Drayton to Address 2005 Graduates
William Drayton, Chairman and Chief Executive Officer of Ashoka will address the 2005 Heinz School graduates at the diploma ceremony on Sunday afternoon, May 15, 2005.
Bill Drayton is a social entrepreneur. As a student, he was active in civil rights and founded a number of organizations, ranging from Yale Legislative Services to Harvard's Ashoka Table, an interdisciplinary weekly forum in the social sciences. He graduated from Harvard with highest honors and went on to study at Balliol College in Oxford University, where he attained his M.A. with First Class Honors.
In 1970, he graduated from Yale Law School and began his career at McKinsey and Company in New York. From 1977 to 1981, Mr. Drayton served in the Carter Administration as Assistant Administrator at the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) where he launched emissions trading (the basis of Kyoto), among other reforms.
After his term at the EPA ended in 1981, he returned to McKinsey half-time and launched both Ashoka and Save EPA and its successor, Environmental Safety. At McKinsey, he helped the firm develop tax and regulatory design work and then its use of industry strategy (an increasingly useful first step to company strategy). With the support that he received unexpectedly when elected a MacArthur Fellow at the end of 1984, he was able to devote himself fully to Ashoka.
Mr. Drayton is currently the Chairman & Chief Executive Officer of Ashoka: Innovators for the Public. Ashoka is a global association of over 1600 leading 'social entrepreneurs,' individuals who envision and implement pattern-setting social changes in the environment, education, human rights, and other areas of human need that are inadequately served by the business sector. Ashoka helps launch these major social innovations and the public entrepreneurs who drive them, helps them succeed on their full life 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 Youth Venture, Community Greens, and Get America Working!