Alison Craiglow Hockenberry
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Alison Craiglow Hockenberry is a contributing editor at Ashoka's Changemakers, an open-sourced community of action that connects social entrepreneurs around the globe to share ideas, inspire, and mentor each other to solve the world's most pressing social problems. Changemakers builds on Ashoka's three-decade history and belief that we all have the ability to change the world. Hockenberry's coverage of human rights issues, politics, social policy, and major conflicts around the world has earned her both Emmy and Peabody Awards.

Blog Entries by Alison Craiglow Hockenberry

The Women Saving Higher Education

(0) Comments | Posted February 26, 2013 | 3:48 PM

Higher education may be notoriously resistant to change, but at this point the writing's on the whiteboard, so to speak. Change is inevitable. Some of our most ambitious entrepreneurs and deep thinkers are taking aim--challenging the entire financial model, delivery system and value proposition of possibly the greatest model of...

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How Your Small Business Can Grow Big Ideas

(3) Comments | Posted November 15, 2012 | 12:34 PM

Readers with even a passing understanding of the term social entrepreneurship understand that it's about big ideas in small packages that have the potential to effect enormous social change. Social entrepreneurship is about the regional and global impact that can be unleashed if start-up solutions to stubborn, often heartbreaking local...

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Antidote To Compassion Fatigue: Lessons From West Africa For US Health Care

(0) Comments | Posted May 1, 2012 | 3:52 PM

Compassion fatigue has an antidote. True, our increasing global interconnectedness makes us more aware of suffering than ever before, and we can become weary of the seemingly infinite number of problems plaguing our fellow humans.

But that same interconnectedness allows us do more than just learn about what's happening...

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Getting Health Care Out of the Middle Ages and into the 21st Century

(3) Comments | Posted March 29, 2012 | 7:53 PM

In our wonderfully convenient century, so many services are readily available without the long wait times or long trips of decades before. It's hard to believe now, but in the recent past we could only make bank deposits and withdrawals in an actual bank, and only on weekdays between 9...

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Disrupting College: A Mother of Five's Search for Answers as Tuition Looms

(7) Comments | Posted February 9, 2012 | 1:58 PM

For 60 grand a year at an elite private college, today's students are paying for a lot of things they could get elsewhere for cheap or free. So, is college worth it?

And the residential four-year model of lectures and directed study may not be preparing them for a changing...

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Intersection: A World-Changing Mash-Up

(0) Comments | Posted January 12, 2012 | 3:49 PM

A movie star, a yogi and an Iraq War veteran walk into a bar...

Ok, not a bar. But no joke, this unlikely group is getting together this weekend, along with about a dozen other movers and shakers, at Pixar Animation Studios for some very serious business.

It's called...

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Making More Health for More People -- and Making it Look Easy

(1) Comments | Posted December 9, 2011 | 9:21 AM

If you ask Vera Cordeiro, good health is within reach for everyone, even the poorest of the poor. But this requires radical rethinking of what health care is.

Health is not merely the absence of illness. If a patient is released from a hospital into a situation...

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Citizen Media: Collaborating to Accelerate Change

(0) Comments | Posted November 20, 2011 | 11:02 AM

The lexicon of new technology is so casual, you'd be excused for thinking the whole world is doing nothing online but goofing off and LOL-ing about. We chat, we surf, we tweet, we tag, we're on a cloud. But this language belies the fabulously serious business that is happening on...

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Making More Health

(2) Comments | Posted November 18, 2011 | 5:44 PM

When you're sick, you see the doctor. When you get a medical test it goes to the lab. When you need medicine, you go to the pharmacy. Or not.

In many places in both the developing and developed world, these basic healthcare steps -- getting from point A to...

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I Spy Occupy

(8) Comments | Posted October 28, 2011 | 3:39 PM

The threat level in the United States has been raised to yellow, but this time it's not the Department of Homeland Security raising the alarm. It's a private initiative that is monitoring the Occupy Wall Street demonstrations on behalf of corporations -- called The Occupy Movement Corporate Threat Advisory.

A...

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An Artsy Fartsy Mom Gets All Techy: Why I Embrace Science and Math

(0) Comments | Posted October 20, 2011 | 7:19 PM

All parents want a bright future for their kids. Which is why this history major, French-poetry minor, writer mom wants her kids to ditch the artsy, literary track I once held as the height of achievement and make stuff. Invent, design, discover, and build actual things.

This surprising revelation is...

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Time for Innovation in Job Creation

(0) Comments | Posted September 30, 2011 | 7:00 PM

We hear a lot these days about innovation and job creation. But when people talk about innovation and jobs, they're usually talking about innovations that may produce jobs -- as opposed to innovations in the way we increase employment.

Why not innovation in job creation?

Sure, cutting-edge technologies will open...

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Now for Some Good News About Jobs

(0) Comments | Posted September 15, 2011 | 4:31 PM

You wouldn't know it from the headlines, but people are getting hired, household incomes are rising, and Americans are pulling themselves and their families out of poverty.

It's happening in Minnesota: An innovative career development program for the chronically-unemployed, called Twin Cities RISE! (TCR!), gets state funding...

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Arab Spring -- and the Long Winter Ahead

(1) Comments | Posted August 16, 2011 | 7:28 PM

For all the debate about whether this is the year of the Twitter revolution and the Facebook riots, the much more interesting question is: What is not happening on the giant social media websites of the world?

The answer is: A lot.

About two billion people have been touched by...

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Innovating Toward a Healthier World

(0) Comments | Posted August 15, 2011 | 6:46 PM

When health innovation expert David Aylward is asked if the developing world can learn from the U.S. healthcare system, his answer is an emphatic yes -- "They should do the opposite!"

Aylward, senior advisor for Global Health and Technology at Ashoka, is not exactly joking. For all our...

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Getting Real on Job Creation

(2) Comments | Posted August 5, 2011 | 6:54 PM

We don't need more jobs.

It's true we need to "add jobs" to the economy. But more jobs is not the same as new jobs. We need new jobs.

Real job creation is about new jobs in expanding markets that provide products and services that are growing in demand....

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Angry Birds! Roller Coasters! Harry Potter! Thank You, STEM

(17) Comments | Posted July 26, 2011 | 1:28 PM

From Angry Birds to roller coasters, from the Harry Potter films to viral YouTube explosions of Diet Coke and Mentos, your summer fun is made possible by science, technology, engineering, and math.

But the STEM subjects, as they're known, are in serious need of a public relations overhaul. Somehow...

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Serious Play: The Goal Is Peace

(1) Comments | Posted July 7, 2011 | 4:22 PM

Jürgen Griesbeck plays hard because of a murder. After his friend Andrés Escobar, a Colombian national soccer player, was killed for botching a goal in a 1994 World Cup game, Griesbeck set to work making sure the game itself -- football, as most of the world calls it...

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Celebrating 30 Years of Social Entrepreneurship

(0) Comments | Posted June 29, 2011 | 2:58 PM

Social entrepreneurship today enjoys the high regard it has long deserved -- fully 30 years after the organization that launched the movement was born.

When Bill Drayton started Ashoka, he knew that the old ways of dealing with social problems -- through the...

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How Travelers Can Help Stem Human Trafficking

(23) Comments | Posted June 26, 2011 | 11:34 PM

The hospitality industry is increasingly making things decidedly inhospitable for a certain kind of person: human traffickers.

Hotels, airlines and other travel-related companies are in a position to combat these criminals where they tend to operate. Whether transporting enslaved domestic workers into the country on a plane...

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