William "Bill" Drayton

Se graduó en Harvard en 1965 con honores. Estudió en el Ballilol College de la Universidad de Oxford donde obtuvo su M.A. con los más altos honores, se graduó en la Escuela de Leyes de Yale y comenzó su carrera en McKinsey & Co en Nueva York. Trabajó en el gobierno de Carter como administrador de la Agencia de Protección Medioambiental (EPA) y en 1980 fundó Ashoka, organización que apoya a los emprendedores sociales y de la que es actualmente presidente y CEO.
In elementary school, Bill loved geography and history and was equally unmotivated in Latin and math. His real passion in those years went to sailing, and starting and running a series of newspapers in his school and beyond. In high school he created and built the Asia Society into the largest student organization. By high school he was also a NAACP member and actively engaged in and deeply moved by civil rights work. At Harvard he founded the Ashoka Table; and, at Yale Law School, he launched Yale Legislative Services which, by the time he graduated, engaged one third of the student body in helping key legislators throughout the northeast design and draft legislation.
Bill's deepening commitments to Asia, especially South Asia, and to civil rights were closely linked. Martin Luther King, Jr. followed Mahatma Gandhi's way, and anyone concerned with inequity within the U.S. could only be more disturbed by the greater inequalities between the world's North and South.
Once focused on such a chasm, any entrepreneur would have to ask: "What can I do?" At Harvard and Oxford, Bill did ask. Fully appreciating how central to significant change ("development") entrepreneurs are, his answer was the Ashoka idea.
For four years, he was Assistant Administrator at the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency, where he had lead responsibility for policy, budget, management, audit, and 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 to the use of economics-defined incentives to remove the advantage of delaying compliance. Later he founded and led Save EPA (an association of professional environmental managers that helped the Congress, press, administration, citizen groups, and public understand and the block much of the radically destructive policies proposed by the Administrator Ann Gorsuch and others). Bill also founded and led Environmental Safety (which helps develop and spread better ways of implementing environmental laws).
He also served briefly in the White House, and taught both law and management at Stanford Law School and Harvard's Kennedy School of Government.
He is currently significantly involved as board chair of Get America Working! and Youth Venture, both major strategic innovations for the public good.
Bill has received many awards for his achievements. He was elected one of the early MacArthur Fellows for his work, including the founding of Ashoka. Yale School of Management gave him its annual Award for Entrepreneurial Excellence. The American Society of Public Administration and the National Academy of Public Administration jointly awarded him their National Public Service Award, and the Common Cause gave him its Public Service Achievement Award. He has also been named a Preiskel-Silverman Fellow for Yale Law School and is a member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences.