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fellows was Gloria de Souza, a Bombay teacher who believed from her own experience that old-fashioned, passive rote learning was boring and ineffective with most students. She used the environment to teach children to learn by doing, to think rather than memorize, to problem-solve rather than to repeat. She made learning active, creative, and fun. De Souza had a burning desire to see her approach adopted across India. Ashoka believed in her approach and in her ability to sell it and in 1981 gave her a four-year grant to cover living expenses so that she could pursue it. By 1985, she had persuaded Bombay’s school board to introduce environmental studies with her learning methods into 1,700 schools. Within three years, nearly a million students were learning her way. By the end of the decade, the Indian government had made de Souza’s environmental studies program part of the official curriculum in the first three grades. An independent evaluation showed that students learning by de Souza’s method scored twice as high on reading tests as those who were taught by rote, and mastered writing and mathematics three times as fast. Gloria de Souza was Ashoka’s first acorn.

By 2006, Ashoka’s budget had grown from $50,000 to $30 million, its fellows from one to more than 1,800 in more than sixty countries on five continents. They have done amazing things in health care, education, economic development, and in advancing equality and social justice. They were all selected through a rigorous process that was based on the potential of their ideas to have national impact, their entrepreneurial capacity to implement and sell them, their persistence in staying the course and making appropriate changes when their plans didn’t work out, and their willingness to keep at it for as long as it takes to succeed.

Ashoka tripled in size from 1999 to 2002 and is still growing and expanding its mission. Besides supporting social entrepreneurs, Ashoka now develops groups and networks of them to reinforce each other and accelerate their impact, and it provides infrastructure support, including access to financing for expansion, ties to the business and academic sectors, and opportunities for partnerships with others doing compatible work. At the 2006 Clinton Global Initiative, Ashoka committed to raise $50 million to expand its search for social entrepreneurs in Western Europe, Africa, East Asia, and the Middle East.

Bill Drayton looks more like a college professor than a world-beater. He is modest, very thin, wears old-fashioned big-framed glasses, talks softly, and is polite, almost courtly in manner. He is brilliant, with a wide knowledge of topics both prominent and obscure. I ran into him not long ago at an event in Washington and was struck, as always, by the unusual combination of power, kindness, and humility he projects. A quiet man who set out to change the world by giving citizens in every nation “the freedom, confidence, and social support to address any social need,” he is still at it, the perfect model for all the other social entrepreneurs he finds and empowers, and many others he’s never met. Bill Drayton’s story and those of other promising social entrepreneurs, including some outstanding Ashoka fellows, are told at greater length in David Bornstein’s fine book How to Change the World. If you’re particularly interested in this kind of giving, I highly recommend it.

In recent years, more funding for social entrepreneurs has become available, principally from foundations established by wealthy individuals. Among the most important is the Omidyar Network, established by eBay founder Pierre Omidyar and his wife, Pam. The network funds a broad array of projects that promote empowerment through innovation. It has been a generous supporter of Ashoka and of the Microcredit Summit campaign, an annual meeting of stakeholders that, for a decade now, has focused on reaching the world’s poorest families (those living on less than $1 a day), empowering women, building microcredit institutions that are financially self-sufficient, and measuring the