Ensuring
Children Succeed
in the Coming
Everyone A Changemaker™ World
Ending
Marginalization:
Children and Empathy
What causes 25 to 30 percent of the
world’s people to be marginalized?
Cruelly left unable to enter into and
contribute to the larger society?
It is not because they do not know
how to use computers or Latin.
Such knowledge they could acquire
easily.
Ashoka has come to understand
why—because 48 percent of the
2,700 Fellows across the world
deal with children, and many more
with marginalization. And because,
as a community, we have over the
last decade learned how to see
the patterns and identify the most
transformative one or two ideas in
a field such as children and young
people.
continued on page 2
Creativity & Play
Jill Vialet, Ashoka Fellow
November 17, 2009
So, I want to start by playing a game.
I’m a firm believer that there is a
good game for every space, and
given this space we’re going to play
a game called stand up. It’s very low
tech. I’m going to make a series of
statements. If a statement is true for
you, you’re going to stand up, pause
and look around, and sit back down.
If, for some reason, standing up isn’t
working for you, if you’re at the top
and worried about toppling down,
just make an upward sweeping
gesture to signify your participation.
Okay?
If you are a parent, stand up. Okay,
sit back down. We’re going to be
doing this a bunch.
continued on page 4
 Ending Marginalization continued
Now we are taking the next step—to take those one or two ideas and
entrepreneur together to tip the world with them. Such collaborative
entrepreneurship is unprecedented and a giant step beyond solo
practitionership.
Imagine the power of hundreds of the world’s best entrepreneurs seeing
how to move their field to the next level and then forming a true global
team to make that happen.
So, what is the key to end the marginalization of so many tens of millions
on every continent?
Today and going forward, knowledge is not enough. Young children
must grasp and master the learned, not genetic, skill of
empathy. They must be able to watch themselves understanding what
is happening to other people, now and into the future, as individuals and
in complex institutions—and then to guide themselves to contribute to
the good and not be hurtful.
Children genetically have a central drive to be contributing members of
society. Otherwise, they will be miserable and earlier probably would
not survive. They will grasp empathy if we give them the opportunity to
learn and practice it.
However, we are not doing that for large parts of the population. These
children do not get it at home, on the streets, or at school. School is
only about learning knowledge—which is why all that is measured is
knowledge transfer, chiefly math and basic language.
Plus the rules. But one cannot be a good, non‑hurtful person by
following rules. The world is changing too fast for that. (The rate at
which change is accelerating is literally logarithmic.) Every year, the rules
cover less and less of our lives. We are ever more in conflict of rules,
changing rules, and/or no rules situations.
Then we must use an ever higher level of empathetic skill to be able to
be helpful, not hurtful.
Without the skill of empathy, we will hurt people and disrupt institutions.
And they will throw us out quickly, ruthlessly, and without apologies—
regardless of our learned knowledge.
How many elementary school principals know that they are failing if one
second grader has not grasped and had steady opportunities to practice

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(chiefly in group play—which is why recess is so key) empathy? And how
many parents know to insist on this?
The consequences of any society failing to ensure that all of its children
master high levels of empathetic skill are grim. Certainly for the life of
each child. But also for the society.
Anyone without this skill cannot go on to the other learned social
skills they must master to be a player, a contributor, in the world of
dramatically faster and far more many‑faceted change we will all face in
15 years. These skills are teamwork, leadership, and changemaking.
The key factor for success for any human grouping—be it a company,
city, or country—will be what proportion of its people are skilled
changemakers working together in flexible teams. (It will not be
technology or other traditional sources of competitive advantage—as
change accelerates, their half‑lives are shrinking year by year.)
If America or Poland or Nigeria or Sri Lanka does not ensure
all its children are mastering empathy now, that country will
be crippled in the race to be a winner in fifteen years. It took
50 years for so many of the industrial dynamos of the mid‑twentieth
century to become desolate. It will not take 50 years this time.
The goal of Ashoka’s collaborative entrepreneurial effort for children
then is to get parents and schools to recognize that mastering the core
social skills necessary in the world we are entering is essential. Only
then will knowledge be put to use.
Once the world redefines what success in growing up and education
requires, the Fellows have demonstrated clearly how to succeed.
Canada’s Mary Gordon (www.ashoka.org/fellow/mgordon) has
thousands of schools in several countries (including 18 starting this year
in Seattle) that are enabling very young children to grasp empathy in
hours. She brings an infant (“the professor”) to class and challenges the
students to grasp what the professor is saying and then feeling. Bullying
rates, which Canada measures, come down and stay down.
California’s Jill Vialet is bringing recess back to the schools—as a
place of group play. Her work fits with Mary’s perfectly. Once children
grasp empathy, they need to practice and deepen it. Jill just gave a
TEDx talk regarding her work and how it serves the world’s central need
(and our Ashoka community’s central goal) of breaking through to an
“everyone a changemaker™” society. You will enjoy Jill’s sparkling talk at
www.ashoka.org/video/jill_tedxsf. The transcript follows.

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 Creativity & Play continued
If you are left-handed, stand up.
If you have sought elected office, stand up. If you’ve also run for student
government, come on now.
If you would describe your relationship to caffeine as an addiction, stand
up. There we go, all right.
If you tried to grow tomatoes this summer, stand up.
If you have ever performed in a musical, stand up. Wow! That’s surprising.
I’m impressed.
If you memorized a poem from start to finish in your teen years, that
you can still recite, stand up. Wow, he’s there. That’s right.
If you have ever owned a Donna Summer album, stand up. All right,
there we go.
So, I play that game, first to establish that this is an extraordinary crowd.
I’m really particularly heartened by the number of Donna Summer’s
lovers, too. I always feel that you’re going to get a warm reception if there
are a good number of Donna Summer fans in the audience. But I also
play, because I’m wondering if you noticed how, when we started to play
the game, that there was a shift. That you know how that busy brain that
we have going all the time? That monologue that’s saying, “Oh I forgot
to pick up my dry cleaning” or “Oh I meant to send that email to Tony
before I left the office” or “How am I possibly going to drop the kids
off and be at that meeting at 8:30 tomorrow morning?” That when you
start to play the game, that busy brain really quiets down. That once you
start to play, you get into that cognitive shift, you get into the play space,
you are suddenly much more in the present. You’re much more aware of

Jill Vialet, elected an Ashoka Fellow in 2004, is

working to ensure that every child learns from
play every day. That's how one masters the
foundation of all social skills, empathy. There
are now 100 US Ashoka Fellows out of the
2700 total. They are an invaluable two way idea
bridge for America to the world's community
of leading social entrepreneurs. (See inside
of back cover for a fuller introduction to Jill.)

4
the people around you. You start checking out the people around you,
at that guy who can recite the poem, you’re thinking about what I’m
saying in a much more intent way, you’re really hanging on to what I’m
saying, because it might apply
to you. There might even
be a physiological response,
  …kids are given fewer
right? You might feel your and fewer opportunities to
pulse quicken slightly, not in develop the skills they need
a nervous or stressed out to become changemakers. 
way, or super anxious, but
just in a slightly more awake, engaged kind of way. So that play state, is
not surprisingly, a state that’s really conducive to learning.
I spend a lot of time in public elementary schools across the country,
and, unfortunately, that’s not a lot of what I’m seeing when I’m out
in the schools. I see a pretty singular focus on achievement, on test
scores. So the folks that I meet out in the schools, they’re really, I think
focusing on “achievement is good.” I think that they believe that, by
focusing on achievement, that they’re going to get to a place of better
teaching and learning. But the problem is, the people in schools are being
held accountable to a very singular metric around standardized tests. And,
it’s like the old saying goes, “people don’t do what you expect, they do
what you inspect.” And so, by virtue of building an educational system
that’s so focused on these measurable outcomes, we’ve seen a subtle
shift in schools away from learning and towards knowledge acquisition.
Now, the implications of this are pretty huge, right? And one of them is
that, while it might have been with the best of intentions, achievement
can sometimes lead to really, a less of an emphasis on children’s
development than you want to see. And the lack of opportunities for
play is a great example of that.
But it’s not just about learning. Another way that having less play in
schools manifests, is that kids are given fewer and fewer opportunities
to develop the skills they need to become changemakers. So
“changemakers” is a term that I borrowed from Bill Drayton, and as many
of you know, Bill is the founder of Ashoka and he’s the person who
came up with the term social entrepreneur. Now, Bill is obsessed with
trends, and so, he has been looking a lot at what it would take to build
a world in which everyone is a changemaker. He’s looked at the 2,700
Fellows who have been elected over the last 30 years as Ashoka Fellows
and he’s noticed a real trend—that almost all the Fellows had these
experiences as kids—where they were able to make a difference, where
they were able to make a change. And he’s pulled out four social skills

5
 that he sees as being absolutely essential to being a changemaker:
They’re empathy, teamwork, leadership and this experience itself of being
a changemaker—that taking creativity and translating it into action.
Not surprisingly, Bill is very
But about six years ago, I was critical of an educational
elected an Ashoka Fellow, and system that is focused
we started going national.  on knowledge acquisition,
because that’s not really
conducive to those four social skills being developed. And, happily
for me, an educational system that emphasizes play, really is.
George Bernard Shaw wrote that “reasonable people adapt themselves
to the world, while unreasonable people attempt to adapt the world to
themselves—therefore all progress depends on unreasonable people.”
When I first started on making Playworks happen, I was fully in touch
with my unreasonable self. I saw that recess in a lot of schools wasn’t
going well. I knew that recess had been absolutely key to my happiness
and success as a kid. And I believed that I could make a difference. And
so, not through any kind of conscious choice, I just started making it
happen. I totally, just found myself doing it. And I cared on a cellular level.
But Playworks has grown over the years, not because of my
unreasonableness, but because the young adults who have come to work
for us, go out onto the playgrounds, and they, through the power of play,
discover themselves as changemakers. And really, there’s nothing that
makes me prouder than the fact that there’s now a legion of unreasonable
twenty‑somethings out there who now share my vision that one
day, every kid in America is going to get to play everyday.

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So, we didn’t start out going national, we started out as a Bay Area
program. But about six years ago, I was elected an Ashoka Fellow, and
we started going national. So, we started getting all these calls from
people who wanted to learn about what we were doing and wondered
if we would come and talk to them about how it was, and would come
open in their city. So we got an invitation to go back to Baltimore and
we were invited to go to the John’s Hopkins Summer Learning Institute,
so we decided to make a whole trip out of it. Four of the staff, myself
and three others, went out. And one of the guys that came with us is
named Lamar. Now, Lamar is about 6’3”, African‑American, 240, never
been out of Oakland before. He is legally blind, he can’t drive, but
he’s magic on the playground. He also has an outside shot, which,
given the fact that he’s legally blind doesn’t make a lot of sense, but
you know, you’ve just got to believe. He’s an extraordinary guy. So he
comes with me, and we break up into two groups, so I go with Lamar to
this one school in Baltimore to meet with the principal and the other two
go to speak at another school.
And we’re sitting in the office So we walk into the
of the principal in the school,
waiting to talk to the principal,
principal’s office and it’s
and I turn to Lamar and I say, just like you remember. 
“Lamar, you want to do the
pitch? When we go in, you can describe the program. I mean you’ve actually
done it. I just made it up, I’ve actually never done it.” And he’s like “Na uh,
no way, you talk, I’ll just sit there and listen, I want to hear how you sell it.
It’s just, it’s all you. I’m just going be completely quiet.” And I say, “okay.”
So we walk into the principal’s office and it’s just like you remember.
There’s the big chair and the big desk and the two little chairs and you
walk in, and the whole thing is set up to make you feel small. And we
sit down in the little chairs, and Lamar is a big dude, and he’s sitting
in the little chair. And I go into my spiel, I start talking about how
Playworks works, how we put one person in each school and they’re out
in the yard for all the recesses and how they work with the classroom
teachers, and we do a junior coach program, and the kids get put in
charge of teaching other kids rock, paper, scissors, and after school and
the leagues and the parents are involved, and the principal’s nodding,
listening and nodding. Nodding, good, good. How it costs about $55,000
per school to run the program, how schools pay $23,500, and I get
to the end of my pitch, and he nods and says, “It sounds like a great
program, but it just would never work for us.” I go, “Is it because of the
money?” Because a lot of times it is about the money, and he says, “No,
we don’t have recess. We haven’t had recess for five years.”

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 And so, up until this point Lamar has been absolutely mum, not a peep
from the guy. But he can’t stop himself at this point. He leans forward
and says “I’m sorry, excuse me, but, but when the kids finish up lunch, and
they go outside to play, what happens then?” And the principal is kind
of startled because Lamar hasn’t said a word, he sort of forgot Lamar
was there and he says, “No, we don’t have recess, the kids stay inside
the cafeteria.” And Lamar says, “But what about when the teachers
take the kids out for break, the first graders and the second graders,
when they go out
during the day to …we don’t have recess, we
run around and get
haven’t had recess in five years.
some air and play?”
And the principal Our kids don’t know how to play. 
looks at me, and
looks at Lamar and says, “No, no we don’t have recess, we haven’t had
recess in five years. Our kids don’t know how to play.”
And at this point, Lamar looks at me, and looks at the principal and
says: “Could I take the kids out for 10 minutes at recess today?” And
the principal shakes his head and is like, “No, no way.” And right then,
you should have seen, Lamar just dug in, and he summoned his full
unreasonable self and he leans forward and said, “No, no no, let me take
them out today, I can show you. We can show you.” And he looks at me
and says, “We can wait.” And I say, “All right, we can wait.”
So, an hour and twenty minutes later I find myself striding into this
cafeteria with 120 4th and 5th graders, just, just a cacophony. It’s insane,
the level of noise. And, you have to picture—there are two doors, and
two lunch ladies at each door. And they just look scary and mean and
cranky, and they’re at the door, and they’re there. And they’re in full
lunch lady garb too, can you picture them? Lamar strides to the middle
of the cafeteria and he claps and a few kids look at him, and the lunch
ladies are like, “Red
…two is treat each other with alert, red alert,
love, and three is a double rule— what’s going on?”
And he does it again.
no bleeding or throwing up.  And a couple of kids,
against their will, go
*clap, clap, clap, clap, clap.* But then, he does it one more time, and the
entire room goes *clap, clap, clap, clap, clap.* And there’s total silence.
Lamar says, “Hi, I’m Coach Lamar. I’m here!” And the kids look at him
and he goes, “What kind of welcome is that? Let’s try that again…Hi, I’m
Coach Lamar” and the kids all go, “Hi Coach Lamar.” And they are just

8
like, what is going on? And he says “I’m visiting from California.” Which is
code for: I am criminally insane in Baltimore. He says, “I’m visiting from
California, and your principal has said I can take you out for 10 minutes
of recess today,” and the kids are like “WAHOO,” and he says, “But, I
need you to show them that you can cooperate. So I’m going to ask you
to do three things. First thing is, I need you to finish up eating up lunch,
second thing is I need you to clean up your area, then I need you to line
up by class, quietly in an organized way.” The kids are like, boom, boom,
boom. The kids are cleaned up, eat up, they line up, and four minutes
later we are out in the yard.
Lamar circles them up, he goes over the rules, and he breaks them
up into three groups. One, two, three, one, two, three. He says, “Okay,
we’re going to break up into three groups. I’m going to take the one
group over here and we’re going to play band‑aid tag, and he says Jill’s
going to take the twos and play rockstar, and the threes, you’re going
to go with your teachers, and I’ve talked to them, and you’re going
to be on the structure. There are three rules on the structure: one is
no running up the slide, two is treat each other with love, and three
is a double rule—no bleeding or throwing up.” And the kids are like,
“Really, no bleeding, no throwing up? Okay!” So we break out one,
two, threes. We do our games, I teach them to play rockstar, he’s got
them going, the kids are running around, they’re having so much fun.
He claps again at the end of the 10 minutes and they circle up and he
goes, “I want everybody to go around and say one word about how that
was.” All of the kids say, “Fun,” “Great,” and, you know a couple kids say
“throw up,” but mostly they were into it. And he goes, “That was
great, but I need one more favor from you. I need you to show the
teachers and the principal that you can go off the yard with the same quiet
and organization and coordination as you came in.” The kids are like,

9
 “Yeah!” And one kid yells, “When are you coming back?” and Lamar
says, “I’ll be back next year, but I need you to show them that you
can do this.” And the kids filed out just like a dream. You should’ve seen.
The principal looks at me and goes, “All right, we should talk.” And
Lamar is so pleased with himself, right? And all of a sudden I look over,
and there come the lunch ladies across the blacktop, heaving bosoms,
and hug Lamar and gave him so much love. It was this great visual.
So we launched there at that school the next year.
There are a couple of things that I love about that story. I love how
the kids were moved so quickly from a behavior that was totally
unacceptable to a behavior that was great. I love the lunch ladies.
But one thing that I don’t get to talk about that often, that seems
so important, is how incredible it was that Lamar stepped up in that
moment. I mean,
And all of a sudden I look over, and nothing in the
there come the lunch ladies across power dynamic
supported that.
the blacktop, heaving bosoms, and hug I’m his boss’
Lamar and gave him so much love.   boss, and the
principal is totally
intimidating and the dude is in the little chair, and yet, in that moment he
had so much empathy for the kids. And he knew it, without a shadow
of a doubt, that he could make a difference. And so, he summoned his
full unreasonable self, and he made a difference.
And that’s the kind of world that I want to live in. I want to live in
a world where people see problems, they see creative solutions, and
they know for a fact that they can make a difference. And then, based
on that, they take action and the world is a better place.
I can stand here and tell you stories about all the hundreds of staff who
do this everyday, who found their incredible power as a changemaker
through play. But, I think what I want to leave you with, is that while it’s
easy to dismiss play and recess as this sort of extra, sort of frivolous
thing, nothing could be further from the truth. It is absolutely
essential that we make sure that every kid in America gets to
play every day. Because, that’s what it’s going to take for them
to develop the social skills they need to take the initiative,
to drive their own destiny, and to ultimately become the
changemakers that we so desperately need them to be.

10
J
ill Vialet developed a love for sports in her early school years. As
a young girl in the dawn of Title IX, she was entitled to play any
sport, but she always preferred the sports that boys thought only
they could play. She remembers with great fondness a recreation
worker named Clarence at her local playground, who made sure she was
always included in the sports of her choice. Jill continued to play sports
in high school, becoming a state champion in track. Through sports she
learned how to manage a team and gained insights about gender equity
and competition that would influence many of her life choices.
As she went on to college, Jill became immediately
immersed in public service and political advocacy.
In her time at Harvard, she was student body
president, co‑founded the group Students Against
Racism, and spent a summer in Peru with Amigos
de las Americas. Jill took her commitment to
service a step further after college, taking a job
with Campfire Boys and Girls in Alaska. She
went from village to village teaching survival
swimming skills and art to 40 children from 2
to 17 years old. As a complete outsider with little support, Jill had to
create a program from scratch; she had no choice but to innovate.
In 1988, Jill cofounded the Museum of Children’s Art (MOCHA) in
Oakland to help families and communities celebrate the creativity of
young people. Through the work with the museum, she brought artists
to a hospital to work with pediatric patients, and convinced the hospital
to display the children’s art throughout its wards. The museum grew
quickly, developing an “artists in residency” program in public schools
and serving 18,000 children over the course of nine years. Principals
were so impressed with Jill’s work that they approached her to solve
their single biggest problem: The schoolyard. At their request, Jill
worked for months to adapt what she had learned to recess.
She then founded what is now Playworks. In 2004 she was elected
an Ashoka Fellow and, with help from Ashoka and its partners, began
spreading her vision nationally. From its roots in the San Francisco
Bay Area, it has now spread to 170 schools in 10 cities. Jill’s plan is to
serve 650 low income schools in 28 cities by 2012. With these schools
providing encouragement as models, more and more communities are
taking advantage of Playworks’ comprehensive training and technical
support programs which will engage a further one million students by
2012. A number of its insights are also now spreading globally through
Ashoka’s collaborative entrepreneuring for children and young people.

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 “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 of UNICEF
President and CEO of World Learning

“[Ashoka is] establishing and

sustaining an independent,
international body which will nourish itself on the nearly
bottomless, practical think tank of its Fellows.”

“Ashoka has identified a clear

pattern: In Fellow after Fellow you
see new ideas of how you can put
children in charge of a series of activities, and how
empowering them had a strong impact on them for
academic performance and their motivation.”

1700 North Moore Street, Suite 2000 (20th Floor)

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www. ashoka.org | www.changemakers.com