Keller Center - Educating Leaders for a Technology-Driven Society

How Will You Do in an

How Will You Do in an "Everyone a Changemaker" World?

Special Event
Bill Drayton

To celebrate the kick-off of the Princeton Entrepreneurship Club’s Social Entrepreneurship Initiative, Bill Drayton, Founder, Chairman and CEO of Ashoka: Innovators for the Public,  gave a lecture titled “How Will You Do in an ‘Everyone a Changemaker’ World?”.  The event, sponsored by the Keller Center for Innovation in Engineering Education, was held in the Friend Center Convocation Room at 3:30 p.m. on December 17. A light reception  followed. 

As a student at Harvard, Balliol College in Oxford University and Yale Law School, Drayton founded a number of organizations, such as Harvard’s Ashoka Table, an interdisciplinary weekly forum in the social sciences.
 
In 1970, he graduated from Yale Law School and began his career at McKinsey and Company in New York. From 1977 to 1981, Mr. Drayton served as Assistant Administrator at the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency, where he launched emissions trading (the basis of Kyoto), among other reforms.
 
In 1981, while working part-time at McKinsey and Company in New York, he launched both Ashoka and Save EPA and its successor, Environmental Safety. With the support that he received unexpectedly when elected a MacArthur Fellow in 1984, he was able to devote himself fully to Ashoka. 
 
Mr. Drayton is currently the Chairman & Chief Executive Officer of Ashoka: Innovators for the Public. He is also chair of Youth Venture, Community Greens, and Get America Working! Mr. Drayton has won numerous awards and honors throughout his career.  In 2005, he was selected as one of America’s Best Leaders by US News & World Report and Harvard’s Center for Public Leadership. In 2006, he was recognized as being one of Harvard University’s 100 “Most Influential Alumni.” In 2007, he received the Duke University Center for the Advancement of Social Entrepreneurship’s (CASE) Leadership in Social Entrepreneurship Award, the University of Pennsylvania Law School’s 2007 Honorary Fellow Award, and the Goi Peace Foundation’s Peace Award. In 2008, he has been recognized by Tuft University’s Institute for Global Leadership with the Dr. Jean Mayer Global Citizenship Award, and Americans for Informed Democracy’s Social Innovator in Smart Investing Award. In 2009, he was awarded an Honorary Doctorate of Humane Letters from Yale University.