Ashoka & Khulisa

Last Wednesday I attended a presentation by Ashoka in the Société Générale.

Ashoka are the oldest association for social entrepreneurs in the world and support over 1800 fellows world-wide . I’ve been working with the Ashoka Support Network to put together some very early stage ideas on how the organisation could apply Web 2.0, and specifically social networking approaches to its work.

If the people I heard about (and met) on Wednesday are anything to go by, the Ashoka fellows are an interesting bunch of people.

I specifically found Lesley Ann Van Selm’s talk hugely inspiring.  She is a South African who founded Khulisa, a restorative justice programme:

"Khulisa is an initiative that tackles crime holistically, working at all levels of the crime cycle – preventing crime, diverting youth from the criminal justice system, providing alternatives to imprisonment, fostering personal transformation for those who are in prison, and assisting with their transition back to society."

According to Van Selm, 80 percent of participants do not revert back to crime, and it costs about a third as much to run this programme as it does to keep someone in jail for one year.

Ashoka seem to really push their entrepreneurs towards taking a world-wide, and world-changing approach.  Khulisa is now coming to the UK; it’ll be fascinating to see how well a South African developed methodology would work in this country.

I think what I like most about the social enterprise sector is the intelligence, resilience and openness of the people I meet. Over the next few years I’m keen to help as many of these people as possible to use the web to tell more people about who they are, what they doing and why more people should be doing the same.