

Drayton believes we’re in the middle of a necessary but painful historical transition. For millenniums, most people’s lives had a certain pattern. You went to school to learn a trade or a skill — baking, farming or accounting. Then you could go into the work force and make a good living repeating the same skill over the course of your career.








Millions of people already live with this mind-set. But a lot of people still inhabit the world of following rules and repetitive skills.

They hear society telling them: “We don’t need you. We don’t need your kids, either.”

Of course, those people go into reactionary mode and strike back.

The central challenge of our time, Drayton says, is to make everyone a changemaker. To do that you start young. Your kid is 12. She tells you about some problem — the other kids at school are systematically mean to special-needs students.

This is a big moment. You pause what you are doing and ask her if there’s anything she thinks she can do to solve the problem, not just for this kid but for the next time it happens, too.

Very few kids take action to solve the first problem they see, but eventually they come back having conceived and owning an idea. They organize their friends and do something. The adult job now is to get out of the way. Put the kids in charge.

Once a kid has had an idea, built a team and changed her world, she’s a changemaker. She has the power. She’ll go on to organize more teams. She will always be needed.

Drayton asks parents: “Does your daughter know that she is a changemaker? Is she practicing changemaking?” He tells them: “If you can’t answer ‘yes’ to these questions, you have urgent work to do.”

In an earlier era, he says, society realized it needed universal literacy. Today, schools have to develop the curriculums and assessments to make the changemaking mentality universal. They have to understand this is their criteria for success.

Ashoka has studied social movements to find out how this kind of mental shift can be promoted. It turns out that successful movements take similar steps.

First, they gather a group of powerful and hungry co-leading organizations. (Ashoka is working with Arizona State and George Mason University.) Second, the group is opened to everybody. (You never know who is going to come up with the crucial idea.) Third, the movement creates soap operas with daily episodes. (The civil rights movement created televised dramas with good guys and bad guys, like the march from Selma.)

I wonder if everybody wants to be a changemaker in the Drayton mold. I wonder about any social vision that isn’t fundamentally political. You can have a nation filled with local changemakers, but if the government is rotten their work comes to little. The social sector has never fully grappled with the permanent presence of sin.

But Drayton’s genius is his capacity to identify new social categories. Since he invented the social entrepreneur category 36 years ago, hundreds of thousands of people have said, “Yes, that’s what I want to be.” The changemaker is an expansion of that social type.