Ashoka UK & Ireland

Shifting roles is a core part of systems change. Ashoka Fellow Francesca Fedeli and FightTheStroke.org are transforming rehabilitation for cerebral palsy by shifting who drives care, where therapy happens, and how knowledge spreads. By combining neuroscience, digital tools, and community networks, they're distributing the efforts for recovery. Ashoka's Globalizer program has worked with Francesca and hundreds of Ashoka Fellows to design these strategies. Full systems change story in our latest case study: https://lnkd.in/dkNinu3B

When did you last drink from an Irish river? For most of us, this idea doesn't even cross our minds. For Ashoka Fellow Li An Phoa, Drinkable Rivers, it's the driving motivation behind her organization, Drinkable Rivers. Featured in The Irish Times, Li An has built a movement that is now active in 25 countries, with citizen scientists monitoring water quality from the Meuse to the Danube to the Thames. Read more here: https://lnkd.in/d22hNcQe

"Before systems change, hearts must connect.” In this beautiful piece, Ashoka Fellow Agamemnon Otero MBE reflects on what it means to hold community as living infrastructure. From a three-day gathering on the Scottish coast to an evening of reconnection in the heart of London at The Energy Garden, he writes about the invisible foundations beneath social change: trust, vulnerability, friendship, meals shared, stories exchanged, and the spaces that allow changemakers to breathe together again. It’s also a reminder that movements are sustained not only by bold ideas, but by the ecosystems of care around them. A powerful reflection on what it means to nurture the roots of changemaking, across generations.

Across the UK and globally, conversations around access, equity, and public systems are getting sharper, and yet one question keeps surfacing: what happens in that in-between space, where social support has been designed, but hasn’t yet found its way into people’s lives? In India alone, an estimated $150 billion is spent each year on social protections, yet a significant portion goes unclaimed. Not because the need isn’t there, but because access is fragmented and often out of reach. On April 29th, we’re hosting a 30-minute virtual chat with Ashoka Fellow, and the recent awardee for the Skoll Foundation's Award for Social Innovation: Tarun Cherukuri, founder of Indus Action. He has been working at exactly this intersection, using technology and grassroots mobilisation to close this gap, with a bold goal of enabling 30 million vulnerable citizens to sustainably access social protection by 2030. We’d love for you to join us.

We are really excited to be partnering with Boston Consulting Group (BCG), alongside Cambridge Centre for Social Innovation and Impact Hub London, to launch the BCG UK Social Enterprise Award 2026. At its heart, this program is about finding and backing the social enterprises across the UK that are already reshaping systems, whether that’s in health, education, or social mobility, and giving them the platform and support to go further, faster. The winning organisation won’t just receive recognition, they’ll work alongside a BCG team on an intensive ~8-week strategy engagement designed to unlock their next stage of growth and impact. Applications close on May 11.

450,000 children lifted out of poverty. Nearly 500,000 people mobilised in a single weekend. 100+ repair cafés and MPs gathered in Parliament. Our Fellows are driving change at every level, from national policy to neighbourhood infrastructure. Here are just a few field notes from across the Ashoka network.

At our Fellows Induction evening at The Conduit, Eliot Higgins, founder of Bellingcat, reflected on a responsibility that has shifted to all of us: we are no longer just recipients of information, we are now participants in its creation and its spread. Over the last fifteen years, the institutions we once relied on to make sense of the world have given way to online spaces where anyone can contribute. How we form our understanding of the world in that environment, and what we do with that responsibility, is at the heart of Eliot's work.