Meet the 2025 Ashoka Fellows in the U.S.
How can youth-led climate litigation secure legal rights for future generations? What if communities owned housing in perpetuity, preserving affordability while preventing displacement? How might a national network of next-gen representative school board leaders improve education for all students?
Meet the 2025 Ashoka Fellows in the U.S. They are working on these and other solutions - creatively, persistently, collaboratively, and in ways that invite all of us to contribute as changemakers.
Anasa Troutman
The Big We | Memphis, TN
New Idea: Anasa Troutman is revitalizing southern communities and repairing long-standing economic exclusion. She works with residents to transform their stories and cultural heritage into engines of ownership, community wealth, and systemic change.
Why we're excited about Anasa: Anasa has created a restorative development model centering cultural assets in community revitalization. Working in Memphis—America's largest majority-Black city—she integrates physical reclamation of historic sites with narrative transformation and economic development. Unlike traditional approaches that create either dependency or displacement, Anasa's model enables communities to own and benefit from their cultural heritage.
David Kemper
Trust Neighborhoods | Boston, MA
New Idea: David and his team have pioneered the Mixed-Income Neighborhood Trust (MINT), using a Perpetual Purpose Trust structure to permanently preserve affordable housing across a growing number of U.S. cities.
Why we're excited about David: As affordable housing reaches crisis levels nationwide, David Kemper and Trust Neighborhoods have partnered with communities to create a model where purposes, not people, own homes and apartments in perpetuity—combating gentrification, displacement, and evictions while empowering neighborhoods to articulate and enforce values that shape their housing policy.
Diya Abdo
Every Campus A Refuge (ECAR) | Greensboro, NC
New Idea: Diya Abdo is building a national movement of “resettlement campuses”—mobilizing colleges and universities to host refugee families on campus and provide a soft landing, stronger beginnings, and pathways to belonging—while recentering higher education as a durable civic actor.
Why we’re excited about Diya: With Every Campus A Refuge (ECAR), Diya and her colleagues are breaking down the silos of the U.S. resettlement system and transforming university campuses -- too often symbols of privilege and insulation -- into humanitarian hubs of inclusion and dignity in 14 states across 21 campuses and counting.
Ethan Ashley
School Board Partners | New Orleans, LA
New Idea: Ethan is building a more inclusive and accessible education system by redesigning the composition, training, and governance of school boards, turning them into powerful levers for educational equity and reform.
Why we're excited about Ethan: Ethan is growing a national network of next-gen school board leaders to address modern educational needs and overcome persistent inequities. As the only network of its kind, it's poised to leverage school boards' power to uphold fairness and equity while improving outcomes for all students.
idris brewster
Kinfolk Tech | New York, NY
New Idea: idris is rewriting civic infrastructure by enabling historically excluded communities to author, own, and mobilize their collective histories. Through Kinfolk Tech, he transforms place-based memory into civic power.
Why we're excited about idris: idris is tackling narrative erasure—the systemic forces that disappear Black, Indigenous, and undertold histories from public consciousness and civic space. He's building Kinfolk Tech, a community-driven platform that challenges who has authority to record, remember, and retell history. Kinfolk Tech provides digital tools empowering people to engage with their stories on their own terms, reframing history as a living, participatory act.
Julia Olson
Our Children's Trust | Eugene, OR
New Idea: Julia Olson deploys youth-led climate litigation to elevate young leadership, set legal precedents, and shift public discourse. Through 50+ cases globally, she's established an enforceable right to a livable climate—holding governments accountable for meaningful redress.
Why we're excited about Julia: Julia empowers youth to secure their climate rights in courts worldwide. Over fifteen years and 50+ legal campaigns, she's established that children have an enforceable right to a livable climate. Through impact litigation and public campaigns, she's reshaping law, changing discourse, and holding governments accountable for meaningful redress from fossil fuel pollution.
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Anasa, David, Diya, Ethan, idris, and Julia join our global network of 4,000+ social entrepreneurs in 90+ countries (since 1981), including 300+ Ashoka Fellows here in the U.S. (since 2001). As ever, we extend deep gratitude to each Ashoka Fellow and to their colleagues and communities. We also thank Ashoka’s friends and supporters.
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