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The Goi Peace Award selection committee has decided to award the 2007 Goi Peace Award to Bill Drayton, Founder of Ashoka: Innovators for the Public, in recognition of his visionary leadership in developing a sustainable global society by promoting social entrepreneurship and empowering individuals to become changemakers. Through his dedicated and pioneering work with Ashoka, he has paved the way for a truly innovative citizen sector to emerge in the 21st Century.
Born in 1943 in New York City, USA, Mr. Drayton has been a social entrepreneur since his youth. After receiving a B.A. from Harvard, a M.A. from Oxford, and a J.D. from Yale Law School, he worked as a McKinsey and Company consultant for almost ten years. From 1977 to 1981, Mr. Drayton served in the Carter Administration as Assistant Administrator at the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency where he launched emissions trading (the basis of Kyoto) among other reforms. Later he founded and led Save EPA and its successor, Environmental Safety.
Mr. Drayton founded Ashoka in 1980, which he currently serves as the Chairman & CEO. Ashoka is a global association of over 1800 leading ‘social entrepreneurs’, individuals who envision and implement pattern-setting social changes in the environment, education, human rights, and other areas of human need. Ashoka helps launch these major social innovations and the public entrepreneurs who drive them, helps them succeed over their fulllife cycle, weaves them together into a field far more powerful than the sum of its parts, and contributes to the design of the field’s overall architecture. He is also chair of three other affiliated organizations; Youth Venture, Community Greens, and Get America Working!
Mr. Drayton has won numerous awards and honors throughout his career. Most recently in 2005, he was selected one of America’s Best Leaders by US News & World Report and Harvard’s Center for Public Leadership.
The annual Goi Peace Award is presented to honor individuals and organizations in various fields that have made outstanding contributions toward the realization of a peaceful and harmonious world for all life on earth.
Mr. Drayton received the Goi Peace Award at a ceremony during the Goi Peace Foundation Forum 2007 held at Waseda University International Conference Hall in Tokyo on November 18, 2007.
Commemorative Address by Bill Drayton
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