Ashoka to Celebrate the Power of Pro Bono

September 16, 2013 /3BL Media/ - Ashoka, the world’s leading association of social entrepreneurs seeking to build an Everyone a Changemaker™ world, announces its participation in global Pro Bono Week from October 20-26, 2013.  For more than 30 years, Ashoka has bridged the business and social sectors by creating high-quality pro bono engagements that provide specialized business expertise to Ashoka’s leading social entrepreneurs, while enabling executives to gain unique perspective on the fields and communities in which they work.   Taproot Foundation, founded by Ashoka Fellow Aaron Hurst, is convening intermediary partners around Pro Bono Week to celebrate and activate the pro bono ethic across all professions, inspiring a critical mass of pro bono activity that makes a difference. 

During Pro Bono Week, Ashoka’s Executive in Residence program—an Ashoka initiative that fosters high-impact collaborations between corporations and social entrepreneurs that have the potential to create systemic social impact—will celebrate its corporate partners, social entrepreneurs, and Executive in Residence alumni who have engaged in pro-bono collaborations.  Through a blog series and Google Hangout, Ashoka will share best practices about pro bono collaborations that go beyond benefit to social entrepreneurs and organizations, facilitating the development of shared value strategies in targeted markets, developing pioneering corporate leaders by enabling executives to practice changemaking skills (empathy, leadership, teamwork, and changemaking) and encouraging experimentation by fostering an innovation mindset. 

To learn more about Pro Bono Week, please visit: http://www.taprootfoundation.org/support-probono/pro-bono-week

About Ashoka

Ashoka is the world’s largest organization of social entrepreneurs and changemakers.  Founded in 1980 with the belief that the most powerful force in the world is a big idea in the hands of an entrepreneur, Ashoka has funded nearly 3,000 social entrepreneurs in 70 countries, providing these extraordinary individuals with funding, collaborations, and pro bono assistance to launch and scale their ideas and to create a network of peers and partners.  With the increasing pace of change, Ashoka works to advance an Everyone a Changemaker world, where anyone can apply the skills of changemaking to solve complex social problems.

About Ashoka’s Executive in Residence Program

Executive in Residence is one of Ashoka’s signature global programs bridging the private and social sectors.  In our interconnected world of accelerating change, business leaders, citizens and social entrepreneurs must collaborate across sectors effectively to solve large problems or benefit from new global opportunities that no one of them can successfully and sustainably do alone.  Building these relationships – the mindset and skills to achieve them -- is key to advancing Ashoka’s core vision, an Everyone a Changemaker  world—one in which people everywhere have the freedom, confidence, and skills to access economic opportunities and address social problems. 

For more information about Ashoka’s Executive in Residence program, please email: executiveinresidence@ashoka.org

ABOUT PRO BONO SERVICE

Pro bono--short for pro bono publico, "for the public good"—refers to professional services delivered without expectation of a fee to organizations serving the social good. It is both a form of support for community organizations as well as an increasingly core part of the ethic of business professionals from design to HR and technology, who believe that high-quality professional services are too important to only be available to those who can afford them.

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