SOCIAL INNOVATION
AND THE JOURNEY TO TRANSFORMATION
Philanthropy has long invested in solutions to societal challenges like climate change and inadequate health care. Transforming entire ecosystems requires more investment in social innovators who can build bridges across sectors and between disparate parts of a system to drive collective action and impact all with a greater emphasis on equity, trust, and partnership.
THE JOURNEY TO TRANSFORMATION
MARLA BLOW & DON GIPS
DON GIPS, TULAINE MONTGOMERY, ROHINI NILEKANI & CRISTIANE SULTANI
GALEN
MARLA BLOW & MICHAELA EDWARDS
SOHINI BHATTACHARYA & CRYSTAL ECHO HAWK
ANNA ZIMMERMANN JIN & SHIVANI GARG PATEL
EVOLVING PHILANTHROPY FOR COLLECTIVE ACTION
From system orchestration to partnership, to evaluation and learning, this series highlights successful approaches to collective action and examples of social transformation.
BY MARLA BLOW & DON GIPS
This year marks 25 years of the Skoll Foundation investing in, connecting, and championing social entrepreneurs and innovators who have generated solutions to some of the world’s most pressing challenges. Five years ago, we set out to evolve our strategy, inspired by founder Jeff Skoll’s concern that the existential threats facing the planet—from climate to pandemics to injustice—were getting worse.
As we conducted a listening tour of our community, the call to action became clear: We needed to figure out how to align the scale and speed of innovative solutions with the scale and speed of mounting global challenges.
We heard the community’s concerns that social innovators working to change whole systems need more opportunities to collaborate long-term with each other, philanthropists, and leaders across sectors.
We also heard what the community needs to achieve this sustained collaboration: more resources to enable system orchestration, more connections to work effectively with government, and new approaches to unlocking private markets. And we didn’t miss the critiques of philanthropy: That we, as funders, need to collaborate more with each other, provide scaled funding to support what is working, and update our approaches to evaluation and monitoring to encourage collaboration.
So we took action. Over the last five years, we have worked with social innovators and partners to test new approaches to address these needs and concerns. Although our strategic evolution is still a work in progress, we cocreated this series with our partners to aggregate our learning and, we hope, to foster more of the collective action that is needed to achieve truly transformational change.
Each article in this series speaks to the theory and practice of a specific approach. If we were to identify a meta-theme that cuts across the articles, it would be this: To accelerate social innovators’ impact, we need to double down on building and growing more collaborative ecosystems to drive collective action over time. To achieve greater impact faster, we need radical new energy and partnerships across the whole ecosystem.
This theme comes into sharp focus in the next article in the series from leaders who operate as system orchestrators. Many social innovators shared with us that to drive systems-level change, they often felt compelled to evolve or even leave their organizations to better orchestrate and harmonize the efforts of others in their sector who are tackling the same challenges. As we looked at successful large-scale systems-change efforts, we found that nearly every one had a system orchestrator at its center.
We also found that building more collaborative ecosystems requires paying careful attention to the obstacles that block participants from working together on shared goals. Too often, social innovators and government officials are like two ships passing in the night. Social innovators move fast and take risks, but often lack resources to scale their ideas, while government leaders bring resources to the table but work at a slower pace that could inhibit creation.
“Engaging Government in Collective Action” shares insights on how to advance proven social innovations through government funding, infrastructure, and channels. One organization might specialize in bringing together public and private entities to access budget appropriations at the state level,
The series highlights approaches that have proven indispensable to accelerating that change and serves as a useful update of our thinking since the 2007 SSIR article “Social Entrepreneurship: The Case for Definition,” by the Skoll Foundation’s founding president and CEO, Sally Osberg, and then-board member Roger L. Martin. Seventeen years later, we are struck by the durability of the values and ideas shared in that article, including the need to expand and deepen our support of social innovators working across sectors and playing a variety of roles to transform systems. But we know there is still work to do.
while another organization might help health and finance departments in local governments all over the world collaborate more effectively.
On the theme of building more collaborative ecosystems, we look to the philanthropic sector for opportunities to develop more joint funding efforts. As a mezzanine, growth-stage funder, we regularly grapple with how to move projects from early to more mature, settled stages.
Over the last decade, 20 percent of the Skoll Foundation’s funding has been in pooled funds. This is core to our ethos, our approach to collective
ADESO WORKS TO CHANGE HOW HUMANITARIAN AID IS DELIVERED, ENVISIONING AN AFRICA THAT THRIVES ON THE RESOURCEFULNESS OF ITS PEOPLE.
action, and our goal of social transformation. In “Reimagining Collaborative Philanthropy,” our cofunding partner Rippleworks explores the growth of collaborative funding models over the past several years and outlines possibilities for how we might expand and proliferate these models to amplify the impact of social-venture organizations.
Private-sector capital must be brought to the table in a more intentional way. In “A Mission-Aligned Investing Approach,” we explain how we use our full balance sheet to help organizations progress beyond what we—and more importantly, they—could have achieved with grants alone. We have been heartened to see the increase in foundations venturing into mission-aligned and program-related investing and hope this article sparks more interest in the expanded array of assets we’ve developed through our close partnership with our sister organization, the Capricorn Investment Group.
We continue to believe in the power of storytelling and narrative change as essential drivers of social change. “Changing the Narrative about Narrative Change” highlights how our longstanding efforts to connect social innovators with storytellers and media partners through platforms like the
Skoll World Forum have matured into a broader effort to support leaders who are building movements, flipping the culture to make room for alternative narratives, and dismantling harmful cultural norms through narrative change and storytelling. By providing flexible long-term funding and allowing partners to take risks, funders can foster transformational change through storytelling and other efforts.
To encourage these system shifts, the final article in the series discusses how our approach to monitoring, evaluation, and learning has evolved to encourage partnership and center the learning goals of social innovators by measuring impact at the systems level.
The approaches we share in this series will not work for all funders; philanthropic strategies are as diverse as the views of the organizations and individuals who have decided to use their wealth for the betterment of society. Nor are we claiming that evolving our strategic approach has been easy or straightforward—it hasn’t. Working to cultivate collaboration and transform entire ecosystems is by definition a nonlinear activity, and the process can often feel messy and complicated.
But we know it’s worth it when we see social innovations scale and impact accelerate because of our collective efforts to find new and different ways to collaborate, mobilize assets, and learn together.
The Skoll Foundation supports organizations and individuals working together to change an ecosystem for the better, with a focus on taking their solutions to the next level of scale and sustainability. For example, three Skoll partners—Community Health Impact Coalition, the Financing Alliance for Health, and Last Mile Health—came together under the leadership of H.E. Ellen Johnson Sirleaf after the COVID-19 pandemic to create Africa Frontline First (AFF), a collaborative focused on transforming health financing in support of Africa’s community health workforce. AFF then joined forces with the Global Fund, Johnson & Johnson Foundation, and the Skoll Foundation to create the Africa Frontline First Catalytic Fund (AFF-CF), which has mobilized $100 million in initial catalytic funding to support the work of 220,000 community health workers who serve an estimated 146 million people in eight African countries.
There are many roads that lead to transformation. This series, The Journey to Transformation: Evolving Philanthropy for Collective Action, highlights the ones that have led to intentional collective action and social transformation. By sharing what we’ve learned from our community-guided work, we hope to give color and imagination to new ways of uniting to achieve common aims, deepen engagement in spaces where we are already working, and uncover new spaces to invest in.
As the proverb goes, going it alone may be faster in the short run, but it won’t help accelerate our collective impact. In that sense, there is only one path that leads to transformation, and that is going farther, together.
MARLA BLOW is president and COO of the Skoll Foundation. DON GIPS is CEO of the Skoll Foundation.
TOP: AN AERIAL VIEW OF RURAL FARMLAND IN KENYA. BOTTOM: A KENYAN WOMAN USES HER SOLAR-POWERED LED LIGHT. PRODUCED BY ANGAZA.
SUPPORTING SOCIETY’S BRIDGE BUILDERS
In a world of increasing complexity and polarization, system orchestrators drive collective action to achieve outsized impact.
BY DON GIPS, TULAINE MONTGOMERY, ROHINI NILEKANI & CRISTIANE SULTANI
We are living in a period of human history rife with paradoxes: Societal challenges like climate change, economic inequality, and social injustice are deeply entrenched and getting worse. Our collective ability to respond to these challenges is increasing, but the problems continue to outpace available resources and solutions. This moment has brought many impact-oriented leaders, including this article’s coauthors, to a shared understanding that linear problem-solving is not enough.
We need more system orchestrators to meet the moment. System orchestrators play a critical role in bringing about transformational social change by knitting together actors and institutions, providing backbone infrastructure, and mobilizing collective change efforts across ecosystems, sectors, and geographies. Along the way, they shape new paradigms, leverage system-wide resources, and navigate complexity, all to create forward momentum and progress at societal scale.
System orchestrators are often overlooked because of the complex, collaborative, and behind-the-scenes roles they play in long-term systems-change efforts. Consequently, many in the social innovation field describe this multifaceted role with different names. The Bridgespan Group refers to these actors as “field catalysts.” Others call them “system catalysts,” “system stewards,” and “network entrepreneurs.” Despite the disagreement on terms, Bridgespan’s research indicates a key truth: If you want to drive equitable systems change, investing in system orchestrators is among the highest-leverage investments that the philanthropic sector can make.
What does system orchestration look like in practice? Spanning sectors and ecosystems, Health Care Without Harm (HCWH) is illustrative of the indispensability of system orchestrators to systemic change. HCWH works globally at the intersection of human and planetary health to transform the health-care sector and drive equity and climate action. HCWH partners with the World Health Organization, governments, hospitals, and community-based organizations to secure commitments to design low-carbon health systems on a path to zero emissions. Its orchestration approach incubates, connects, and scales grassroots initiatives to create systems-level shifts in policy and practices.
The eGov Foundation in India is a philanthropic organization that works to better lives by transforming public health infrastructure, creating a
sanitation value chain, improving public finance management, and tackling climate change—all backed by open digital infrastructure and ecosystems. To achieve its goal of putting people first and bringing the government closer to the people it serves, it helps the state deliver services that are accessible, affordable, and inclusive. To date, eGov Foundation has delivered benefits to two billion people and more than 200 organizations in 10 countries have used its assets.
GirlTREK, the largest public health nonprofit for Black women and girls in the United States, mobilizes community members to organize local walking crews and lead a health movement that centers healing intergenerational trauma and fighting systemic racism. Working closely with many organizations including the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, American Council on Exercise, and Sierra Club, GirlTREK developed a world-class training program for Black women looking to serve as health advocates and coaches. The organization set the bold goal of increasing the life expectancy of Black women in the United States by 10 years. To that end, it currently engages more than 1.3 million Black women in the United States alone, with crews emerging across the Caribbean and West Africa.
The work that these system orchestrators do to bridge, connect, and knit together individuals and institutions across sectors and roles is indispensable to transforming societies for the better. We have seen firsthand the huge leverage that system orchestrators create for our partners and ecosystem actors—and the value of funding and partnering with them over the long term. That is why we have come together—the Skoll Foundation with a global lens, New Profit from the United States, Rohini Nilekani Philanthropies from India, and Instituto Beja from Brazil—to support system orchestrators in their efforts to fix inequitable systems around the world.
One of the misconceptions that we are working to address among funders is the notion that skillful and proximate system orchestrators are few and far between. In fact, it’s the funding that has been scarce; the pipeline of system orchestrators and the opportunities to support them is flourishing.
Our hope is that by coming together, we can accelerate our collective learning journey, build a shared understanding of what is working and what is needed, and provide resources for other funders who want to provide scaled-up and sustained funding and other support to system orchestrators.
We have observed the following three hallmarks of the most successful system orchestrators we’ve worked with to remake entire systems around education, health care, environmental sustainability, protecting democracy, and economic equity.
Focused on driving collective action and impact. | System orchestrators are the connective tissue that holds different parts of a system together. They identify, validate, and support solutions worth further exploration and scaling. They also understand the financial, policy, legal, and cultural barriers that are often overlooked or only addressed in isolation. They know that shifting mindsets around societal challenges and potential solutions is
SYSTEMS ORCHESTRATORS KNOW THAT LEADERSHIP DUTIES— AND THE POWER THAT GOES WITH THEM—SHOULD BE SHARED AMONG MULTIPLE PEOPLE, INCLUDING OTHER TYPES OF SOCIAL INNOVATORS, GOVERNMENT OFFICIALS, AND C-SUITE EXECUTIVES.
part of the work. The result is that people rely less on individual heroism and more on coalitions that can accelerate solutions at scale.
Bridge builders and enablers of other leaders in the system. | System orchestrators know that leadership duties—and the power that goes with them—should be shared among multiple people, including other types of social innovators, government officials, and C-suite executives. These leaders demonstrate high levels of credibility and are trusted as stewards to build bridges between communities and institutions of power to drive equity, inclusion, and change. Given the challenges of coming together in a polarized world, they are often content to lead through others and receive no public recognition.
Capable of deploying the full range of tools available to them. | They understand that there is no single solution to large-scale societal issues and that money alone won’t solve our problems. In addition to direct funding, they employ strategies such as convenings, relationship-building, and knowledge-sharing to influence policy, resource flows, decision-making pathways, and mindset and behavior shifts.
Now is the time to come together to drive deeper investment in system orchestration. In 2022, The Bridgespan Group surveyed approximately 100 system orchestrators—including many in our networks—who mobilize and galvanize myriad actors across a social-change movement, or field, to achieve a shared goal for equitable systems change. The survey found that these organizations believed they could achieve their ambitious systems-change goals within two decades with a median size of 10 staff and annual operating budget of $5 million. This is despite being seriously underfunded, with the median funding gap for each organization estimated at $2.5 million per year.
Closing this funding gap would help these organizations transform systems for the better. In addition to unlocking more resources, we believe we can cocreate opportunities for system orchestrators to learn from each other, and for other funders and partners to join the effort.
As funders, we believe it’s critical to listen to and learn from social innovators on the front lines; they know best how we can better support their work. This level of partnership is critical, because by any measure, system orchestration work is ambitious, highly complex, and requires the bridging of many gaps and sectors.
We launched the Centre for Exponential Change (C4EC) to mobilize around system orchestration. C4EC is a global action network that creates spaces and marshals resources for system orchestrators. These resources, including design expertise, paradigm grants, leadership development, and technology, are used to reimagine solutions and ecosystems that create resilient, collaborative responses to new challenges as they arise.
It’s hard to imagine a scenario in which the big, audacious goals of society can be achieved without system orchestrators. If philanthropy provides them the wraparound, long-term support they deserve, we may never have to.
DON GIPS is CEO of the Skoll Foundation.
TULAINE MONTGOMERY is CEO of New Profit.
ROHINI NILEKANI is chair of Rohini Nilekani Philanthropies.
CRISTIANE SULTANI is founder and president of the Board of Directors of Instituto Beja.
REIMAGINING COLLABORATIVE PHILANTHROPY
Collaborative funding models must reach beyond initial funding to build long-term strategies for sustainability, growth, and impact.
BY DOUG GALEN
Collaborative philanthropy has surged in the past decade, moving billions of dollars to high-impact ventures. It’s time to dream bigger and reimagine what’s possible. By improving how we unite funders, we can make faster, bolder decisions, raise more resources, and share knowledge—while easing the burden on ventures. While we’ve seen incredible progress, there’s room to refine and strengthen this approach for the long haul. Here’s what we’ve learned and where we believe collaborative philanthropy can go next. Rippleworks has participated in collaborative philanthropy across the spectrum of formal platforms and conveners to informal networks and information sharing. We’ve learned five lessons from this work:
Collaboration pushes funders outside their boxes. | By participating in platforms like The Audacious Project, we have stretched to fund organizations that we may not have otherwise. As part of the 2020 Audacious Project, we were introduced to the Humanitarian OpenStreetMap Team (HOT). Before HOT walked into the room, mapping was not the type of social innovation that we would have gravitated toward. HOT shared how the billion unmapped people are unseen. It is impossible to effectively dispatch first responders, plan a vaccination campaign, or trace the spread of diseases to the unmapped. By 2020, HOT had already mapped 100 million, and with the goal to reach 1 billion people, they required a large injection of funding. We realized then that if we cared about improving the human condition, we had to start with ensuring they were seen. The Audacious community funded HOT to map 1 billion people living in poverty and at high risk of disaster. Since receiving Audacious funding, HOT has mapped 707 million people in 24 countries and is on track to achieve its goal of 1 billion by 2025. HOT maps have been used to enable 95 percent vaccination rates for measles in the Democratic Republic of the Congo, helped reach 80 percent of homes in parts of Mozambique with malarial spray teams, and have been a critical threshold for preventing the spread of the disease. We wouldn’t have been informed or inspired to fund HOT without collaborative philanthropy.
Proactively sharing diligence reduces the burden on funders and ventures. | Rippleworks has invested in our own staff to find and conduct diligence on each venture we fund. We’ve discovered that by proactively working with other like-minded funders, we can support each other to expedite decision-making and reduce repeatedly asking ventures for the same information. One example of this is a group that we’ve started with other funders who all care about funding livelihood interventions. When Rippleworks conducted due diligence on a small agriculture venture working in West Africa, we identified an opportunity for Livelihood Impact Fund to leverage our diligence to also fund this venture. Leveraging trusted diligence is of value for funders who choose to keep support teams small. By sharing our diligence with like-minded funders along the way, we were
able to crowd in a match for our funding for this venture and multiple others in the past year. Shared diligence stacks funding at critical growth points or creates a continuum of funding in a venture-friendly way.
We must support social ventures beyond grantmaking. | A common theme we hear from ventures is that there is deep value in “beyond funding” support: “It’s not just capital—you’re invested in us.” Rippleworks aims to support ventures with short-term, high-impact projects, where we pair social ventures with industry-leading executives to tackle top operational challenges. We applaud and encourage other funders to go beyond just the grant and think about what other challenges and speed bumps that venture might encounter along their scale journey. For proximate leaders, who have historically been under-resourced and under-networked, we need to be particularly intentional about layering in nonfinancial resources that are tailored to the needs of each venture.
We can build trust with others without a specific agenda. | Without an agenda, collaboration is easier. In the informal group of other livelihoods funders, we found that each of us was curious to discuss the merits of different poverty graduation approaches. To that end, we hosted a povertygraduation learning call where we brought in experts on the topic and committed to collectively analyze our existing portfolios within a consistent framework in the hopes that each of us could make more informed decisions about ventures we support in the future.
continuum, the most impactful social innovations will not be able to scale. Despite these incredible successes, there are limits of this approach— limitations and opportunities that are true for philanthropy broadly. When we, as funders, fail to consider and support organizations along the full continuum of their scaling journey, funding gaps become insurmountable barriers to growth. Many organizations, after receiving large funding injections, are hitting a fiscal cliff—an abrupt halt in growth as they struggle to find a sustainable path forward once the initial support dries up. Since receiving funding in 2020 through The Audacious Project, HOT grew from mapping 100 million people to 707 million people and will reach its goal of mapping 1 billion people. It has consistently hit all of its targets over the last four years; that said, they’re finding that as they come to the end of their funding term, other sources of philanthropy are drying up despite their proven impact. Without collaborative philanthropy having a clear strategy for long-term sustainability, even the most impactful ventures can stall.
Our experience both directly in funding and supporting social ventures and with some of these collaborative platforms has illuminated some of the pathways forward to address these limitations and define what the next iteration of collaborative philanthropy looks like. There are some deeply practical things we can all do, starting today, including:
• Identify a plan upfront to bridge the gap between philanthropy and potential government or market mechanisms for sustainable funding.
• Reconsider funding timelines to align with each venture’s unique path to scale, and be realistic about the time it takes to work with government or establish alternative revenue streams.
We need the multiplier effect to scale impact. | Whether through collaborating to provide big-bet funding through platforms like The Audacious Project or coordinating follow-on funding with other funders, we have seen funding successfully multiplied and moved to impactful ventures around the world. Audacious alone has moved billions of dollars since its inception. Other collaborative platforms, including Blue Meridian, Co-Impact, and Forests, People, Climate (FPC), have similarly enabled large checks to be written for social ventures. Without funding at this volume and on a
• Coordinate with other, larger funders on behalf of the venture to help build the bridge to future resources instead of leaving the onus on the ventures.
• Provide expertise and other nonfinancial support mechanisms to make sure ventures are supported to build sustainable operating models for themselves, with sustainability being defined on their terms—not the funders’.
• Center the venture’s experience in everything we do, starting with making diligence processes less burdensome or duplicative.
• Continue what is already working: inspiring each other to give more, reduce time spent for ventures and funders by leveraging each other’s diligence, and accelerating funders’ wisdom by sharing lessons learned with each other.
Collaborative philanthropy has already unlocked incredible potential for ventures like HOT, but it’s time to take it further. To ensure lasting impact, we need to go beyond just initial funding and build long-term strategies that foster resilience and growth. By working together, we can reshape what it means to support social ventures—making sure they’re not just surviving but thriving for the future. The next evolution of collaborative philanthropy can truly help these organizations reach their full potential.
DOUG GALEN is the CEO of Rippleworks.
COMMUNITY MEMBERS IN INDIA DISCUSS THEIR PLAN FOR LAND REHABILITATION USING METHODS FROM THE FOUNDATION FOR ECOLOGICAL SECURITY.
ENGAGING GOVERNMENT IN COLLECTIVE ACTION
Working with governments to cocreate programs and funding strategies can unlock resources far beyond what any single organization can do on its own.
BY NAN CHEN & ARCHANA SAHGAL
Joining forces with government can turn small-scale social efforts into large-scale innovations that benefit historically under-resourced and underserved communities. The most pressing challenges of our time—from global health crises to social, economic, and racial inequity—cannot be solved by any single sector. Delivering solutions at speed and scale requires a multisector coalition—and government plays a central role given its mandate, infrastructure, and unparalleled resources.
As nonprofit leaders who have partnered closely with governments— Hyphen in the United States and Last Mile Health in four African countries and globally—we have seen firsthand how engaging with government can shift resource flows and decision-making pathways to accelerate and magnify lasting systems change. While we work in very different spaces, we’ve come to the same realization that everyone has a role to play, whether they are community leaders with lived experience and knowledge of the problems, or government, civil society, business, or philanthropic leaders.
Hyphen ensures that resources from historic federal policies like the American Rescue Plan accelerate systems change and improve the material conditions of families with low incomes, communities of color, and other underserved populations. Hyphen engages philanthropic and private-sector leadership and resources to leverage and drive federal dollars to where they are critically needed and can have long-term impact.
Last Mile Health works to save lives in the world’s most remote communities by professionalizing community health workers and embedding them in national health systems. Last Mile Health partners directly with government in countries like Liberia and also cofounded Africa Frontline First, a global partnership to make financing more available and effective for countries, enabling national community health worker programs to deliver at scale.
and drive big, lasting change. We cultivate, build, and activate connections to form coalitions. We translate between public- and private-sector actors to help them uncover and align on shared interests and goals. We steward relationships so that government leaders, civil society actors, and private-sector partners can work together in ways they otherwise could not. We navigate complex decision-making structures, leadership transitions, changing priorities, electoral cycles, and other disruptive forces to maximize continuity for long-term initiatives. And in the case of Last Mile Health, we even embed ourselves in government teams.
Is partnering with government easy? No. Is it worthwhile? Absolutely. Successful joint public-private efforts can produce inspiring results.
At Last Mile Health, our partnership with the Liberian government resulted in the country’s first national community health worker program, which now reaches every rural and remote community in the nation. Community health workers now diagnose and treat 50 percent of malaria cases in children under five, and in places like Grand Bassa County, they are the primary caregivers for sick children. This progress required years of building evidence and relationships, seizing the right opportunity (postEbola rebuilding), mobilizing multiple funding institutions and implementing partners, and aligning various government priorities.
Success in Liberia has led to broader partnerships. Through Africa Frontline First, we help 17 governments in Africa maximize financing for community health. That includes developing policies, plans, and alignment to ensure every dollar invested leads to more patients getting the care they
Unlocking the vast potential of government partnerships requires significant effort and fortitude. While our organizations have been fortunate to work with government leaders with a shared vision for the change we want to see in the world, collaborating with government also requires intense levels of coordination and relationship-building with all partners.
This is where the work of our organizations comes in. We act as system orchestrators who align the efforts of government, nonprofits, philanthropy, business, and communities to identify points of leverage
deserve. Cofounded by the Financing Alliance for Health and the Community Health Impact Coalition, Africa Frontline First puts countries in the driver’s seat of their community health plans, backed by financing from partners like the Skoll Foundation, Johnson & Johnson Foundation, and The Global Fund to Fight AIDS, Tuberculosis and Malaria, coupled with technical expertise from peer organizations including Integrate Health, Living Goods, and Muso.
At Hyphen, the multisector public-private partnerships we have developed have driven nearly $1 billion in federal funding into communities
DR. RAJ PANJABI OF LAST MILE HEALTH EXAMINES A PATIENT IN LIBERIA VIA ITS COMMUNITY HEALTH WORKER PROGRAM.
in need. The Initiative for Inclusive Entrepreneurship (IIE)—an 18-month national pilot that Hyphen incubated in collaboration with the US Department of Treasury and small-business organizations—leverages Treasury’s State Small Business Credit Initiative (SSBCI) to generate more than $215 million in capital for small businesses owned by socially or economically disadvantaged entrepreneurs. The Community Violence Intervention Collaborative—another 18-month pilot that Hyphen incubated with leadership from community violence intervention (CVI) organizations and the White House Domestic Policy Council and Office of Intergovernmental Affairs—laid the groundwork for the formation of the Coalition to Advance Public Safety and the allocation of $100 million in grants from the US Department of Justice and more than $761 million in public commitments for CVI programs nationwide.
While Hyphen and Last Mile Health work on different issue areas in different places, we have distilled some key lessons for driving government resources into intended communities:
Bridging and translating are critical work. | When Hyphen launches a new public-private collaboration, we serve as the bridge between different sectors, helping government, philanthropic, and business leaders understand how the other sectors work, navigate limitations, align interests, and develop shared goals. It’s also essential to help government and donors grasp the challenges, lived experience, and wisdom of impacted communities. Rather than advocating on behalf of these communities, both Last Mile Health and Hyphen provide community leaders a seat at the table, whether that looks like community health workers serving on high-level councils or grassroots CVI leaders engaging directly with federal officials. Our organizations also help field leaders navigate the complex protocols, procedures, and expectations of government, philanthropic, and privatesector partners. This bridging and translating role is crucial to our success.
Timing matters. | We must take advantage of windows of opportunity when they open. We must also expect occasional failures, whether they are the
result of external circumstances or a lack of stakeholder alignment. At Last Mile Health, we talk a lot about timing: When we fail to convince a government partner to support community health programs at the level we think is necessary, we remind ourselves, “It’s not the idea that failed. It’s just the wrong time. And we have to be ready when the window opens again.” In Hyphen’s experience, this is also true for our multisector partnerships.
Connect vision to action. | When it comes to moving from disparate visions to shared action, partnerships can drag under the weight of complex issues. At Last Mile Health, we try to listen for the “ next right move.” For example, at a recent global health initiative meeting, we challenged the group to show concrete action within 90 days and provided several suggestions. Meanwhile, Hyphen’s approach is to keep the focus on leveraging federal resources to benefit under-resourced communities and engaging partners across sectors to make their unique contributions to achieve that shared goal. At Hyphen, we always say that a vision without a plan is just a hallucination, and the stakes are too high to not be intentional about this work. This action orientation pushes progress and builds momentum for bigger change.
A systematic yet flexible approach is crucial. | Part of our work is methodically and continually checking in with all parties and banding together to tackle challenges. This often invisible work may mean raising additional capital or facilitating difficult conversations between partners. Effective governance requires effective policy implementation. To realize the full potential of new laws, civil society will have to flex new muscles, including coinvesting in policy implementation alongside the federal government. This once-in-a-generation opportunity to advance climate, workforce, and equity goals while ensuring that funds benefit underserved communities and achieve durable structural change will slip away without speedy and substantial philanthropic support.
Think long-term. | Shifting policies, securing large-scale funding, and ensuring service delivery and access do not happen overnight. Measuring success doesn’t either. We must employ innovative approaches to track the directional progress of change and determine if our solutions are still having impact over time, despite political, economic, and social uncertainties. For example, philanthropic grants are often awarded on an annual rather than a multiyear basis. But the federal SSBCI program’s time horizon is at least 10 years, and the associated funds will likely circulate through the US financial system for two decades.
We have seen firsthand the important role that government plays in driving deep systemic change. When funders support efforts to bring together public and private entities and individuals to achieve shared goals, their investment can be multiplied a thousand times and benefit real people in real communities around the world.
NAN CHEN is coexecutive director of Africa Frontline First, a partnership cofounded by Last Mile Health.
ARCHANA SAHGAL is founder and president of Hyphen.
A COMMUNITY HEALTH WORKER EXPLAINS A MEDICATION TO A PATIENT IN RURAL LIBERIA.
A MISSION-ALIGNED INVESTING APPROACH
Private-sector capital must be brought to the table in a more deliberate way to catalyze social innovation.
BY MARLA BLOW & MICHAELA EDWARDS
Just as the world’s challenges are interconnected, so too are effective solutions. Adding foundations’ endowments to the impact equation holds potential for accelerating solutions to some of the world’s largest challenges.
What if foundations aligned impact and investment strategies intentionally and strategically to fuel change across multiple dimensions?
Foundations can operate across a spectrum of capital opportunities from general-operating support grants at one end to market-return endowment investments on the other—with a variety of options, such as concessionary and returnable capital constructs, in between.
The longstanding partnership between the Skoll Foundation and the B Corp Capricorn Investment Group (CIG) shows us how this approach has created outsized impact. In 2020, Skoll and CIG developed impact-investing portfolios that could drive social change alongside commercial opportunities. Together, we shifted the foundation’s endowment to a net-zero status by changing our holdings to drive innovation and returns and by investing in nature-based carbon-offset projects for the residual emissions.
Our work shows that when a foundation, in collaboration with an experienced and like-minded partner, invests its endowment in alignment with its core mission, it is possible to compound the impact of its grantmaking and accelerate progress toward transformational social change without compromising returns.
Both mission-related investments (MRIs) and program-related investments (PRIs) are tools we use to generate positive societal impact while also yielding financial return. Through MRIs, we invest in opportunities that have positive social impact while contributing to the foundation’s long-term financial stability and growth.
PRIs have been part of the foundation’s portfolio since the first class of Skoll Awards in 2005. Over the past four years, we have collectively deployed $32 million in first-time and undercapitalized fund managers in the United States and abroad through our PRI and MRI programs. We have allocated capital across the spectrum and vehicles to help organizations grow and expand their impact.
For example, the nonprofit Water.org was created to provide potable water and sanitation services to millions of people around the world. One of the many challenges facing Water.org was the lack of capital it needed to build the structures and systems that would give families affordable access to clean water and healthy sanitation solutions. In response, Water. org focused on supporting microfinance approaches to ensure low-income communities can make the capital investment needed to have access to water and sanitation.
The Skoll Foundation first funded Water.org in 2009 by providing $765,000 as a general operating grant via the Skoll Award for Social Entrepreneurship (now the Skoll Award for Social Innovation). This grant contributed to the organization’s efforts to prove the impact and financial viability of making microloans to families to fund access to clean water and sanitation solutions.
Too often, communities have funds to pay for water, but not enough for an upfront investment in the infrastructure. A loan and payment model that first allows repayment of the loan and then continues paying for the infrastructure maintenance enables long-term sustainable water access. Once Water.org incubated a fund (WaterEquity) to scale access to these kinds of loans by investing in the lenders, the Skoll Foundation provided first-loss guarantee capital via a grant and two PRIs of debt capital to seed a series of water credit investment funds. These funds demonstrated the opportunity to scale access to critical water and sanitation solutions and unlocked institutional capital from the Development Finance Corporation (DFC), Bank of America, and others.
With this partnership in place, the Skoll Foundation made a $10 million mission-aligned investment (MAI) as an anchor in the market returngenerating Water Access Fund through our standard endowment investment process. This positioned Water.org to raise a total of $150 million for this fund and deploy it to create access to water infrastructure. Today, Water. org is a multibillion-dollar entity that has provided water access to more than 65 million people through microfinance tools and blended finance structures comprised of philanthropic capital, debt, and equity.
Experiences like this bolstered the Skoll Foundation’s and Capricorn’s confidence in this full-spectrum approach to driving social change and fueled our work together to move beyond climate-focused opportunities where the bulk of our impact investing had been directed prior to 2020.
In 2021, we expanded our mission-aligned investing by committing to use endowment dollars to advance both economic inclusion and justice and equity. This plan aligns the Foundation’s investment approach with our focus on equity as a philanthropic priority. As an initial step, the Foundation established MAIs in two funds aimed at closing the racial wealth gap and spurring economic mobility in underserved communities: Apis & Heritage (A&H) Capital Partners’ Legacy Fund I, designed to increase business equity ownership for workers, and Zeal Capital Partners’ Fund I, designed to narrow wealth and skills gaps through tech-enabled solutions.
A&H’s Legacy Fund invests in closely held businesses with large workforces of color and transitions them into 100 percent employee-owned enterprises with its employee-led buyout (ELBO) model. The fund is pursuing the option to purchase companies from retiring founders in order to convert at least 500 workers over the next five years into employee/owners. In America today, 60 percent of Black and 65 percent of Latinx workers have $0 in retirement assets, making workers vulnerable to financial insecurity as they age and without resources to pass on to the next generation. A&H expects an average worker who benefits from an A&H-assisted buyout to accrue retirement savings of $70,000 to $120,000 each, which can be life-changing for groups who face persistent barriers to accumulating and passing on assets to future generations.
Fund I is focused on investing in financial technology and future of work companies in the United States with tech-enabled solutions that address the wealth and skills gaps. The fund plans to invest in up to two dozen businesses that proactively target diverse management teams reimagining the building blocks of wealth, from education to employment and financial health. Zeal Fund I pioneered the concept of inclusive investing, which allows the firm to cast a wide yet targeted net when sourcing companies that position them to reap outsized returns.
The Skoll Foundation’s expansion of our mission-aligned investing has brought approximately 70 percent of our endowment in alignment with our
mission. Our long experience of working in partnership with mission-driven investment advisory group, Capricorn has taught us a few lessons.
Reconsider and reframe “risk.” | One of the arguments against impactdriven investments is that they are inherently riskier than more traditional investment models, which are generally perceived as being better at maximizing returns while minimizing risk. We have learned that this is a mischaracterization. With the right level of analysis, diligence, and creativity, impact-driven investments can achieve both commercial and philanthropic aims. Market-beating returns are often possible when we reframe opportunities beyond initial and often misleading risk profiles. Moreover, many standard methods of evaluating investment opportunities actually ignore diverse types of risk, including environmental and economic.
Make the argument for greater impact. | If philanthropies and donors want to see their dollars do good, then grantmaking dollars can go even further with mission-aligned investing strategies. Making the case starts with asking the question: “After the IRS-mandated 5 percent of an endowment is given in grants, would you leave the remaining 95 percent on the impact table or would you leverage it to create outsized impact?” How you go about leveraging endowments to maximize impact is the next question.
Work with interdisciplinary advisors. | Foundations should set high standards for sourcing and evaluating impact-aligned investments, ensuring their entire portfolio contributes to both financial and impact goals. To best source and evaluate impact-aligned investments, it’s essential to assess current capabilities in areas like specialization, execution, and deal access. If there
are gaps in capacity or expertise, foundations should consider partnering with impact-aligned investment managers or advisors, who have the experience, skills, and infrastructure to build diverse investment pipelines and evaluate investments for both financial performance and impact potential.
For foundations and other philanthropic entities just beginning this journey, you can find these partners through existing networks and groups designed just for impact investors like Confluence Philanthropy, the Global Impact Investing Network, and the Net Zero Asset Managers Initiative.
Codify an MAI approach in your organization’s by-laws. | By establishing MAI as the norm for an organization with an endowment, foundations can establish best practices, including learning and innovation, then amass the expertise needed to do this type of investing at scale and further amplify the impact of their grant dollars. This approach helps solidify, sustain, and evolve an MAI practice over time, leadership transitions, or generational transfers of assets. The Skoll Foundation endowment has impact embedded within its Investment Policy Statement.
Mission-aligned investing is not new, but despite being highly impactful, is still not as much the norm as it should and could be. By shining a light on what has worked well, we hope that many more asset managers will consider joining this movement to more closely align their philanthropic missions and strategies with their investment approaches.
MARLA BLOW is the president and COO of Skoll Foundation.
MICHAELA EDWARDS is a partner and investment committee member at the Capricorn Investment Group.
CHANGING THE NARRATIVE ABOUT NARRATIVE CHANGE
Storytelling provides the tools for engagement, education, and ultimately, movement building and systems transformation.
BY SOHINI BHATTACHARYA & CRYSTAL ECHO HAWK
We are all shaped by stories. But we are not all aware of how much we are influenced by dominant narratives—or who holds the privilege of producing and disseminating them.
Many believe that storytelling lies exclusively within the province of the entertainment sector. But the truth is that narratives are everywhere and they influence how we see the world, the issues that matter to us, and even how we view ourselves, as we work to reinforce or change existing narratives.
In our respective roles at Breakthrough Trust and IllumiNative, we focus on replacing the narratives that have rendered our causes and people invisible and on deploying storytelling and narrative change as tools for engagement, education, and ultimately, movement building and systems transformation.
For the past 25 years, Breakthrough has worked to shift social norms so that discrimination and violence against women and girls are viewed as unacceptable. It engages directly with young people, their families, and their teachers—both in schools and communities— all with the goal of sensitizing the important people around them to gender-based violence. The goal is to equip future generations of young adults to build a better world. Breakthrough also creates and pushes for gender-equitable content in mainstream media and uses social and behavior change communication (SBCC), pop culture, and storytelling to shift culture, ideas, and thinking.
IllumiNative is a Native woman-led racial and social justice organization dedicated to building power and advancing equity, justice, and self-determination for Native peoples by increasing the visibility of—and challenging the narrative about—Native peoples. Historically, Indigenous people in the United States have suffered horrific violence and harm at the hands of society and government. We’ve seen our cultures and experiences erased. IllumiNative was founded to increase representation on multiple fronts: advocacy and political representation, popular culture and entertainment, research on Native issues, and storytelling, particularly for the young.
including erasure and disempowerment, faced by most people who have suffered grievous harm and injustice and been rendered largely invisible in historical narratives. Our partnership with the Skoll Foundation enabled both to successfully move beyond developing and sharing stories and media narratives to reach another level where we can invest in people and communities to build their capacity to tell their own stories. In this way, they gain the agency, power, and presence to positively influence harmful cultural stereotypes, and eventually, policies, laws, and systems.
Despite their progress, they still have several critical hurdles to clear, and they are especially salient for funders to hear, given the growing interest in funding narrative change strategies in the philanthropic sector (and the risk that skepticism about the efficacy of narrative change will relegate it to a fleeting trend).
Narrative change strategies must work in tandem with other strategies. The organizations use a multipronged approach to narrative change. Breakthrough produces content to dismantle toxic norms around gender and gender-based violence and engages in ongoing dialogue with parents, teachers, and young people. The content is largely driven by its work with young people, which demonstrates how they interact with media, what they consume, and how it influences them and facilitates youth-led progressive digital content that amplifies stories of change in their own lives. In this way, Breakthrough works to change systems from the inside out. IllumiNative uses its research to inform its narrative, cultural, and
Both organizations work to provide a map for others to build narrative power and capacity among underrepresented groups and on issues of vital importance to those communities. Although they work in very different cultural and societal contexts—Breakthrough primarily in India, IllumiNative in the United States—the organizations combat the same challenges,
organizing strategies that advance Native representation. It does this via campaigns that build the advocacy and movement-building skills of Native Americans on a range of issues important to the community. In other words, narrative strategies are a powerful tool for change—but this tool cannot drive change on its own. Our organizations are intentional about building bridges to other parts of the systems we seek to transform in hopes that others will be inspired to act. This intentional bridge-building makes us effective partners and advisors to other actors seeking to change the
A GIRLS’ SCHOOL IN INDIA IS WORKING TO SHIFT GENDER NORMS IN PARTNERSHIP WITH BREAKTHROUGH.
same ecosystems. Breakthrough, for example, works closely with both the government school system and mainstream content creators in India, and IllumiNative fills the same role with actors in the entertainment industry.
We must reconceptualize what success and impact look like for narrative change. There are too many harmful narratives crowding the marketplace. In fact, there are too many narratives, period, shared through a dizzying array of platforms, channels, and media outlets. This can make it challenging for new narratives to take hold. But with the right mix of bridge-building to other strategies and patience with respect to storytelling, dissemination, and grassroots activism and engagement, we know that positive change is possible, and narrative strategies are a critical reason why.
In the United States, the Standing Rock Sioux Tribe’s fight against the Dakota Access Pipeline galvanized an ongoing movement in Native American communities around water rights. While the pipeline was eventually built, the narrative strategy employed inspired millions of Natives and non-Natives to become activists for Native American rights across a spectrum of issues, including accurately documenting the abuse suffered by Indigenous children who were involuntarily placed in boarding schools. We also need different measurement and evaluation tools beyond the crude metrics often used to quantify storytelling efforts, such as media impressions, website traffic numbers, and open and click-through rates on emails and newsletters. While these metrics have some validity in the immediate term, they do not reveal if the story is being effectively shared, or if it has succeeded in changing something—be it people’s attitudes or mindsets about a particular issue, or the defeat of a specific legislative
action under debate. Funders should support the development of new theories and instruments for measuring narrative change so we can learn what’s working and what’s not.
Funders should invest in infrastructure to support more narrative change efforts. Narrative change and storytelling strategies are fundamentally about connection. People feel connected to each other when they see themselves represented. And that feeling encourages them to raise their voices and join movements. This type of connection, however, requires support and structure. People need to be trained in understanding narrative and culture change, they need resources to develop and share their own stories, and they need to infuse narratives into on-the-ground organizing and community engagement.
These strategies are most powerful when they are authentic, developed and disseminated by the people at the heart of the stories. Much of what is produced in media and entertainment is driven primarily by profit concerns. The result is that too many groups of people have been shut out of and even harmed by traditional platforms.
Recently, IllumiNative announced the launch of IllumiNative Entertainment, a wholly owned subsidiary that will give more Native Americans the opportunity to shape stories in TV and film, both in front of and behind the camera. And Breakthrough launched a talk show developed, produced, and directed with creators from the entertainment industry to push conversations on gender-positive stories and what it takes to create them. The idea is to build a cohort of upcoming influencers and storytellers and engage with them regularly.
Narrative change work comes with its own set of challenges. Given the vast scale of content creation and storytelling, the industry dynamics, and the many people involved, our vision of making a dent in this universe is a monumental one. And the ideas around implementing this work are new and still evolving. We need more research on narrative shifts and how to flip the culture to make room for alternative narratives. We also need funders to embrace a long-term perspective when it comes to supporting innovative, collaborative approaches.
Narrative strategy work is a marathon, not a sprint. It requires sustained investment in building diverse networks of storytellers, supporting the development of new media platforms, and fostering partnerships across sectors. By providing flexible long-term funding and enabling partners to take risks, funders can create transformational change and challenge harmful stereotypes.
NARRATIVE CHANGE AND STORYTELLING ARE FUNDAMENTALLY ABOUT CONNECTION. PEOPLE FEEL CONNECTED TO EACH OTHER WHEN THEY SEE THEMSELVES REPRESENTED, AND THEY ARE ENCOURAGED TO JOIN MOVEMENTS.
SOHINI BHATTACHARYA is CEO at Breakthrough Trust.
CRYSTAL ECHO HAWK is founder and CEO of IllumiNative.
THE ABOVE STILL IS FROM THE ILLUMINATIVE SHORT FILM, SETTING THE TABLE , DIRECTED BY KYLE BELL (THLOPTHLOCCO TRIBAL TOWN).
NEW EVALUATION APPROACHES THAT FUEL COLLECTIVE ACTION
Learning and evaluation can best serve both funders and social innovators by centering equity, trust, adaptive learning, and grantee approaches.
BY ANNA ZIMMERMANN JIN & SHIVANI GARG PATEL
Companies are largely evaluated by their profits and stock price, and it is encouraging to see a growing number hold themselves accountable for their impact on workers, community, and the planet. In democracies, governments are assessed by voters. In philanthropy, there is no universal method to measure our impact. In fact, some of the current approaches may actually hinder collective action.
Safeena Husain, founder of Educate Girls, a Skoll Awardee, made these hindrances clear when reviewing the Skoll Foundation’s strategy and monitoring, evaluation, and learning (MEL) process in 2019: “Too often, funders are creating a race between grantees [to show attribution], when they should be encouraging us to create a relay race where we work together [to show contribution].”
The Skoll Foundation took Safeena’s challenge seriously as we evolved our strategy and our MEL approach to recognize the importance of collective action in driving durable change. Our portfolio, team, and peers in the practice of the Equitable Evaluation FrameworkTM push us to reflect on the dominant norms that shape philanthropic MEL practices today. MEL strategies, when designed around principles of collaboration, equity, adaptation, and a systems-change orientation, can help different entities working on a common cause align on what they want to learn and do together.
The foundation’s strategy concentrates financial and nonfinancial resources (e.g., networks, convenings, storytelling) on social innovators within a set of priority issue areas like pandemics and health systems strengthening, effective governance, climate action, and justice and equity. Our goal is to accelerate system-wide impact by supporting collaboration and collective action. Looking beyond individual grants and activities helps us understand signals of progress at the portfolio and foundation strategy levels. Centering how social innovators track their progress and goals, we ask ourselves how we performed in support of those goals. Embracing the contributions of many in collective action is a critical component of our evaluation practice.
This evolution in strategy and MEL approach required us to shift our mindsets and unlearn old habits. Below are three meaningful lessons we have learned through this process:
Practice a learning approach that goes beyond individual grants. | Placing less emphasis on evaluating the impact of individual organizations and more on understanding how constellations, or groups, of social innovators are working together holds lessons for what accelerates—and slows— collective action for systemic change. For example, a constellation of partners in our health systems strengthening portfolio have contributed to a movement to scale and sustain country-led community health across
low- and middle-income countries, ensuring community health workers (CHWs) are paid, trained, supervised, and equipped. Partners across civil society, government, and philanthropy united to generate supportive evidence, contribute to pro-CHW policies in 40 countries and the World Health Organization’s global guidance on CHWs, and secure international, national, and private capital commitments for community health.
Thinking of constellations as a unit of analysis prompts ecosystem-level discussions with our staff and board, and inquiry on the roles partners play relative to one another, how connected they are, and what they need to accelerate progress.
Part of our evolved strategic approach focuses on supporting system orchestrators—people and organizations who knit together important actors, provide backbone infrastructure, and mobilize collective change efforts to transform entire systems. In the CHW example, we see system orchestrators crucially bridging between community health workers, ministries of health, institutional philanthropy, and nonprofits. Supporting system orchestrators is one of the ways we can accelerate progress on the most persistent societal challenges. Doing so requires funders to take a flexible and relational approach to understanding and measuring system orchestrators’ progress.
Center how social innovators track and assess their progress. | We are more open to a broader range of qualitative and quantitative methods and findings and different ways of documenting change, such as via storytelling. In understanding the range of learning approaches that exist within a portfolio of social innovators, and shaping our own, we look to the quality of systems thinking and the quality and inclusivity of the learning process as components of rigor.
Social innovators we fund share the long-term (potentially decades-long or generational) desired transformation they are working toward, the shorterterm systems-level outcomes they intend to achieve (e.g., changes in behaviors, relationships, policies, or attitudes), and the signals of progress (such as activities or outputs) they track along the way. We embed their reflections on their progress and on collective systems-level advancements in how we assess our collective progress. On an ongoing basis, we incorporate social innovator metrics as we capture their journeys to transformation within our priority issue areas.
For example, within our climate strategy, our constellation of social innovators’ shared desired outcome is to reduce tropical deforestation in the Amazon, Indonesia, and Congo Basin by supporting Indigenous peoples, local communities, and Afro-descendant people (IPLCAD) as guardians of tropical forests with secure land-tenure rights. One social innovator, Rights and Resources Initiative, aims to double the legally recognized areas owned by or designated to IPLCAD in focus countries by 2030. To that end, the initiative tracks how the coalition contributes to new laws and policies, the mobilization of public and private donor funds in support of community land rights, the strength of coordination between IPLCAD organizations, and the conditions that support and sustain rights-based reforms.
Another social innovator, the Global Alliance of Territorial Communities, tracks progress toward recognition of IPLCAD as key actors in climate change and biodiversity global arenas (e.g., United Nations Climate Change Conference of the Parties) and inclusion of their voices in media and key decision-making, among other goals.
We also acknowledge our part in contributing to a broader pattern of funding and MEL practices that could better center the perspectives,
goals, and communities of the organizations we support. We now seek annual feedback from our portfolio on how well we are supporting their efforts. We also conduct the Center for Effective Philanthropy’s Grantee Perception Report to learn from our portfolio where we could be better and where we should double down.
Lean into contribution versus attribution when understanding how systems shift. | Deploying a strategy grounded in systems-change work is a lot messier and less linear, so we found that traditional MEL methods—often focused on narrowly targeted strategies and direct service programs over short time horizons—were unsuitable. Evolving our MEL approach and infusing an emergent learning mindset feels like we are better aligned with how the work of social change actually happens (and the sometimes agonizingly slow pace at which it happens). Skoll’s approach to systems change is shaped by FSG’s The Water of Systems
Many foundations and nonprofit organizations have boards that are accustomed to seeing quantitative, attributable results tracked year over year. We worked with our board to move from more quantitative attribution measures to a combination of quantitative and qualitative measures focused on contribution at the system level. At times, it can be difficult to distill contribution-related information gathered from ongoing connection and colearning into clear, succinct data points that inform decision-making.
Evolving our MEL approach has required us to be more deeply immersed in the work alongside the social innovators we fund. Ultimately, we believe that rethinking longstanding practices in MEL will enable us and others in the field to be more effective partners and funders. We hope that creating space to align the design of our MEL approach with our organizational mission and values, embracing a systems mindset that values contributions to change, and centering a culture of learning in all we do will create more equitable systems change. We are excited to collaborate
Change. This framework highlights that shifts in system conditions are more likely to be sustained when working at three different levels: structural (explicit, such as shifting policies and resource flows), relational (semi-explicit, such as shifting connections and power dynamics between system actors), and transformative (implicit, such as shifting mental models).
We invest in social innovators driving progress at all three levels of change. Recognizing the nonlinear nature of systems-change efforts, we understand that social innovators need opportunities to adjust their impact goals as they reflect and act on headwinds and tailwinds within their systems. We seek to learn how their approaches have adjusted in these moments of essential adaptation and the role they are playing amid others who are contributing to collective change. Attitudes, practices, and measurement systems must be shifted to recognize, reward, and encourage effective collective action. So we have expanded our mindset to recognize the reality that there will be more contribution than attribution in systems-change work.
and learn with others who are similarly evolving how they measure and assess their contributions to social change.
As important as the collective action that is driving toward systemic change, is a proximate, immersive, and adaptive approach to measuring, evaluating, and learning what accelerates and impedes collective impact. The Journey to Transformation series highlights successful approaches to collective action and shines a light on examples that have led to social progress and transformation. From system orchestration, collaborative philanthropy, partnering with government, mission-aligned investing, and storytelling to measurement, evaluation, and learning—all are indispensable accelerants to social progress and the journey to transformation.
ANNA ZIMMERMANN JIN is director of evaluation and learning at Skoll Foundation.
SHIVANI GARG PATEL is chief strategy officer at Skoll Foundation.
In 1999, Jeff Skoll created the Skoll Foundation to build a sustainable world of peace and prosperity for all. The Skoll Foundation catalyzes transformational social change by investing in, connecting, and championing social entrepreneurs and other social innovators who together advance bold and equitable solutions to the world’s most pressing problems.
www.skoll.org