People & Planet is Ashoka’s global initiative rekindling the human-nature connection and advancing climate and environmental solutions that redefine our relationship with the planet.
Across 99 countries, we grow and convene one of the world’s largest networks of environmental social entrepreneurs. A group of 700+ proximate leaders who pioneer transformative solutions for the planet.
Changing Systems and Cultures in the Environment Field
By finding the people with the ideas, helping them succeed and sharing what works, we are changing the landscape of what’s possible to build a just and regenerative world, where everyone is a changemaker for the planet.
Changing Systems and Cultures in the Environment Field
What Ashoka does
All people have the right and ability to co-lead solutions that transform their societies for the better. Together, we mobilize (and catalyse) a movement where "Everyone is a Changemaker" - a person who sees themselves as capable of transforming real-life, systemic problems.
Across various areas of action, Ashoka builds a community of Fellows, Young Changemakers, and Changemaker Institutions to create larger-scale, replicable, and positive change.
The climate crisis is not just an environmental challenge—it is a crisis of disconnection.
For too long, humanity has been predominantly operating under the illusion that we are separate from nature. The result? We are living in a climate crisis driven by systems that disconnect us from the natural world, from each other, and even from ourselves.
What do we do about it?
As our Ashoka Fellow Ailton Krenak says, " the future is ancestral," and Ashoka People and Planet is resurfacing a long-neglected understanding: we are nature.
Scientists have proven what Indigenous and traditional communities have long known: love for nature, well-being, and pro-nature behavior are deeply connected. A person’s love for nature is both biological and learned, with early childhood offering the best window to attachment and the greatest return: a lifetime of pro-nature action on behalf of people, climate, and all forms of life.
By building towards a world where everyone practices ‘being in, for, and with nature’, we can strike a new equilibrium between humans and the natural world. Humanity’s health is directly linked to planetary well-being. In its ability to engage people currently on the sidelines and to help us bring about long-envisioned environmental solutions, the connection to nature is a source of often-overlooked power for the climate movement.
There are +700 active Ashoka Fellows working to rebalance humanity’s relationship with the planet while creating environmental agency across all ages, socio-economic levels and geographies.
These changemakers are redefining a new way of being human and the fact that we are nature and therefore we have a role to play, while bringing system-changing innovations that go from protecting ecosystems, to designing new architectures and building new narratives around climate action.
Ashoka is a living encyclopedia of social innovation in every field around the world.
Jimmy Wales
Wikipedia co-founder and Ashoka Fellow
Ashoka has set a high bar for the rest of the philanthropy we get involved with, because I can see these are people who are driving true change.
Anne Wojcicki
23&me CEO & Co-founder
Ashoka, which patiently, persistently pioneered social entrepreneurship for decades, remains at its cutting edge... By enabling leading social entrepreneurs from every continent to think and entrepreneur together, it has unleashed an unprecedented new force for good.
Sir Fazle Abed
BRAC Founder and Former Chair
How society helps children grow up needs fundamental innovation at least as urgently as in how it produces computers. That is why Ashoka is so important. It finds, helps launch, and then links and leverages the most powerful social innovations and innovators.
Carol Bellamy
Former Executive Director UNICEF
Welcome to Learn Out Loud
Here you will find some of Ashoka’s latest publications around People & Planet, reports that look at sustainability and environmental agency through different angles, and which have been created by teams in different geographies. We want to bring together the work that is being done in multiple local teams, with partners in the field, in different areas of action.
Join the People & Planet network on LinkedIn and subscribe to our newsletter to stay updated on the latest innovations, stories, and how changemakers worldwide are reimagining our relationship with the Earth to build a future where both people and the planet thrive.
