ASHOKA DIWA Graduation 2021

Hello I'm Angeline, founder of SheASK and hope you are doing great! Early this year, I launched SheASK - a social impact driven startup that empower women through lifelong learning after I graduated from Oxford university's Social Entrepreneurship. This is my first social startup and I was not sure exactly how to operate it and where to start. One day, I was doing research about gender equality and I found that ASHOKA (an international organization that promotes social entrepreneurship) was organizing DIWA program (Deepening Impact Women Activator) and it was open for application. It was a golden opportunity for me and one month later, I was thrilled to be selected as one of the Women Social Entrepreneurs in Southeast Asia in this program.

Throughout the program, we learned a lot about Leadership, Impact strategy and Financial sustainability. Apart from learning from the mentors, we also built friendship and broaden our network among the cohort members. Although the entire program was done online - meeting and learning with each other through Zoom! but it didn't stop our passion to learn and share our experience together. In every module, facilitators arranged 'break-out room' for a randomly picked few members to discuss and share our problems and ideas. Honestly, I like how meticulous they are to prepare a separate virtual space for us to deep dive and discuss the issues. I find that I was able to know more cohort members during this session. Of course, organizer also additionally arrange a coaching circle session where we could further discuss what we learned on the modules.

As time goes by, the 3-months program was finished on September and last week we finally had an official virtual Graduation together with DIWA cohort-1 members! At the beginning, we were listening to Dr. Iman Bibars's inspiring stories being a successful women social entrepreneurs. Dr. Iman Bibars is the vice president of Ashoka Global and she is also the founder of WISE (Women's Initiative for Social Entrepreneurship). Following we had the opportunity to reflect and share our experience about how DIWA program influenced our personal and professional changemaking journey. Personally, I think DIWA program brought me to another new level being a women social entrepreneur, a changemaker and more importantly, a leader. I was really lucky to be able to meet and exchange ideas with these amazing women social entrepreneurs in Southeast Asia. Hoping that all of us can gather and meet in person very soon! ;)

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