when growing up and to help companies and other groups help their staff become changemakers throughout their lifetimes. Ashoka will work with a change team within each participating organization to help them become changemakers and co-create workshops and strategies to replicate the training within their organizations. Ashoka will assist with the “how-to’s” of creating a changemaker culture of innovation and problem solving within the corporate environment. This begins with a change in how every employee sees him or herself and whether or not the company is welcoming changemaker behavior and values innovation. Many companies are stuck with antiquated policies and hierarchical behaviors that stunt innovation and create barriers to a thriving culture for changemakers. Companies that do not recognize that their staff is confronted by changes at an escalating rate, and are in desperate need of a new framework will quickly lose their competitive edge in the marketplace. As for employees that are parents, the same methodology that works in the corporate environment can be practiced at home. Parents will become adept in communicating, learning from and participating with their kids at home to become changemakers. For others, volunteering with kids and NGO’s in the greater community will be an outlet for their new changemaker skills that will ultimately benefit the company too.
Q4 2016
Launch Your Kids with close partners including CGI members
Provide workshops and webinars to help members help their kids become changemakers
Select CGI member co-leaders for company engagements (Your kids offering for employees and
leading to a corporate, Everyone a Changemaker culture)
Q2 2017
Collect input and data, co-create final program with feedback from pilots and key stakeholders
Continue Pilots with new program changes
Q3 2017
Global launch of Your Kids initiative
Q1 2018
Media strategy around evidence demonstrating parents can be powerful changemakers
Q2 2018
Offer additional workshop to employees, scouting and religious youth groups, according to demand for this service
Q4 2018
Create open networks and avenues for partnerships that freely engage in teaching
These concepts, while allowing parents full and easy access to the tools they need in order to help their kids become changemakers
Background
Children need to master and practice the complex skills of changemaking in their teens if they are going to be meaningful contributors in life. For millennia, the aim was to master a profession, such as a barber or a banker, and repeat it for life. Think about assembly lines or professional firms, for example. However, for three centuries now the rate of change has been escalating and the demand for repetition declining, exponentially.
To be successful today, young people need to be adept in change management, skilled in cognitive empathy as global citizens, able to work in teams of teams vs. siloed approaches, collaborative in leadership vs. hierarchies and top down management and consistently problem-solve to implement solutions to ever shifting issues. Ultimately, a successful young person will be successful when they are able to fluidly lead amid rampant where change while positively contributing to a culture of love and respect both in and out of the office.
In this new reality where change is the new constant and solving problems is equated more with evolving solutions that are continually redefined. As the ever shifting world of new technology is introducing new solutions daily and a stream of new accompanying problems, there is more that is changing than staying the same. Even current solutions and discoveries are left irrelevant within shorter and shorter spans of time as one solution effects another relative to specific populations and overall global societal impact in both positive and negative ways. In order to keep up with the constant change it is now imperative that organizations shift to fluid teams of teams cultures; they need every team member reading their environment and rapidly and creatively helping the teams adjust To ongoing change.
The magic of getting one’s power by having a dream, forming a team, and changing one’s school or community in one’s teens has always been important. LinkedIn members who started something in their teens are four times as likely to be a C-level leader and five times as likely to be a founder or co-founder.
Progress Update
May 2017
Ashoka has completed the CGI “Your Kids” meeting for members, and has also completed follow up with each of the attending members to answer questions and to explore replication of the workshop with their own children and employees. Ashoka is making notable progress in the systems change work within the broader ecosystem that supports youth as changemakers, namely Government (schools), Unions (Teacher and Head Master), Schools of Education (teacher training), Companies (hiring of changemakers), and publishers. Ashoka is implementing its global Theory of Change to establish a “triggering” community that brings together model examples of early adopters within the ecosystem that are helping children to master Empathy and supporting youth to know they are Changemakers. The Your Kids workshops play an instrumental role in helping strategic stakeholders necessary within the Theory of Change to see that the world has changed and that it is paramount to success as adults that young people grow up differently. WIthout Empathy and the ability to self identify as Changemakers, young people entering the world today in search of jobs and new careers will not be prepared to adapt to the accelerating pace of change nor be effectively equipped to contribute in this new world. No longer a world of repetition and rote memorization, young people today need to grow up with the ability to navigate new complex systems and on-going, dynamic change. Ashoka has engaged with the key stakeholders outlined in the commitment and is making progress with at least three significant partnerships in each of the categories: Teacher Unions, Schools of Education, Companies and Publishers.
Partnership Opportunities
May 2017
Ashoka is looking for Companies that want to implement Your Kids as part of their employee engagement programs. Ashoka is also looking for companies that are aligned with Ashoka’s Everyone A Changemaker vision so that we can co create the Changemaker culture within your company and activate all staff as Changemakers, activating Empathy, Collaborative Leadership, Team of Teams organizaing, and Changemaking. Ashoka is also looking for Teacher Union teams, Governments, Publishers and Schools of Education to form active teams within the ecosystem that support youth to be changemakers.
Ashoka is committed to helping CGI members help their kids and their employees’ kids to become changemakers. Our partners will be individuals and organizations that are interested in piloting and replicating our Changemaker training initiative for parents and teachers. Ashoka will offer custom engagements to co-create workshops and sustainable changemaker education programs with CGI members and members’ organizations that will include project leadership and training staff time to build program and pilot first workshops with custom materials, developing implementation strategies for the new changemaker framework (cognitive empathy, collaborative leadership, team of teams culture and changemaking skill), best practices, learning and knowledge webinars, curriculum and workshop materials and the parenting changemakers online tool kit.