Get the latest delivered to your inbox
Privacy Policy

Now Reading

Yale Awards Highest Honor to Bill Drayton

Yale Awards Highest Honor to Bill Drayton

Published 05-26-09

Submitted by Ashoka: Innovators for the Public

Monday, May 26, 2009 - Ashoka Founder and CEO Bill Drayton has been awarded an honorary Doctor of Humane Letters today at Yale University's 308th Commencement. Since 1702, the honorary degrees awarded annually during the Yale University Commencement are the highest honor conferred by the university and past recipients include Benjamin Franklin, Martin Luther King, Jr., John F. Kennedy, and Sandra Day O'Connor.

The full citation read by Yale President Richard C. Levin upon conferring the degree is as follows:

"You have defined and perfected the role of social entrepreneur, helping people around the world help themselves. As the founder of Ashoka: Innovators for the Public, you have sought creative solutions to the most pressing social problems. By guiding and supporting the work of more than 2,600 Ashoka Fellows, you are advancing economic development, environmental sustainability, public health, and human rights, and helping to build institutions that ensure continued progress. In your quest to abolish sorrow, we rejoice, and gratefully award you your second Yale degree: Doctor of Humane Letters."

The degree was conferred upon Bill Drayton in recognition of Ashoka's continued work to create and build the field of social entrepreneurship and its central contribution to a world where everyone, not just an elite few, can be powerful changemakers. Earlier this year Oxford University similarly recognized Ashoka in making Bill a life Balliol Honorary Fellow. This year's other honorary degree recipients were Hillary Rodham Clinton, Richard Serra, John McPhee, Gustavo Gutiérrez, Alison Richard, Sofia Gubaidulina, Leroy Hood, Thomas Schelling, and Bill T. Jones.

About Bill Drayton

William Drayton, a leading social entrepreneur, has spent his career enabling people around the world to help themselves. He is the Founder, Chair, and CEO of Ashoka: Innovators for the Public, a global citizen group that has fostered entrepreneurial programs since 1980 in fields including economic development, social awareness, environmentalism, health, and human rights. In a career that has embraced higher education, business consulting, and government service, he has consistently devoted himself to social causes, and currently chairs three U.S.-based organizations: Youth Venture, Community Greens, and Get America Working!

About Ashoka

Founded in 1980, Ashoka is the world's working community of leading social entrepreneurs. It champions the most important new social change ideas and supports the entrepreneurs behind them to start, grow, succeed, and collaborate on their ventures. As Ashoka expands its capacity to integrate and connect social and business entrepreneurs around the world, it builds an entrepreneurial infrastructure comprised of global initiatives that supports the fast-growing needs of the citizen sector. Ashoka is creating change today, for an Everyone a Changemaker(TM) society to become the reality of tomorrow.

Ashoka: Innovators for the Public logo

Ashoka: Innovators for the Public

Ashoka: Innovators for the Public

Ashoka is the global association of the world's leading social entrepreneurs - men and women with system changing solutions for the world's most urgent social problems. Since 1981, Ashoka has elected over 3000 leading social entrepreneurs as Ashoka Fellows, providing them with living stipends, professional support, and access to a global network of peers in more than 70 countries. Working with these social entrepreneurs, Ashoka builds communities of innovators who work collectively to transform society and design new ways for the citizen sector to become more productive, entrepreneurial and globally integrated. For more information, please visit www.ashoka.org.

More from Ashoka: Innovators for the Public

Join today and get the latest delivered to your inbox