Social Innovation Trends

What’s Working

Insights About Social Innovation & Systems Change

“I would say that we’re at a key moment in history where many organizations that have emerged across all different sectors, and all different sorts of stakeholders, need to come together. We need to be able to work collaboratively with each other. We need to recognize the diverse gifts that we can each bring to this work, and figure out how to create that which is greater than the sum of the parts.”

David Levine, American Sustainable Business Network

The Solutions Insights Lab asked dozens of successful social entrepreneurs how they made a difference, using a structured interview format drawn from the solutions journalism approach. These changemakers work on the frontlines from Afghanistan to Zimbabwe. They are rural and urban. They work in democracies and dictatorships. They solve all kinds of problems in all kinds of communities: they help women raise capital to start businesses, or bring healthcare to rural areas, or help off-grid villages get sustainable energy.

These diverse interviewees consistently shared similar insights about how they succeeded and what kinds of challenges they have faced, and continue to face. Just a few strategies, it seems, as well as insights about how to implement them, are key to creating all kinds of change.

Solutions Insights Lab experts manually tagged over one hundred interviews and stories — by geography, the type of community being served, and issue area, but also by the strategies that produced success. These tags were generated by the interviews themselves rather than fitting the interviews into a pre-existing taxonomy. This is the first Solutions Insights Lab conducted to date, and while this is a significant sample, it is just a subset of a much larger universe of knowledge. Yet even drawing from this modest sample we were able to glean lessons and create a framework based on their commonalities that can help other leaders create change.

The framework includes nine high level insights. It helps us understand the common pillars of system change. Sharing this kind of evidence-based knowledge can empower those working on social change, speed up the process of learning and innovation, and contribute to the refinement and scaling of solutions. This approach offered great value and promise for scaling it to broader and deeper inquiries with many more participants.

1:

Networks expedite the pace and scale of change

A single organization cannot create and sustain systems change. It is important to build a coalition or network of partnerships, identify the expertise and strengths of each partner, and leverage that expertise. This involves putting egos aside. Successful changemakers don’t work for individual or organizational recognition, and don’t compete with each other for scarce resources. Instead, they share resources and leverage the strengths of each individual/organization.

"You cannot do anything alone [...] Partnership is crucial. Investing in those relationships, investing time, energy, and effort into collaborating with other partners is crucial because if you try to do everything yourself, you're going to do it worse than the folks that you work with deserve."

George Tsiatis Resolution Project

"To create a massive impact at the local level, but at a large scale, there's no better model that works on a network. It's not like the work of one organization or one hero. Spreading this out and having many people with the capacity to do it is a wonderful thing to do."

Tasso Azevedo MapBiomas

"Another lesson that I've learned is the importance of being ego-free and focused on impact. All too often, in a world where it feels like resources are scarce, organizations are competing to have their brands or their logos on an initiative or a partnership. But what is really most important is that everyone identifies their specific expertise that they're bringing to solving the problem and working in collaboration with others to put together something successful."

A group of people put their arms around each other

Gabrielle Fitzgerald Panorama Global

2:

Public-private partnerships are vital to sustain changes at scale

Getting buy-in from key government partners is important. Government partnerships can provide access to funding on a larger scale. They also increase the possibility that the government will take over a program, which provides longevity and scope (i.e., geographic spread).

"First, without doubt for us, is government leadership. Zvandiri has been founded on the belief that this has to be a government-led response. This isn't a parallel program."

Nicola Willis Zvandiri

"We don't want to be forever supporting a system in a specific country. We want a government to ultimately be owning that, caring for it, supporting it, and managing it for as long as they need to."

A person views a chat app on their mobile phone

Carlos Yerena Reach Digital Health

"Public/private collaboration in an emergency situation has been a game changer in reaching the vulnerable populations in need and making partnerships work in the context of an emergency situation."

Ambika Sasidharan Community Action Collab

3:

Systems change is more likely to occur with access to unrestricted funding

Systems change requires organizations to be flexible, to quickly pivot if needed. Funding can’t be tied up with so many restrictions so as to prevent this flexibility. Also, funding must be for the long haul and not for just a few years because social changes – particularly at the systemic level – do not happen in a year or two.

"Trust-based philanthropy [means] long-term, no-strings-attached gifts that really allow the organizations that are closest to the problem to identify how the money is best spent and trusting them and partnering with them to execute on that."

Gabrielle Fitzgerald Panorama Global

"We found ourselves in situations where we wished we could have done more, but because the funding arrangement or the contract that we had was very prescriptive, we didn't have that opportunity. That has been one of the main things that has restricted our thinking and our approach. Two years ago we started to engage and receive more philanthropic support in the form of unrestricted funding."

Carlos Yerena Reach Digital Health

"Whoever is supporting us is supporting the whole thing, even if it's a hundred dollars, it doesn't matter. You are supporting the whole thing."

Tasso Azevedo MapBiomas

4:

Solutions developed from the ground up are more likely to achieve broad reach

Deep listening and human-centered design are critical. Successful solutions rely on the input and insight of people with first-hand knowledge of the problem. They should be centered in the solution design process. Western (or “outsider”) paradigms will not necessarily work in other contexts. Locally led solutions not only are more accurate and context-specific but also get the essential buy-in of people on the ground who can assure the solution is sustained.

"The first lesson is to listen to the community. They understand their experience and their situation more than we do. We are there to support and we are there to provide a framework for their progression towards their vision, however, the content is very much coming from the communities themselves."

Yussuf Sané Tostan

"We are the only social enterprise that employs 90% formerly imprisoned women to lead with the solutions. We strongly believe that those who are close to the problem are also very close to the solutions."

Teresa Njoroge Clean Start Solutions

"All of our work is guided by the work and advocacy of survivors themselves. It's really important that all of that work is grounded in the voices and experiences of survivors themselves and young people."

Yasmin Vafa Rights4Girls

5:

Sustainable solutions are co-designed with communities and encourage agency and decision-making power

Empowering people might not be the main goal of a response. But it’s a crucial goal nonetheless. It’s always important to empower individuals and/or local communities to increase their agency and decision-making power. It’s especially necessary when the response seeks to create gender equity, for example through skill building, education or income security among women.

"My search was to really find a solution which could provide women with resources and the ability to influence decision making within their homes and their communities [...] The problem on a larger issue is gender inequity, and in a microcosmic way is the lack of women's decision making within households."

Roshaneh Zafar Kashf Foundation

"We have evidence that shows that the girls that are supported by CAMFED are able to complete school… They have grown their confidence and, in a survey, we were able to hear from 95% of the girls saying that they're better able to shape their life goals. When they think that they are in control, then it's a different trajectory."

A student writes with a pencil while a teacher is nearby

Lydia Wilbard CAMFED

"[After participating in the program,] suddenly girls who didn't have a voice, now they have started taking decisions, they've started taking a stand that no, I don't want to get married now, I want to complete my education."

A row of girls wearing blue and white uniforms

Geetika Tondon-Higgins Educate Girls

6:

Systems change requires sustained commitment and ability to maintain focus

Systems change is slow. Funders and operations/programmatic planners need to be in it for the long haul.

"The critical thing is that funders and implementers, and any organizations that are in this space or in the global health space, need to have a long-term horizon and vision and not just do one year, two year, three year grants that address one piece of the problem. They must look at it holistically and bring organizations together that can help solve this problem over time. If this were easy, we wouldn't be in this situation."

Jim Ansara Build Health International

"With that comes a real challenge of how to operate in a way that is sustainable for all of us over the long haul. There's not going to be quick, easy wins that solve everything. They are going to be wins that we can feel good about, but then the work goes on. We need to make sure that we can, on a really hard issue where people feel it personally in lots of different ways, enable the team to be in it for the long haul, to be resilient, to operate in a sustainable way, to realize that it does matter even if the challenge hasn't gone away."

The Protect Democracy Project is written in white text on a red background

Justin Florence Protect Democracy

"We know that change isn't linear. We know that it's not a nice tidy project cycle where I give you two years funding and then you come back to me at the end of two years and say, 'Woohoo, gender-based violence is over.' That's not how change works at all."

Vanessa Thomas Decolonizing Wealth Project

7:

Solutions spread faster when the data and tools behind them are freely available

Many solutions need to be transparent and free to achieve the broadest possible scale, providing the necessary information and permissions for others to replicate them. This is particularly important with solutions involving technology.

"We have developed this platform, and we give it to anyone in the world who wants it, who has a mission for equity. We ask them to apply it in any area [...] We have close to a hundred networks now."

A group of people in a conference room participate in a virtual meeting

Sanjeev Arora Project ECHO

"Everything we produce is an open data source and is free for anyone to use. [I]t's possible for anyone to reproduce because you don't need an infrastructure and so on. The model is based on that so it can be democratized easily."

Tasso Azevedo MapBiomas

"We are computing things and putting that on public domains, so that other people feel inspired and can reach out to us and contextualize some of these learnings for their own educational curriculum or other initiatives. The more we see how people are taking that up in different places, the more we feel that it is making an actual impact."

People walk on the Oxford University campus.

Anjali Sarker Oxford Character Project

8:

For some systems change work, it is important to shift societal narratives

Deeply entrenched ideas and beliefs can limit the opportunities of certain groups. Working to change dominant narratives – such as prevailing patriarchal or racially biased paradigms within society – is an important goal as well.

"The narrative change piece is a really important part of our work because we recognize that for us to really live in a just world which is free from racial trauma, we have to normalize racial healing. We have to normalize talking about the racial disparities and how white supremacy has harmed us all, and we need to normalize reparative actions through philanthropy and other wealth orders."

Vanessa Thomas Decolonizing Wealth Project

"Entrepreneurship is actually not viewed as a career path whatsoever. And because 90% of the economy is informal, it's viewed that if you go into the informal sector and start a business, you're a failure. So trying to also shape that with the parents and working with the media to bring out some of these great stories of the work that these ventures are doing so that people can see that this is acceptable in the news. People can celebrate it and try to shift that way of thinking."

Taku Machirori Emergination Africa

"When we say we create ecosystems, we start with household dialogues. In many cases, we enable local partners to have household dialogues, where we dismantle gender and power dynamics at the household level."

Zubaida Bai Grameen Foundation USA

9:

Solutions adapted to specific cultural contexts are more effective

Every community is unique and situated within specific cultural and social contexts. In order to be effective, and get local buy-in, solutions must be built taking these unique contexts into account. Systems change will not happen using a one-size-fits all approach, particularly in terms of applying solutions created in the West in other cultural contexts.

"While we have certain policies and frameworks and best practices, those are all offered as tools for the local teams to use and to adjust and adapt as they need. That's a really important piece of making sure that this is a scalable model, that it's adjustable, that it's flexible, and that it always is contextualized for the local community's needs."

Morgan Lance OneSky for All Children

"You have to know who you're serving. Africans don't need people from elsewhere coming in. They just simply don't. If you really want to make an impact, if you really want to make a difference, you let those you're trying to serve be your guide, be your teacher. You listen to them and try to determine how you can best add value."

Kristine Pearson Lifeline Energy

"Each community is unique. We learn from the other areas and we try to adopt the good practices in one community and sometimes it doesn't actually work. That's why presence and listening is an important part of the process."

Luis Oquiñena Gawad Kalinga

Overview of the What’s Working database

The database features 250 organizations and counting that are working to advance social change around the world. While each organization has a unique approach, similar problem-solving strategies surface across issue areas.

Notes: For the purposes of these visualizations, each organization was tagged with a primary issue area, community served, and problem-solving strategy. Explore the full taxonomies and tags at https://whatsworkingsolutions.org/search-resources/ We will continue to update the charts as the database grows. Last update: March 19, 2024.

Jump to:

1:

Networks expedite the pace and scale of change

2:

Public-private partnerships are vital to sustain changes at scale

3:

Systems change is more likely to occur with access to unrestricted funding

4:

Solutions developed from the ground up are more likely to achieve broad reach

5:

Sustainable solutions are co-designed with communities and encourage agency and decision-making power

6:

Systems change requires sustained commitment and ability to maintain focus

7:

Solutions spread faster when the data and tools behind them are freely available

8:

For some systems change work, it is important to shift societal narratives

9:

Solutions adapted to specific cultural contexts are more effective

Overview of the What’s Working database

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