Marie Ringler

WORK HISTORY

EDUCATION

SKILLS

ABOUT MARIE RINGLER

I have a question I keep coming back to: what does it actually take for a good idea to change a system? Not a project or a program - but change at the level of a whole system.I\'ve been trying to answer this for 25 years: as a politician, and over the past decade leading Ashoka\'s work across Europe.What I keep finding - and it still surprises me - is that organizations matter less than we think. What matters is the infrastructure around ideas: trust, peer connections, and belonging.Ashoka\'s latest global research confirms what I have been sensing for years. 75% of Fellows see their work replicated by others. Their ideas are active across an average of 8 countries. 72% have influenced legislation. None of this happened because organizations grew bigger. It happened because ideas found the conditions to travel.That is what I work on: building those conditions across 27 countries, with 800+ social entrepreneurs and a team of 150+ colleagues, and with the funders, partners and institutions who understand that trust, long-term relationships, and genuine peer networks are not a byproduct of the work but its foundation. This means making hard choices - about where to invest time and money, where to let go, and how to stay focused on long-term impact. And here is something worth sitting with: 94% of Ashoka\'s partners and funders say working with our community changed how they think about philanthropy, and 85%+ changed their actual strategy as a result. Not because we told them to - because proximity to this work does something to you. It shifts what you think is possible, and who you think deserves to be trusted with resources.I care about all of this with some urgency. We are living through an epidemic of people feeling powerless — not as a metaphor, but as something measurable across European democracies. Social entrepreneurs are among the most underused and underfunded responses to democratic decline that we have.Before Ashoka I spent a decade as an elected member of Vienna\'s Parliament, spokesperson for culture, media, and technology policy - and before that I was part of the founding team of Austria\'s first not-for-profit internet provider. I left politics after two terms, on my own terms, to build something new: Ashoka in Austria and later its expansion across Europe.Today I am Vice-President of the European Forum Alpbach. I served on the Supervisory Board of ORF, Austria\'s public broadcaster. I was Vice-Chair of the advisory board of Austria\'s €24M Digital Transformation Fund for Media.