Bill Drayton: Social Entrepreneur and Ashoka Founder

Bill Drayton is the world-leading social entrepreneur who founded Ashoka, the world's largest working community of more than 2,000 leading social entrepreneurs.

From the day Bill was born he has been cooking up new and innovative ideas. In elementary school, Bill started a circulation of newspapers in and outside of his school. In high school, he created and built the Asia Society into the largest student organization and joined the NAACP, where he actively engaged in civil rights work.

At Harvard he founded the Ashoka Table, an interdisciplinary weekly forum in the social sciences. And at Yale Law School, he launched Yale Legislative Services, which engaged one-third of the student body in helping key legislators throughout the northeast design and draft legislation.

From 1977 to 1981, Bill served as Assistant Administrator at the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency where he had lead responsibility in representing the environment in Administration-wide policy development, notably including budget, energy, and economic policy. He successfully "intrapreneured" a series of major innovations and reforms in the field, ranging from the introduction of emissions trading (the basis of Kyoto) to the use of economics-defined incentives to remove the advantage of delaying compliance.

After his term at the EPA ended in 1981, Bill returned to McKinsey part-time and launched Ashoka, Save EPA (an association of professional environmental managers that helped block radically destructive policies) and Environmental Safety (an organization committed to implementing environmental laws).

Bill is currently the Chairman & Chief Executive Officer of Ashoka.