Who is Bill Drayton?

Bill Drayton was born in New York in 1943. His father was an explorer, his mother a cellist. He gained a BA from Harvard in 1965 before going on to Oxford where he read Economics, won a First, and received his MA in 1967. He then attended Yale Law School and obtained his JD in 1970. Drayton began his career with McKinsey as a consultant. Later he worked as Assistant Administrator at the US Environmental Protection Agency (EPA). In 1980 he founded Ashoka, an internationally-oriented citizen organization that tackles the woes of this world with the means of the marketplace. Drayton has played a major part in defining social entrepreneurship: entrepreneuring changes whose success is measured not in terms of profits but of social transformation and whose business models are designed to be copied by other social enterprises to accelerate the pace of change. When it was founded in 1980 as a venture capitalist supporting change in the world, Ashoka had a global operating budget of US$50,000. Last year that had risen to around US$40 million. Today, Ashoka is active in more than 70 countries and supports the work of over 2,000 Fellows – social entrepreneurs it helps from the start-up phase onward. The Ashoka community also includes those who are now thoroughly proven social entrepreneurs, such as the Nobel Prize laureate and founder of Grameen Bank, Muhammad Yunus.

Source: http://www.ezifocus.com/content/thefocus/issue/article.php/article/54300800

Posted by: Mimmy Duhaylungsod