Spoiler alert: It gives us even more drive to move forward with this initiative in the future, as we are genuinely excited about the impact our program is having on our community.

The vision of the Ashoka Europe Fellowship Program was clear from the very start: to connect various social innovators in Europe, to co-create with them and share the most crucial knowledge & network among each other – in order to reach a higher level of impact all together. Therefore, we wanted to bring together leading Social Entrepreneurs (our Ashoka Fellows) and key change leaders in Europe. That’s why we opened our initiative to

The first year of prototyping this program has been everything from exciting and mind-blowing, to inspiring and touching. But mostly, it has been a deep learning experience. Today, we are even more committed to this program and want to keep bringing people together to co-learn and co-create, as we believe: System change in Europe needs a community!

During the course of this first year, we’ve had the pleasure to welcome 125 participants from 17 countries in six learning programs, that we offered.

Today, we are proud to present our three key findings from the impact report 2018/2019:

#1 Our program triggers TAKING ACTION

Let’s first take things into perspective: According to a study by the “Adult Education Survey” in 2018, the average percentage of people that have participated in a professional training and are afterwards applying their newly acquired knowledge to their project  This means, in a professional context, the average of 6 out of 10 do not bring into action what they have learned. The knowledge ends up in dark corners of our brains (and our desks) and is forgotten, without any impact. That’s a quite sad average.

For the Europe Fellowship Program instead, 97% of the participants of our co-learning modules (workshops, retreats, webinars) are planning follow-up activities in their organization after having taken part in our program.

These actions are related to: changes in their impact strategy, in their attitude towards partnerships and co-creation, in their leadership styles within the team and in their wellbeing.  Almost everyone got triggered into action! The fact that our community doesn’t only co-learn and co-create, but does also turn the learnings into impactful actions, makes us believe in this cause even more.

Thank you all for this great changemaking commitment!

#2 Increased KNOWLEDGE amongst the participants of our modules

An average of 92% of our participants state that their knowledge has increased strongly (a great deal + a lot) through taking part in one of our co-learning modules. And, as we know, knowledge is power!

We’ll continue to give our best to empower the community through the knowledge, frameworks, tools and methodologies, we offer. 

In this sense, we are also happy to share this encouraging quote by one of our Fellows who participated in the program 2019 with you: 

A very useful educational program that has brought me relief and many new perspectives on how to move our steps further. Shared vision at the center of attention for systemic change has been a crucial issue for me.”

#3 The COMMUNITY factor: It is a CO-learning and CO-creation community indeed!

When we asked our participants about their level of satisfaction, one finding was particularly insightful for us: Every area that had anything to do with the fact that they found support by a team and the community, stood out with excellent results.

For us, this is crucial: The community factor hasn’t only been at the roots and deeply connected to the vision of the Ashoka Europe Fellowship Program, the community itself has indeed become one of the outstanding gains of our program – indeed it is all about us sharing and collaborating!

This being said: A community is only as strong as their single members and we want to use these results to thank all of the Fellows, ASNs, partners, change leaders in education and the Ashoka staff for contributing to the Ashoka Europe Fellowship Program and bringing such a community to life! Thank you – we are looking forward to continuing this exciting program with you in 2020.

 

Got curious? Please download the whole impact report HERE!

 

Our learnings from the first year of the Ashoka Europe Fellowship Program: 

  • In 2020, we want to create more spaces and opportunities for Fellows to effectively co-lead the program with us. Therefore, the community approach will become even stronger and it will be a co-learning, co-creation and co-leadership experience! If you are a Fellow and want to support and co-lead the program with us, please reach out to us!
  • Thanks to the feedback from our Fellows, we also realized that we need to offer more spaces to co-create solutions for the grand challenges in Europe. That’s why we are enlarging the program and are happy to start the new collective impact initiative around the pressing topic of “Populism and the challenges to Democracy

Changing systems in Europe needs a Community! What’s next?

With the program 2019/2020 having been released in October 2019, we are excited about this new journey and hope to see many of you again – or for the first time, because in order to reach systemic change for the good of all, we need everyone.

Our modules for the upcoming year are:

Ashoka works worldwide to support Social Entrepreneurs and build a world where everyone can be a changemaker. The Europe Fellowship program helps reaching this on a European level by offering powerful co-learning and co-creation spaces. We look forward welcoming you in our Program!

What module inspires you most? Visit our webpage and apply or reach out to us!

Want to stay up to date? Please reach out to sign up for the Ashoka Europe Fellowship COMMUNITY NEWSLETTER!

 

Last but not least, we want to share these quotes by our participants with you:

 

"An amazing journey to become more impactful (both personally and for the project itself)."
Participant in the Program 2019

"This was a truly enlightening retreat which boosted my intention to increase collaborations for impact.”
Participant in the Program 2019

"It was great to stop and connect again with what is my work in service for. I believe it's very important to step back from the day to day and commit to scale the impact through collaboration.” Participant in the Program 2019

"If there is one thread that runs through the program: it’s the collaborative nature of learning experience.”
Participant in the Program 2019

"The module helped me to visualize the replication of my social enterprise, seeing my weaknesses and strengths. I will recommend it to other fellows. “  
Participant in the Program 2019