The fourth year of the Ashoka Europe Fellowship Program was another big adventure! We kept strengthening our community, enabling spaces to engage, connect, co-create and collaborate.
We are excited to share with you our Impact Report, covering our activities from September 2021 to August 2022.
The fourth year of the Ashoka Europe Fellowship Program (2021-2022) was an incredible additional chapter in our journey and a learning adventure. Due to the ongoing pandemic, we continued working and hosting activities fully online for our core community, but we also managed to organize an in-person team retreat in Sicily in June 2022 after two whole years without seeing each other!
We are proud to present the key facts, figures, and take-aways from the 2021-2022 impact report.
This year, we:
With our co-learning pillar, we are designing and delivering co-learning experiences for our community to see and embody changemaking as an approach to transformative social change.
The knowledge we co-create and co-learn together in the program, which derives from the experience of leading practitioners in the field, is cutting edge and action oriented. We help to standardize these learnings and translate them into accessible and replicable learning and engagement journeys for Ashoka’s core community. All our offers are custom-designed and evolving!
Some impact numbers:
The Wellbeing Lab has been a gamechanger for me as a fellow. I've enjoyed learning new tools that I can practice is my work, and connecting to other fellows to share experiences, tips and laughter.
The Wellbeing Lab Participant
Social entrepreneurs and changemakers need a supportive ecosystem. We inspire collaborative initiatives with key ecosystem actors to address the burning needs and challenges of the social entrepreneurship and changemaking movements.
This year, we focused on five priority areas:
On these issues, we have co-created and co-facilitated +25 roundtables, multi-stakeholder webinars, and working groups with +690 participants.
In addition, we engaged +1800 to build ecosystems for social entrepreneurship, systems change and changemaking.
We co-created 4 reports and shared them widely through our networks:
Many new ideas and initiatives emerged from these encounters and collaborations. We have engaged in 9 collaborations that were initiated or advanced this year.
Here are some highlights:
We foster spaces for collaboration & practice to bring our community together around critical issues, challenges, SDG to co-develop initiatives for greater impact.
We co-created and engaged in five collective impact initiatives on five core areas:
We strive to continuously share our experience supporting social entrepreneurs. By sharing our learnings and creating new knowledge, we hope to provide our colleagues and partners in the growing social entrepreneurship ecosystem with useful inspiration and practical insights for their work. We hope to spark a meaningful dialogue about how this movement can continue to improve and to help build new alliances that so we can innovate the ecosystem together.
Here are some of the most important knowledge initiatives we undertook this year:
4 reports co-created:
Through newsletters, blog posts, and knowledge products, we shared learnings and insights with our network of 98 country offices with Ashoka´s core community of more than 4,000 social entrepreneurs and changemakers across Europe and beyond (check out all our newsletters and blogs here).
We have 17,586 yearly unique webpage visitors with an engagement rate of 45%. The Ashoka Europe Fellowship Program monthly newsletter has 3,100 subscribers (mostly social entrepreneurs and business leaders) with an opening rate of 41-50%—not to mention the thousands of stakeholders we reach through country offices sharing our newsletter with their own distinct networks. We reached over 62,200 changemakers through posts on Ashoka’s global social media accounts.
Ashoka Europe Fellowship Program puts diversity, equity, and inclusion efforts at the core of its work as a necessity of fulfilling its vision - a future where everyone is a changemaker. Our goal is to make Fellowship efforts more inclusive & equitable for diverse community of Fellows.
The Ashoka Europe Fellowship Program acts as a catalyst for the integration of 17 European country offices and their local communities. To achieve this, the program:
In 2021-2022, 23 Ashoka staff members based in country offices across Europe were part of the Ashoka Europe Fellowship Program team. These staff members spent between 15-100% of their time on the program with a total approx. FTE (full-time equivalent of a staff member) 10,1 compared to 7.3 the previous year and 4.6 two years before. The Europe Fellowship Program is operationally anchored in Ashoka UK’s legal entity, which is Ashoka Europe’s regional hub.
From September 2021 to August 2022, we spent 725K EUR, up from 500k in FY21. Most of the costs were staff costs. In FY 22 these amounted to 480K EUR, an equivalent of total 10FTEs and 23 colleagues hired under the program in different % of capacity. The total budget in FY22 amounted to 805K EUR, which allowed us to transfer a surplus of 80k EUR into the FY23. Any surplus is used as co-funding the following year.
We kept strengthening our operational system to engage, connect, and mobilize staff, community members, and partners effectively and efficiently. Our shared leadership model and organizational matrix allows colleagues across countries, teams, and levels to step up and unleash their leadership potential. We have been working closely with other European colleagues for the European transition process for a more integrated Ashoka Europe.
We thank our two core partners, Steelcase and Porticus, for their invaluable contributions, trust, and spirit of co-creation which drive our partnerships.
This year, the program is collectively funded through the contributions of Ashoka country offices, core partnerships with Steelcase and Porticus, and special initiatives funded by corporate partners and foundations including Johnson & Johnson, Beiersdorf, Boehringer Ingelheim, Zalando, The Human Safety Net and Amex.
1. Impact Evaluation: We need to further develop our impact evaluation framework and process for our ecosystem and collective impact work. Evaluating the impact of mid-to-long-term collaboration initiatives remains a challenge. We need to commit sufficient resources to align our impact evaluation systems across local, European and Global levels, with some key guiding indicators across all levels.
2. Communications: Strategic communication is a priority moving forward. Community members need to have easy access, clear engagement pathways and simple ways to plug-in. We updated our Europe communication strategy to address these needs.
3. Team: Staff turnover remains a challenge due to sabbaticals, maternity, and paternity leave as well as career changes, especially in senior positions. Due to the complexity of the program, it takes longer for new staff to become effective, with negative consequences for the program. Building our “collaboration muscle” across teams and initiatives is more vital than ever.
4. Diversity Equity & Inclusion (DEI): We successfully anchored DEI within the program, but the journey has only just begun. It’s a long-term process.
5. Knowledge Products: Moving ahead, we need to prioritize communication above the production of new, complex, knowledge products. We must foster our ability to translate the insights into communication strategies that increase accessibility, uptake from our community members and policy influence.
6. Community building: We stopped our online community platform prototype and re-focused our energy to build a community engagement strategy across teams, to foster engagement through our existing activities (and some simple add-ons), and to improve accessibility through strategic communications.
7. Self-Organization: Also, improving network leadership and increasing the potential of community co-leadership in the program continue to be a priority moving forward.
8. Digitalization and Scaling the Program: Due to covid, we transformed many program activities online, and are continuously learning to improve digitalization and accessibility. Nevertheless, online experiences have its limits. We started to have physical convenings again, which improve outcomes, but are more cost intensive. Balancing online and offline activities in the right way will be important moving ahead.
9. Scaling the Program: We also achieved to fully open source one of our co-learning modules, resulting in x20 participants. This successful prototype is central for our new scaling strategy, open sourcing all co-learning modules, to move from linear to indirect and exponential scaling.
For us, community is essential. In fact, the community itself has become one of the outstanding gains of our program—this program is all about us sharing and collaborating!
A BIG shout out goes to the 100+ organizations, experts, and Ashoka Fellows that co-created the program with us in one way or another. You all know who you are, thank you so much! This shows that our program is a real community effort and that it´s the program of ALL of US.
We want to use these results to thank all of the Fellows, ASNs, partners, changemakers, and Ashoka staff members for contributing to the Ashoka Europe Fellowship Program and bringing the community to life across so many countries!
Our goal is to increase the network effect of our community. We are driven by the ambition to uplift its collaborative potential. Join us in making it happen!
