Strengthening Democracy Through Parks • Sustainability Is Out, Regeneration Is In
Governor Newsom’s Public-Private Innovation
SUMMER 2024
VOLUME 22, NUMBER 3
Strategic Philanthropy Has Failed.
What’s Next?
BY MARK KRAMER AND STEVE PHILLIPS
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of skill building and inspiration Sept. 17-18, 2024,
at Stanford University, or join us virtually.
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Strategies and Tactics for Today’s Agile Leaders
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Stanford Social Innovation Review / Summer 2024
1
inside
P U B L ISHE D B Y T HE S TA NFO RD C E N T E R O N P HIL A N T HR O P Y A ND C I V IL S O C IE T Y
SUMMER 2024 / VOLUME 22, NUMBER 3
28
Where Strategic
Philanthropy Went Wrong
BY MARK KRAMER & STEVE PHILLIPS
Dramatic advances in the scale and sophistication of strategic philanthropy
have not improved societal conditions at a national level. We propose empowerment
philanthropy as a new approach to fostering political and economic
self-determination.
38
Effective Government Demands Partnership
BY KATHLEEN KELLY JANUS
The problems we face in the world are too big for government
to solve alone. Public-private partnerships demonstrate
how government can collaborate with the private sector to
catalyze and scale innovation.
48
Revitalize Parks to Strengthen Democracy
BY GENEVA VEST, CARY SIMMONS & HOWARD FRUMKIN
The Trust for Public Land developed a framework to
build community power through the creation and stewardship
of green spaces. Our work demonstrates the power of parks
to enrich democracy.
58
How Regeneration Is Redefining Business
BY CHRISTOPHER MARQUIS
ON THE COVER
Illustration by Matt Chase
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Aiming for sustainability has not fundamentally altered the
environmentally destructive effects of business. Only by embracing
regeneration as a model can we meet the challenges posed by
today’s biggest global crises.
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Stanford Social Innovation Review / Summer 2024
DEPARTMENTS
4
5
6
EDITOR’S NOTE
Social Innovation Isn’t Just a Western
Phenomenon
SSIR ONLINE
Global Solutions / Trauma and Systems Change /
Migration Potential / Trust-based Philanthropy /
Rethinking Offsets
W H AT ’ S N E X T
Drone Sisters / Not Building From Scratch /
Disability Organizing / Real Estate for the Artists
P. 6
FIELD REPORT
11 No Disabled Child Left Behind
A lack of resources should not
prevent young people from serving
their communities.
BY YASMINE MAHDAVI
69 The Longer-Term Impact of
Fixed-Life Foundations
A foundation that eschews perpetuity can continue to sustain and scale
long after its doors close.
BY A N N A D E LA CR U Z & DAV I D L EH R
71 Who Knows
Agroforestry Best?
Sightsavers is working to change social attitudes
toward disabled children through communitycentered education in Malawi.
Current scientific approaches
to agricultural sustainability may
prove counterproductive to
environmental preservation.
BY MADALITSO WILLS KATETA
BY EVELYN R. NIMMO, ANDRÉ E. B. LACERDA,
13 Circular Construction
P. 7
VIEWPOINT
67 Volunteerism’s
Diversity Problem
A multinational team is upcycling old concrete and
brick for new buildings in the Czech Republic.
BY PAUL HOCKENOS
15 Learning Code for a Second
Chance at Life
Social enterprise Take2’s training and support
program provides a pathway to job security after
incarceration.
BY RINA DIANE CABALLAR
P. 13
CASE ST UDY
18 Promoting a Culture of Caring
in Education
For the past two decades, the Jed Foundation
has led the fight to address the mental health crisis
among American youth. Its story highlights the
importance of addressing the cultural causes of the
mental health crisis through systems change.
BY ALISON BADGETT
P. 69
LEANDRO BONFIM & JOEL BOTHELLO
73 A Cashless Economy
Is No Utopia
The future of money may be digital,
but we must not underestimate
the resilience and freedom
that cash offers.
BY S E E M A PR E M
RESEARCH
75 How Nudges Get Adopted /
Prisoner to Entrepreneur /
The Limits of Public-Private
Partnership / Skepticism
About UBI
BOOKS
79 Lessons on Effective
Connection
Charles Duhigg’s
Supercommunicators
REVIEW BY AYESHA ANNA NINAN
“A survey found that 50 percent of college students had anxiety and depression
that disrupted their academic or personal lives.”
— F R O M P R O M O T I N G A C U LT U R E O F C A R I N G I N E D U C AT I O N P. 1 8
81 Making Sense of Wicked
Problems
Thomas Hale’s Long Problems
R E VI E W BY A N D R E W J. H OF F M AN
83 Digital Bookshelf
LAST LOOK
84 Fish Food
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Stanford Social Innovation Review / Summer 2024
Editor’s Note
Social Innovation Isn’t Just a
Western Phenomenon
IN BRAZIL, where one-third of the world’s deforestation has occurred, the nonprof-
it CEDErva promotes traditional practices for tending to—and harvesting—the
land. “Conventional approaches to sustainable agriculture are no longer working,”
argue the coauthors of “Who Knows Agroforestry Best?” one of this issue’s Viewpoint columns. Instead, they advocate for a new model. From its headquarters in
the state of Paraná, CEDErva advances innovative solutions to conservation, raises
awareness of Indigenous knowledge systems, and seeks alternative compensation
for communities so that ancient practices can compete with more modern ones.
While CEDErva’s focus is decidedly local—
the acronym stands for the Center for the Development and Education of Traditional Erva-Mate
Systems, referencing the plant species native
to South America that’s often used in teas—its
model could be applied elsewhere. Consider Bolivia, Laos, Nicaragua, the Democratic Republic
of the Congo, and other countries rapidly losing
tree cover, according to the World Resources
Institute’s latest report. Might they, too, benefit
from adopting CEDErva’s approach?
It’s that question, and the answer it implies,
that explains why so much of our reporting
comes from around the world. Why we’ve set up
partnerships with international organizations to translate SSIR’s features into several other languages to reach a wider audience. And why we support and mentor
those organizations as they produce their own original work, highlighting social
progress in China, Japan, Korea, Mexico, the United Arab Emirates, and, yes, Brazil, that might not otherwise be seen, shared, and celebrated.
Elsewhere in just this print issue, you can enjoy: a profile of Take2, a social
enterprise in New Zealand offering job training during periods of incarceration
and other paths to job security as a form of rehabilitation; a new life for old brick
and other building materials, which are being turned into “green concrete” and
used in the development of sustainable architecture in the Czech Republic; and a
plant-based solution concerning the lack of access to safe and hygienic menstrual
products, a problem faced by an estimated 500 million people.
Online, at ssir.org, you’ll find much more, including a recent series that brought
together all of our international partners in an inspiring, collaborative effort. The
Global Pursuit of Equity, published over several weeks this spring and presented
in six languages, “looks at inequities within the context of seven specific regions or
countries, and the ways local innovators are working to balance the scales and foster greater inclusion across a range of issue areas,” according to the introduction
by Jenifer Morgan, our global editions editor, who coordinated the project.
In a meeting about our wide reach and distribution, Jenifer once shared that
social innovation isn’t just a Western phenomenon. It’s an obvious statement, but
one so powerful in its simplicity that I find myself invoking it often. It’s why I encourage you to read widely and to look for solutions and inspiration everywhere,
even in unlikely places. — N ICHOL A S JACK SON
004_EdNote_4_sum24_proofedDA.indd 4
EDITOR-IN-CHIEF AND PUBLISHER Nicholas Jackson
ACADEMIC EDITOR Johanna Mair
DEPUTY EDITOR, PRINT David V. Johnson
DEPUTY EDITOR, DIGITAL Bryan Maygers
EDITORS Aaron Bady, Marcie Bianco,
Barbara Wheeler-Bride
GLOBAL EDITIONS EDITOR Jenifer Morgan
ART DIRECTION David Armario Design
COPY EDITORS Elissa Rabellino, Annie Tucker
PROOFREADER Dominik Sklarzyk
PUBLISHING AND MARKETING MANAGERS
Brian Karo, Shayani Bose
MARKETING COORDINATOR Christie Fancher
ADVERTISING Adam Steinhorn, Involved Media
SPONSORSHIP Cynthia Lapporte, Oak Media
WEBSITE DESIGNERS Arsenal, Hop Studios
PRODUCTION COORDINATOR Yulia Strokova
SSIR ACADEMIC ADVISORY COUNCIL
Paola Perez-Aleman, McGill University; Josh Cohen,
Stanford University; Alnoor Ebrahim, Tufts University;
Marshall Ganz, Harvard University; Chip Heath,
Stanford University; Andrew Hoffman, University of
Michigan; Dean Karlan, Yale University; Anita McGahan,
University of Toronto; Lynn Meskell, Stanford University;
Len Ortolano, Stanford University; Francie Ostrower,
University of Texas; Anne Claire Pache, ESSEC
Business School; Woody Powell, Stanford University;
Rob Reich, Stanford University
S TA N F O R D C E N T E R O N P H I L A N T H R O P Y
AND CIVIL SOCIETY
FACULTY CODIRECTORS Patricia Bromley, Woody
Powell, Rob Reich, Robb Willer
EXECUTIVE DIRECTOR Priya Shanker
PACS TEAM Rebecca Abella, Lucy Bernholz, Jessica
Braham, Clarissa Chiu, Kathryn Davis, Kylie Fuller, Izzy
Gainsburg, Isaias Ghezae, Jeanine Holden, Anh Le,
Nithya Magal, Micah McElroy, Vera Michalchik, Lillian
Nguyen, Lisa Overbey, Chrystal Redekopp, Christian
Seelos, Ruth Selby, Cat Uong, Yi Zhao
S TA N F O R D C E N T E R O N P H I L A N T H R O P Y A N D
CIVIL SOCIETY ADVISORY BOARD
CHAIR Laura Arrillaga-Andreessen
MEMBERS Herbert A. Allen III, Laura Arnold, Ted Janus,
Kathy Kwan, Kim Meredith, Julia Milner, Jeff Raikes,
Elizabeth Danhakl Reed, Lauren Sánchez, David Siegel,
Darren Walker, Yilan Zhao
Stanford Social Innovation Review (ISSN 1542-7099) is
published quarterly by the Stanford Center on Philanthropy
and Civil Society, a program at Stanford University’s
School of Humanities and Sciences: 559 Nathan Abbott Way,
Stanford, CA 94305-6042. Phone: (650) 724-3309,
Fax: (650) 725-9316.
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Subscriber Services Stanford Social Innovation Review,
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Article proposals, advertising, and reprints go to ssir.org
Postmaster: Send address changes to Stanford Social
Innovation Review, Member Services, PO Box 426,
Congers, NY 10920-0306. Volume 22, Number 3, Summer
2024. Stanford Social Innovation Review and the Stanford
Center on Philanthropy and Civil Society are part of Stanford
University’s tax-exempt status as a Section 501(c)(3) “public
charity.” Confirming documentation is available upon request.
Stanford Social Innovation Review was established in 2003
by the Center for Social Innovation at the Stanford Graduate
School of Business. The founding publisher is Perla Ni.
The former academic editors are Stephen R. Barley,
James A. Phills Jr., Robert Scott, David Brady, and Chip Heath.
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Stanford Social Innovation Review / Summer 2024
5
SSIRonline
STANDOUT DIGITAL-ONLY CONTENT AT SSIR.ORG
MIGRATION POTENTIAL
A R T I C L E | Betting on Migration
GLOBAL SOLUTIONS
S E R I E S | The Global Pursuit of Equity
SSIR is proud to present our first-ever global series of articles created in collaboration
with our six local language partners—SSIR
China, SSIR en Español, SSIR Japan, SSIR
Korea, SSIR Brazil, and SSIR Arabia. The
stories, written in contributors’ native languages and then translated into all seven
partner languages, feature ways that local
innovators from around the world are addressing equity issues, from gender inequity in Mexico to social isolation in Korea to
the legacy of colonialism in Okinawa.
I L L U S T R AT I O N B Y R A F F I M A R H A B A , T H E D R E A M C R E AT I V E
TRAUMA AND SYSTEMS CHANGE
A R T I C L E | Healing Systems
Trauma is a near-universal part of the human experience and an invisible force contributing to the “stuckness” of virtually all
social systems—including child welfare,
criminal justice, education, health care,
housing, and climate. Yet the impact of trauma remains all but absent from discussions
about systems change. In one of the mostread and -discussed articles on SSIR.org
in the last year, Laura Calderon de la Barca,
Katherine Milligan, and John Kania unpack
how moving discussions about trauma
from the margins to the mainstream can
help the social sector discern new and effective approaches to systems change.
005_online_4_sum24_proofedDA.indd 5
for Impact
When the issue of migration makes headlines, it’s portrayed as a burden, threat,
or tragedy, and almost always politically
intractable. In reality, contributor Jason
Wendle argues, migration represents an
opportunity waiting to be unlocked by
thoughtful investment. Wendle responds
to a few common objections—for example, concerns about “brain drain”—and
then outlines how philanthropists, impact
investors, and other social innovators can
help this emerging field take flight.
TRUST-BASED PHILANTHROPY
A R T I C L E | In Numbers We Trust
The trust-based philanthropy movement
is a justified reaction to oppressive and unproductive reporting requirements, writes
Mulago Foundation director Kevin Starr.
Yet this reaction often morphs into a general hostility to numbers. If we’re serious
about creating a new generation of effective leaders who do not come from rich
countries, Starr argues, numbers are critical, because they are the closest thing we
have to a universal language. Moreover,
numbers help build trust by creating a
shared reality between doers and funders.
RETHINKING OFFSETS
A R T I C L E | Instead of Carbon Offsets,
We Need ‘Contributions’ to Forests
Low-quality carbon offsets have failed to
deliver meaningful emissions reductions,
according to a growing body of research
and a number of lawsuits against companies. This is a good thing to expose, write
researchers Libby Blanchard, William
Anderegg, and Barbara Haya, but it doesn’t
erase the need for private-sector funding
for forests. One way to channel forest finance away from bad offsets toward more
productive outcomes is to stop claiming
that forests offset fossil fuel emissions.
Companies could, instead, make “contributions” to global climate mitigation through
investments in forests. This change in terminology may seem small, but it represents
a fundamentally different approach with
different incentives.
BY THE NUMBERS
1.3 billion
The number of people,
roughly 16 percent
of the global population, who
are living with significant
disability.
17%
The estimated pay gap
in Latin America between
men and women
for equivalent job roles.
540,000
The estimated number of
young adults (aged 19-39) in
South Korea who have
voluntarily excluded themselves from society, a
phenomenon known as
extreme social withdrawal.
35%
The poverty rate in
Okinawa Prefecture, twice
Japan’s national average.
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Stanford Social Innovation Review / Summer 2024
W H AT ’ S N E X T
New approaches to social change
ECONOMIC DEVELOPMENT
Drone Sisters
A new government program in India is training women
to become agricultural drone pilots to increase their financial
security and modernize farming.
B Y N E H A B H AT T
W
hen 38-year-old Banita Sharma’s husband developed a health condition recently that left
him unable to work, her small pickle business
proved insufficient to meet her family’s needs.
Few job opportunities exist in her village of Bado Brahmanan, in
the northern Indian state of Haryana—especially for women.
“That’s when I heard about a new [program] for women to train
as drone pilots,” she says. “It would certify us to run our own dronerental service, adding another source
of income.”
In November 2023, India’s government launched the NAMO Drone
Didi (didi is Hindi for “elder sister”)
program. Rural women comprise 65
percent of the agricultural workforce,
but their work is labor-intensive and
poorly paid, with limited ownership of Drone Didi participants engage in
land. The Drone Didi program aims to the compassmake them stakeholders in the rural calibration process
to ensure accurate
economy through skill development, drone navigation
while also modernizing agriculture as part of the
training course at
through technology and boosting yield IIT Mandi, India.
and precision farming. The target is
to train 15,000 rural women selected
from women’s collectives in drone
operation for agricultural purposes,
mainly to spray fertilizers and pesticides on crops. Hundreds of women
have already completed the two-week
training program, which qualifies them
to purchase a drone at a 50 to 80 percent subsidized cost through a lowinterest loan offered by the national
agriculture financing facility, with state
banks covering the remaining cost.
The government’s ministries are
collaborating with educational orga-
006_010_whats_next_proofedDA_sum24.indd 6
nizations, fertilizer companies, rural women’s collectives, drone
manufacturers, and pilot-training institutes to implement the program nationwide. The government has also allocated 1,261 crores
(more than $152 million) over the next two years for the project.
The cost of the training is being largely covered by fertilizer companies, who are investing in Drone Didi because it uses fertilizers
in crop cultivation.
The Drone Didi training programs are held at drone-training centers in cities across the country. Sharma traveled three hours from
her village to attend a two-week residential course in Manesar, a town
near the capital of New Delhi. The course was run by the Indian Farmers Fertiliser Cooperative (IFFCO) in partnership with Drone Destination, a remote-vehicle-training organization based in New Delhi.
“We learned air traffic regulations, drone applications, putting a drone together, loading fertilizers, mapping, flight simulation, [and] spraying,” Sharma explains. “I learned how this
technology is helpful in reducing water usage, manual labor, and
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Stanford Social Innovation Review / Summer 2024
7
L E F T : P H O T O C O U R T E S Y O F I I T M A N D I I H U B T E A M ; R I G H T : P H O T O C O U R T E S Y O F J E A N - J A U R E S 2 0 2 2 P A R I S H A B I T A T / FRÉDÉRI C A C H D O U
Paris’ city housing
conversion has
resulted in a former
outdoor garage
being transformed
into 149 housing
units, at a cost
of £24 million and
opened in 2021.
the cost of fertilizers.” An area that
would take half to one day to spray
manually can be covered in less than
10 minutes with a drone.
Social and gender barriers have
made training participants challenging.
“Many of [the women] have not been
in an organized learning environment
for a long time or worked outside the
home before,” says Drone Destination
CEO Chirag Sharma. “It is a culture shock.”
A project like Drone Didi “serves a higher purpose of democratizing technology and cuts through gender biases by enabling women to venture beyond their homes for educational and employment
opportunities,” says Somjit Amrit, CEO of iHub, a technology innovation center at the Indian Institute of Technology, Mandi (IIT
Mandi), in the North Indian state of Himachal Pradesh. IIT Mandi
is conducting a more expansive 10-week Drone Didi program in
partnership with the National Skill Development Corporation. The
program is tailored to a wider range of women from both rural and
urban areas: It is taught in both Hindi and English and includes
modules on entrepreneurship, communication, and leadership.
Shashi Bala, 22, a drone-pilot trainee at IIT Mandi, is the first
woman in her family to study and seek work outside her hometown of Kangra. She is eager to break gender barriers with the
tools she has been given by the program. “With the drone industry growing rapidly, I am optimistic about building a career
in this sector, gaining job experience, and then starting my own
venture,” she says.
A partnership ecosystem is gradually being built around the
Drone Didi program to support the drone pilots to increase women’s access to financing and work opportunities. Government
agencies and training organizations are currently devising loan
plans with drone manufacturers and banks to help the pilots buy
drones. Drone Destination is working on an app to support the
more than 650 women pilots it has trained so far across 13 states to
connect them with job opportunities. Physical hubs, too, are under
construction to handle drone maintenance.
For many women like Sharma, the program has catalyzed greater
social change and fueled even bigger dreams. “I am the first in my
village to become a drone pilot,” she says, “so I hope it will set a
trend of more jobs for women and change how we are perceived.” O
NEH A B H AT T is an award-winning journalist and author based in
New Delhi, India. She reports on gender politics, public health, human rights,
education, environmental issues, and culture.
006_010_whats_next_proofedDA_sum24.indd 7
CITIES
Not Building From
Scratch
The city of Paris is turning empty properties into homes
to relieve a supply-strapped housing market.
BY CHLOÉ ROUVEYROLLES
F
or most Parisians, buying an apartment has become almost impossible. To acquire a property in the City of
Light, a first-time buyer needs to earn roughly £97,500
($106,000) per year—more than double the average
annual salary of a white-collar worker—and have the 10 percent
down payment to qualify for a mortgage.
It is unsurprising, then, that approximately 10,000 people leave
Paris each year because they can no longer afford to live there. Paris
is the fourth most population-dense city in the European Union,
so it has little space to build more housing.
Housing conversion has become an increasingly popular approach to the housing shortage in the French capital, garnering
support from public-housing companies and local politicians
alike, including Paris mayor Anne Hidalgo. Since the Institut Paris
Région began registering conversion projects in 2013, every year
empty nonresidential buildings are turned into a quarter of the
city’s new housing units.
Now a decade in, the once emerging trend has become a revolution. “We’re living in a sort of golden age of social housing,” says
Stéphanie Jankel, an urbanist at Apur, a nonprofit Parisian urbanplanning workshop.
Yet as with any revolution, the effort has come with challenges,
particularly that of design.
“We can’t plan just as we like; there’s a lot of technical work
beforehand to find out how many units we can produce,” says
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8
W H AT ’ S N E X T
Stanford Social Innovation Review / Summer 2024
Hélène Schwoerer, deputy general director of project management
at Paris Habitat, a social-housing company that has managed the
city’s public-housing conversions for more than a decade.
“If a garage is deep, we need to know how much floor space to
keep as living space and how much floor space to have for common
use, so as not to weigh too heavily on the tenants,” she explains.
The housing-conversion process varies according to ownership and zoning laws but always entails a collaboration between
the government and private entities. For example, if the city
owns a building it has identified for conversion, it will commission a company like Paris Habitat directly to oversee the conversion process. If the city does not own the building, it will
mandate the conversion work, and then companies can apply
for the commission.
Landlords present another challenge, since they prefer to lease
their properties as commercial offices rather than as residences,
and the city government has no power to force landlords of commercial or nonresidential property to sell or rent to companies
that convert properties into housing. Only the national government has the authority to regulate real estate, but it does not have
the power to force an owner to sell an empty building. In 2020,
Apur estimated that 128,000 of Paris’ housing units had been empty for more than two years.
Expenses of money and time present additional challenges. According to companies that manage housing conversion, it’s more
expensive to convert a building than to construct one from scratch.
A starter kit for social change.
006_010_whats_next_proofedDA_sum24.indd 8
For Paris to meet its target of making 40 percent of its housing affordable to low-income residents, it provides financial assistance
to housing companies of up to £2,500 per 2 meters ($3,215 per 6.6
feet) of floor space. In the northeastern section of Paris, Caserne
de Reuilly—military barracks dating back to 1847—was turned into
a multiuse complex, including rental accommodation for middleclass and low-income families, a kindergarten school, and a medical practice.
“When you build a city, you don’t build it for 5, 10, or 15 years—
the cost and payback take decades,” Jankel says.
After years of experimentation, local public authorities have
honed the building-conversion process and are now seeking to
shorten the time between design, construction, and conversion
to more quickly recover costs. Their expertise has shaped the
buildings under construction for the 2024 Olympic Games on the
outskirts of Paris. They were designed not only to accommodate
tens of thousands of athletes and journalists but also to be rapidly
transformed into housing, offices, and even a university dormitory
by the end of the year.
It remains to be seen whether this ambitious project will meet
its objective, however, given that it is already behind schedule for
its first use. O
C H LO É RO U V E YRO LLE S is a French journalist currently based
in Jerusalem. Born and raised in Paris, she reports on urban-planning issues
in France, India, and the Middle East.
Grow to meet the needs of
the community you serve.
Integrating human-centered
design into your work.
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Stanford Social Innovation Review / Summer 2024
CIVIC ENGAGEMENT
Disability Organizing
New Disabled South advocates for disability justice
and enfranchisement in the US South.
MARIANNE DHENIN
PHOTO COURTESY OF TYLER BOOZER
D
isabled Americans face significant barriers to participating in our democratic process. The overwhelming
majority of polling locations nationwide are inaccessible, and many states have restrictive voting laws
that limit mail-in voting or ban ballot drop boxes. More than 11
percent of disabled voters reported encountering difficulties when
voting in the last general election.
New Disabled South (NDS), a disability-rights and disabilityjustice nonprofit organization founded in 2022, is working across
14 states in the US South to eliminate these barriers. With the
2024 elections rapidly approaching and voter suppression rampant throughout the region, NDS is working on multiple fronts to
ensure disabled people’s voting access so their voices can be heard
on critical issues.
While 2024 marks the nonprofit’s first involvement in a general
election, its leaders have deep experience in electoral politics and
voting-rights advocacy. NDS cofounder, president, and CEO Dom
Kelly has worked for voting-rights organizations in Georgia and
served as the senior advisor for disability on Stacey Abrams’ 2022
gubernatorial campaign. What he witnessed in those roles—disabled voters were disenfranchised and often overlooked, even by
progressive groups—made him realize the need for a disability-led
organization. He observes that it is not enough for some organizations to work on disability-rights issues if disabled people aren’t
given a seat at the table. “If you don’t have that lived experience,” he
says, “you’re only looking at the issues from the outside.”
One of NDS’ main objectives is combating efforts to disenfranchise disabled voters. The organization’s other priorities
include improving outcomes in the legal system, ameliorating
poverty, and securing access to health-care services. These priorities address issues that disproportionately affect disabled
people nationwide: Disabled people face arrests, incarceration,
and police violence at higher rates than nondisabled people.
006_010_whats_next_proofedDA_sum24_crx.indd 9
9
Disabled people also experience poverty
at a rate of more than twice that of nondisabled people. The issues are even more
A group of disabled
community members
pressing in the South, where more than 20
in Atlanta, Georgia,
percent of the population is disabled—the
talk at an NDS organizing event in
highest rate in the nation.
2023. (NDS cofounder,
NDS hired 10 employees in its first year;
president, and CEO
Dom Kelly is second
its entire staff and board are disabled and
from the right.)
have roots in the South. The organization
also launched a 501(c)(4) arm called New
Disabled South Rising (NDSR) in February
2023. “We recognized that if our goal was to
build a political home for disabled people, we
needed to be able to have the flexibility of a
501(c)(4) to do that,” Kelly says.
Philanthropic funders, including the Ford Foundation, Borealis
Philanthropy, and the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation, have
been vital to NDS’ rapid growth. An individual donor provided
seed funding for NDSR. In November 2023, Open Society Foundations awarded the organization a two-year grant as part of its
mission to reduce barriers to voting nationwide.
The organization’s early efforts include partnering with Data
for Progress to conduct a six-state survey on voter perceptions of
disabled people and disabled people’s experiences in the South.
The survey results will serve as a framework for a multistate qualitative research effort that NDS will launch this summer. NDSR was
also the fiscal sponsor on an Atlanta, Georgia, ballot referendum
campaign to allow voters to decide whether a $90 million police
training facility should be built in the city.
Looking ahead to the upcoming general election, NDS is partnering with nonpartisan voter registration, education, and turnout efforts across the region. The nonprofit will offer guidance
for “these organizations [to] bring a disability lens to their work,”
NDS’ organizing director, Lila Zucker, says. O
M A R I A NNE D H E NI N is an award-winning journalist and historian.
ARTS & CULTURE
Real Estate for
the Artists
CAST provides art organizations a pathway to
property ownership, giving artists much-needed space
to create and display their work.
B Y K Y L E C O WA R D
D
uring the 2010s tech boom, incomes skyrocketed
across the San Francisco Bay Area—but so did the
cost of living. The median price of rent, for example,
jumped by 24 percent over the decade. San Francisco’s arts community, in particular, felt the rent crunch: A 2015
civic survey reported that 70 percent of the city’s artists had been
displaced from their homes, workplaces, or both because of higher
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10
W H AT ’ S N E X T
Stanford Social Innovation Review / Summer 2024
costs. Local arts organizations that leased office spaces were likewise affected by the price surge. According to the data platform
Statista, San Francisco-area office rents cost $79.06 per square
foot, second only to Manhattan among 30 select US markets.
In 2013, San Francisco-based Community Vision (then known as
the Northern California Community Loan Fund) created the Community Arts Stabilization Trust (CAST) to protect local arts organizations from being priced out of the Bay Area. The trust buys, renovates, and leases buildings below market value to small and midsize
organizations. Organizations can be given the option to buy their
spaces within 7 to 10 years, and lease extensions are also available.
“We are an involved, community-centered real-estate organization for culture,” says Moy Eng, CAST’s founding CEO and
former executive director, who now serves as a consultant. “We
steward and secure affordable space.”
The Oakland-based Kenneth Rainin Foundation provided
CAST with a five-year, $5 million seed grant in 2013. Continued
funding has come through public and private sources such as tax
credits and grants.
CAST currently has real-estate investments in five Bay Area organizations, ranging between $1 million and $6.3 million per organization. CounterPulse, a San Francisco-based experimental arts
nonprofit, exemplifies the success of CAST’s model.
Founded in 1991, CounterPulse had long made its home base
in the city’s South of Market (SoMA) neighborhood. But by 2012,
high rents forced the organization to look elsewhere. “We could
see the writing on the wall that we would not be able to renew our
lease at the favorable rates that we had before the tech boom,” says
CounterPulse executive director Julie Phelps.
The following year, a consultant connected CounterPulse to
the newly formed CAST, which at the time had purchased and was
renovating a building in the nearby Tenderloin neighborhood for
$1.3 million. CAST offered CounterPulse a 10-year lease on the
property with an option to buy.
CounterPulse signed a lease on the building in 2015 and
opened in the space the following year. The organization would finance renovations on the property during the term of its lease and,
through fundraising, amassed $7 million to purchase the building
from CAST in 2023.
Eng describes the process of real-estate transactions and development as “intensive,” which is why CAST focuses exclusively
on the Bay Area. CAST’s influence is not limited, however. Stakeholders in cities around the world—from Seattle to Sydney to
London—have reached out to CAST for consultation on how to
stimulate community-centered real estate for artists.
“What do we want in our cities? What do we want in our neighborhoods? How do we step in to do that together?” Eng asks. “Now
is the time when things are at a crisis point, and I think this is the
moment where change is possible.” O
K YLE C O WA R D is a Chicago-based communications professional and writer who
has contributed to the Chicago Tribune and The Atlantic, among other publications.
is a nonprofit media
organization that is funded
entirely from subscriptions,
events, webinars—and your
thoughtful donations.
DONATE TODAY, and help us continue to inform and inspire
social changemakers everywhere. ssir.org/donate
006_010_whats_next_proofedDA_sum24.indd 10
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11
FIELD REPORT
Profiles of innovative work
No Disabled
Child
Left Behind
Sightsavers is working to change
social attitudes toward disabled children
through community-centered
education in Malawi.
B Y M A D A L I T S O W I L L S K AT E TA
PHOTO COURTESY OF SIGHTSAVERS MALAWI
T
en-year-old Shelista Banda was
born deaf. Bullied by other
children because of her disability, she would often retaliate
by throwing stones at them. Because of the
bullying, Shelista’s mother, 29-year-old Rose
Banda, refused to send her to school. Yet she
worried about how her daughter would go
through life without an education.
In 2017, she enrolled Shelista, then 6
years old, at the James Centre, a day care
in the Ntcheu district of central Malawi
that provides education to children with
disabilities. There, Shelista underwent
therapy to learn how to cope with her disability. The center also donated five goats
to her family to boost their food security
and economic stability.
Shelista’s education and treatments have
changed her life. “My daughter used to
live a lonely life. But now that has totally
changed,” Rose Banda says. “She is now also
able to help with some household chores
and can socialize with other children.”
In Malawi, more than 1.7 million people
ages 5 and up live with a disability, representing more than 11 percent of the total
population. Worldwide, 240 million children live with a disability. According to the
United Nations Children’s Fund, children
with disabilities in low- and middle-income
countries either are kept out of school or
011_016_Field_Report_proofedDA_Sum24.indd 11
receive substandard education. Their poor
educational outcomes stymie their social
development and inclusion.
The James Centre is one of the 49 childcare centers in Malawi supported by Sightsavers, an international NGO founded in
1950 by Sir John Wilson, a British publichealth advocate best known for working to
prevent blindness in developing countries.
Sightsavers works to end avoidable
blindness and treat and eliminate tropical diseases in more than 30 low- and
middle-income countries in Africa and
Asia. Since 2015, the organization’s mission
has expanded to promote diversity, equity,
and inclusion in health, education, employment, and governance through partnerships with governments and NGOs. One
such partnership is with the NGO Catholic
Health Commission (CHC), which manages the James Centre as part of Sightsavers’
to establish equal education for disabled
children to foster their social inclusion and
belonging.
In Malawi, Sightsavers supports children who struggle with access to education, good nutrition, and health care. In a
country where half of the population lives
in poverty, disabled children face particularly dire circumstances. Superstitious beliefs fuel stigma against children with disabilities—it is not uncommon for them to
be accused of witchcraft or being cursed.
Through IECDE, Sightsavers endeavors to
break down these barriers to ensure that
children with disabilities are not deprived
of equal education and opportunity.
THE EMPOWERMENT
FRAMEWORK
IECDE emerged from the Sightsavers’ successful Leave No Child Behind program,
Caregiver Hawuya
(top right) leads
a lesson for children
with disabilities in
the Ntcheu District of
central Malawi
in April 2023.
Inclusive Early Childhood Development
Education (IECDE) project. In collaboration with CHC, Parents for Disabled Children Association of Malawi (PODCAM),
and the Ntcheu District Social Welfare office, Sightsavers launched IECDE in 2020
which ran from June 2010 to May 2016 in 10
childcare centers offering nursery and preschool education in the Ntcheu district. The
program partnered with local communities
and the government to raise awareness
of disabled children’s right to education,
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12
FIELD REPORT
Stanford Social Innovation Review / Summer 2024
to increase school enrollment of children
with disabilities, and to train caregivers and
teachers in inclusive practices.
With IECDE, Sightsavers scaled the
program to 49 childcare centers and broadened the scope of its support to families
and communities with disabled children.
IECDE also expanded Leave No Child
Behind’s school-enrollment efforts to primary schools, focusing on increasing disabled children’s enrollment in six primary
schools in the Ntcheu district. The project
is financed by Sightsavers and is supplemented by donations and grants, including
a £475,000 ($594,000) grant from People’s
Postcode Lottery (a subscription lottery
that raises money for charities) in 2020.
IECDE’s empowerment framework
seeks to provide families, communities,
and caregivers with the financial and educational support they need to guarantee that
disabled children receive high-quality education. Food support, for example, is a crucial factor in children’s education. A 2023
World Food Programme report indicated
that school-lunch programs are the world’s
most extensive noncontributory assistance
to vulnerable families and can increase
school-enrollment rates by 9 percent.
Since IECDE launched in 2020, the
Ntcheu district has seen a 139 percent
rise in school enrollment for disabled students—which Chikaipa attributes largely
to the free lunch guaranteed to students.
Civic education is the cornerstone of
IECDE’s community empowerment efforts
that aim to change harmful social attitudes
about disabled people. The project hosts
regular community-sensitization meetings
on disability issues and trains community
leaders in how to become advocates for
disabled community members. John Banda,
who is a local chief for Kawala village, says
that this advocacy training also entails
learning how to petition organizations for
resources and services for disabled people.
“We are now able to mobilize resources
from businesses in our area as one way of
sustaining the project [if] Sightsavers ends
its operations,” Banda says.
The empowerment framework also includes caregiver education, with Sightsavers offering free training to caregivers and
teachers. Catherine Hawuya, who was born
with a disability and experienced barriers
to education as a child, decided to enroll
in the training upon the recommendation
of her village chief, in 2020. Thanks to the
Children with disabilities can now
learn in the same class as nondisabled children
without any discrimination.
Sightsavers donates goats to poor families
like Shelista’s both for sustenance and to
sell for the money that they need to send
their children to school. Under the auspices of IECDE, it also created community gardens run by local volunteers that
provide food for children’s lunches at the
49 childcare centers. The volunteers are
trained in food preparation and nutrition
to ensure that the food is not only nutritious but also hygienic.
“With the chronic food instability faced
by the country and the increasingly erratic
growing seasons due to climate change,”
IECDE project coordinator Ben Chikaipa
says, “the project’s agricultural component
is important, as the children are attracted
to class because they are assured that they
will get food in school.”
011_016_Field_Report_proofedDA_Sum24.indd 12
ongoing professional development training in childcare offered by Sightsavers,
Hawuya now teaches children with and
without disabilities in the same classroom.
“Children with disabilities who used
to perform badly in class now have good
grades and can now learn in the same class
with children without disabilities without
any signs of stigma and discrimination, as
was previously the case,” she says.
CHC field officer Maria Mwadzangati
notes that the IECDE’s caretakers’ guidebook—currently available only in print and
in English and Chichewa (the vernacular
language of Malawi)—has changed social
attitudes toward disabled children. The
book aims to dispel stigmatizing myths
about disability to encourage parents to
send their children with disability to school.
“People previously used to associate
disability with witchcraft and sins that
could have been committed by parents,
but after reading the handbook, they understand that a disabled child is just like
any abled child,” Mwadzangati says.
A PA R T N E R S H I P S T R AT E GY
FOR GROWTH
IECDE initially struggled because it launched
amid the COVID-19 pandemic, when schools
were closed during lockdown. Its early years were also hindered by three
cyclones between 2020 and 2022 and
Malawi’s longest cholera outbreak in history, from 2022 to 2023.
To navigate these challenges, Sightsavers and its partners—CHC, PODCAM, and
the District Social Welfare office—developed a strategic approach in which each
partner oversees a specific task based on
their expertise. PODCAM manages disability rights, CHC is assigned to health
issues, and the Social Welfare office runs
IECDE’s social programs. Sightsavers provides childcare centers with preventive
services such as handwashing facilities and
chlorine for water purification.
In addition, Sightsavers has donated
wheelchairs, standing frames, walking
frames, and cerebral palsy chairs to 45 children. The organization also sends children
in need of such assistive devices to healthcare providers for assessment and treatment, and it pays for the cost of the devices
and any associated treatment.
“This support is very important to
achieving Sightsavers’ mission of ensuring
that children with disabilities from underprivileged families have a right to live in an
inclusive society,” Chikaipa says.
In April 2023, Sightsavers expanded IECDE to 18 primary schools in the
Ntcheu district to better attend to the
continuing education of the disabled children who graduated from the nursery and
preschool centers. The expansion offers
greater hope to children like Shelista that
they, too, have a right to education just
like their nondisabled peers. O
M A DA LI T S O W I LLS K AT E TA is a freelance
journalist and media consultant based in
Lilongwe, Malawi. He has written for Thomson
Reuters Foundation, BBC Future Planet, and
Foreign Policy, among other publications.
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Stanford Social Innovation Review / Summer 2024
13
Circular
Construction
A multinational team is upcycling old
concrete and brick for new
buildings in the Czech Republic.
B Y PA U L H O C K E N O S
PHOTOS COURTESY OF SKANSKA (TOP) AND VIVID VISION (BOTTOM)
A
butting the Vltava River’s muddy bank on the outskirts of
Prague, three new apartment
buildings contain a potential
breakthrough in sustainable architecture.
With help from the European Union and
other partners, the multinational construction and development company Skanska
has developed an industrial-quality, hybrid
concrete by upcycling concrete and masonry rubble. Skanska and Czech architects are
employing this “green concrete”—which
Skanska patented under the name Rebetong
in 2019—for the apartment buildings’ internal walls, foundations, façades, and pavements using the concrete from the ruins
of an early-20th-century sugar factory that
once stood on the site.
The Prague- and London-based architecture firm CHYBIK + KRISTOF designed the blueprint for the new building
complex, called the Sugar Factory estate.
According to the firm’s founder, Michal
Kristof, the estate will eventually accommodate seven buildings with a total of
790 apartments, in addition to an event
space, brewery, and kindergarten. Each
successive new building will comprise a
greater percentage of Rebetong than the
three preliminary apartment buildings.
All buildings in the complex will draw energy from rooftop solar panels and utilize
recycled water. Residents will move into
the first of the finished apartment buildings later this year.
Circ-Boost, the EU’s arm to fund research and innovation, has contributed
approximately $400,000 to defray building costs associated with piloting the
Sugar Factory project’s sustainability innovations over the next four years. The
project is one of several across Europe that
are part of the $8 million Circ-Boost initiative to promote circular solutions in construction value chains across Europe. The
Sugar Factory estate and Circ-Boost’s four
011_016_Field_Report_proofedDA_Sum24_crx.indd 13
Elements of the
Sugar Factory estate
(top) in Prague were
constructed with
Rebetong, or "green
concrete," (bottom)
created by
the multinational
construction
company Skanska.
other pilots will demonstrate novel circular
solutions for residential-building construction, construction-waste processing, and
emissions reduction.
“Our intention is to demonstrate
the use of new technology in the real
environment,” says Circ-Boost project head Albert de la Fuente Antequera,
a civil engineer at Polytechnic University
of Catalonia.
The motivation to address sustainability in the construction industry stems from
its staggering discharge of greenhouse gases and consumption of natural resources.
Concrete alone generates 9 percent of all
human-generated CO 2 emissions. The
industry is responsible for 40 percent of
global emissions, and it consumes nearly
half of the roughly 50 million metric tons
of crushed rock, gravel, and sand extracted
from the earth every year. Moreover, the
construction industry generates 30 percent of the planet’s waste.
The world’s nations must contend
with the construction sector if they intend to meet climate and other environmental targets, especially considering
that “there’s going to be a lot more construction happening in Europe,” says José
Mercado of the German Energy Agency
(DENA), a Berlin-based clean-energy institute. In fact, the sector’s use of raw materials is expected to double over the next
two decades.
Mercado says that the drive to create
sustainable concrete is hugely important
and resembles other experimentations
in the field of sustainable construction in
which the private sector, research institutes, nations, and the European Union
collaborate. The diverse partnerships of
the Sugar Factory estate illustrate exactly how this kind of collaboration can
work and yield results that no one actor
or even a smaller cooperative could produce on its own.
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Stanford Social Innovation Review / Summer 2024
A DURABLE REPLACEMENT
Recycling and reusing concrete and brick
are not new ideas; they have long been
deployed, including in highway pavement.
But recycled concrete had long lacked the
quality of the high-grade variant produced
with virgin materials that developers favor
for buildings. The drawback had been that
this kind of mixed-material recycled concrete was less durable and flexible than
reduced transportation costs—and exhibits
greater heat retention, adding another perk
that enhances buildings’ energy efficiency.
De la Fuente Antequera expects Rebetong to become a fully functional concrete
with 100 percent recycled material that
can be produced cheaply with much the
same hardware as traditional concrete.
Once the results are verified by the Czech
Technical University in Prague (CTU) laboratories, Circ-Boost project officials plan
Upcycled materials like Rebetong
will help to transform the global construction
sector for the better.
standard concrete. Its life span was about
half as long (roughly 30 years), and moisture penetrated it at a rate higher than traditional concrete, causing it to crack.
However, Rebetong, says Skanska’s
Bohuslav Slánský, one of its creators, is in
another league. “Tests show that even with
very high proportions of recycled materials, up to 100 percent, the final concrete
mixture exhibits a similar performance to
conventional concrete,” he says.
The difference between Rebetong and its predecessors is that the former is made with a nano-additive created by the now-defunct Czech-based
firm ERC-TECH. In 2018, ERC-TECH
approached Skanska with a chemical substance of very fine granularity that in limited testing had shown an impressive ability,
when mixed with cement, to bind recycled
masonry into a concrete with impressive
levels of durability. Skanska purchased the
nano-additive—with the help of a 2 million
Czech koruna ($90,000) grant from the
Czech Republic’s ministry for industry—
and further developed it.
Skanska’s headquarters in Sweden heralds Rebetong as a “concrete that uses one
hundred percent recycled concrete and/or
masonry to fully replace natural aggregates.
This circular approach enables new buildings to be constructed from other buildings
at the end of their life cycle.” In its 2019
sustainability report, Skanska also claims
that Rebetong’s production emits 12 percent fewer carbon emissions—mostly from
011_016_Field_Report_proofedDA_Sum24.indd 14
to disseminate the findings to hundreds of
other construction and development companies across Europe and beyond. They
hope that these companies will ultimately
adopt similar circular solutions, particularly concrete mixes using upcycled materials like Rebetong.
GETTING TO 100 PERCENT
But the Rebetong employed in the Czech
projects isn’t fully circular yet. It currently
exists in different grades, and the mixes with
lower quantities of recycled materials can be
deployed more widely than in building elements that require more elasticity. The first
Sugar Factory estate structures containing
Rebetong relied on 25 to 50 percent recycled
materials. In CTU laboratories, even higher
grades have been tested with positive results.
This year, the Sugar Factory developers will
employ Rebetong with 50 to 75 percent of
recycled aggregate.
While the onsite application of Rebetong at the Sugar Factory estate has delivered results very much like those of traditional concrete, Skanska discovered that it
hardened more slowly than conventional
concrete in cold weather, which slowed
construction during the 2022-23 winter
season. Since this discovery, Skanska says
that it tweaked the recipe to produce a mix
that now hardens at the same rate as conventional concrete.
Another challenge is the dearth of highquality demolition rubble necessary to produce Rebetong. Decaying demolition-site
debris that often ends up in mixedmaterial landfills has limited upcycling value. For example, because of the poor quality of the old bricks from the sugar factory,
only a minimal percentage of them could
be incorporated into the Rebetong used for
the housing complex.
In order for green-concrete production—and circular construction in general—to function, demolitions have to follow
certain procedures, like meticulously sorting waste according to type and then sending it to recycling centers or commercial
buyers, rather than to landfill sites. Demolitions themselves have to happen much
differently than they do today, in a way that
enables the collection of potentially valuable debris. More recycling centers and
markets for used construction materials,
Mercado says, are critical to realizing Europe’s vision for a circular economy.
Despite its breakthrough qualities, Rebetong will most likely face skepticism on
the construction-materials market. “The
construction industry’s emissions and
resource use are so egregious that every
step forward in sustainability can result
in significant gains,” Mercado explains. In
Europe, he says, the construction sector is
transitioning to a circular economy slowly,
even though it is central to EU climateprotection plans.
One of the biggest obstacles, Mercado
observes, is that the construction industry
is very conservative and sticks with what it
knows. “The greatest hurdle,” he says, “is
getting everybody on board to think about
construction in a completely new way.”
Skanska’s next step is to increase the
quantity of recycled concrete in Rebetong
and complete the Sugar Factory project,
and then move on to other building projects in the Czech Republic. It intends to
experiment more with alternative cement
mixes as well, which will lower the carbon
footprint of concrete even further.
De la Fuente Antequera’s team is
watching closely, confident that concrete
upcycling can help transform the global
construction sector for the better. Hundreds of international construction companies are awaiting Circ-Boost’s results. O
PAU L H O C K E NO S is a Berlin-based writer
covering energy and climate issues. He is the
author of five books on European affairs.
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Stanford Social Innovation Review / Summer 2024
Learning Code
for a Second
Chance at Life
Social enterprise Take2’s training and
support program provides a pathway to
job security after incarceration.
BY RINA DIANE CABALL AR
P H O T O S C O U R T E S Y O F TA K E 2
N
ew Zealand’s prisoner rehabilitation system is broken.
The country’s incarceration
rate of 173 people per 100,000
is higher than in many other high-income
economies. For example, neighboring Australia is at 158 per 100,000, and Norway,
which has a population size comparable to
New Zealand’s, is at 52. Recidivism rates
are also high: Nearly 57 percent of those released from prison are reconvicted within
two years, and 36 percent are reincarcerated two years after their release. Research
shows that employment reduces recidivism,
but formerly incarcerated people experience
significant barriers to employment, including the requirement to report any criminal
conviction on their job applications, which
automatically disqualifies their candidacy
for employment.
Cameron Smith witnessed the difficulty
of placing formerly incarcerated people into
jobs when he worked as a recruitment consultant at the firm Michael Page in Auckland, New Zealand, in 2013. “They’re looking
to get their life back on track, but whether
their mistake was a month ago, a year ago,
or 10 years ago, we as a society put a lot of
barriers in front of them,” he says.
When Smith took a managing position
at an Auckland-based impact-investment
firm a few years later, he noticed that there
were myriad job opportunities in the tech
sector but a talent shortage and lack of
diversity. From this observation, he wondered if he could bridge those gaps with a
talent pool of people hoping for a second
chance at life.
This query inspired Smith’s founding
of Take2 in 2019. A social enterprise, Take2
offers people in prisons a 9- to 12-month
training program where they learn web
development skills and social skills such
as teamwork and communication. Take2
011_016_Field_Report_proofedDA_Sum24_crx.indd 15
has partnered with New Zealand’s leading
tech companies like RUSH and Datacom to
facilitate program graduates’ employment
upon their release. Partnerships are a strategic decision, Smith explains, because they
add credibility to the program. “There’s also
a lot of structure, training, and support in
place with a larger organization, which is an
ideal landing spot for our graduates coming into the workforce,” he says. The partnerships are mutually beneficial because
partners hire Take2’s graduates to fill their
shortage of tech talent, which boost their
diversity and inclusion efforts, as more than
half of those incarcerated in New Zealand
are Māori or Pacific Islander.
TRAINING AND THRIVING
Take2’s program involves two phases: The
job training program during incarceration
is followed by two years of support upon a
graduate’s release and reentry into society.
Training consists of lessons in coding and
other web development technologies in
15
addition to technical workshops and motivational talks from employment partners.
“Bringing the employment partners
into the prison classroom and [students]
hearing ‘We appreciate where you’ve
come from and you’ve made a mistake,
but that won’t hold you back from having a career at our organization or the
tech sector’ is really powerful for the students,” Smith explains.
Another essential part of the program
is the life-skills curriculum. Dylan Wiggill,
a former Take2 learning facilitator who
codesigned the course, developed an approach that teaches students about selfregulation techniques such as mindfulness
and meditation, as well as team-based
skills—including collaboration, resilience,
and adopting a growth mindset—to help
them navigate the workplace.
“It’s inspiring to walk into a prison environment each day and see a group of men
that are so focused on trying to achieve
these great outcomes for themselves—
Top: Take2’s former
learning facilitator
Dylan Wiggill
talks with a Take2
student.
Bottom: Take2 staff
and students pose
for a photo after
the successful
completion of their
Demo Day.
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16
Stanford Social Innovation Review / Summer 2024
so much so that back in their residence,
they’re running study groups together outside of class hours,” Wiggill says. “It makes
my life feel like it has a greater purpose.”
Take2’s yearlong pilot began in October
2020 at the Auckland South Corrections
Facility with 10 participants, 3 of whom
were hired by Take2’s partner companies
upon their release. One of the graduates, who asked to remain anonymous,
now works as a quality-assurance tester
at Datacom. “The things I learned in the
Take2 program help me in many different parts of my life,” he says. “They make
me better at handling different situations
and achieving success in both personal
and professional areas. The communication
Take2 offers “important support, programs to help change behavior, and chances to learn new skills,” says the Take2 graduate and Datacom employee. “This not
only helps them fit back into society well
and decreases the chances of them committing more crimes, but it also improves
their chances of finding stable employment and leading productive lives.”
Take2 is a 13-person organization consisting of a board of directors, which includes Smith; an advisory board; and five
full-time staff. One of Take2’s graduates is
now part of its advisory board, which informs the program’s design and suggests
improvements. The graduates are also giving back to society. Building on the coding
Take2 will prevent reincarceration in
New Zealand and chart a new course toward
a better rehabilitation system.
skills I learnt during my time with Take2
have helped me form and build positive relationships within my workplace.”
Take2 was launched with Smith’s personal savings and is now entirely funded by
philanthropic organizations, including the
Spark Foundation, the Simplicity Foundation, and the J. R. McKenzie Trust. Employment partners have also donated laptops
and resources for the design and implementation of the program’s IT infrastructure in
the prison classroom.
“We have a long-running mantra of
bringing in people new to IT that wouldn’t
necessarily be in IT,” says Karl Wright,
chief information officer at Datacom, one
of Take2’s employment partners. “But
we’re not doing this because it looks good
on our diversity and inclusion report. You
have to get serious about actually helping
and changing lives. You have to do this
because you fundamentally believe that
people deserve a second chance.”
Students who finish the program are
offered support reintegrating into society
upon release, from assistance with securing government-issued IDs and setting up
bank accounts to providing them laptops,
phones, and internet access, to career
mentorship and personal counseling.
011_016_Field_Report_proofedDA_Sum24.indd 16
skills they learned in the program, two of
Take2’s graduates created Ngā Mihi, an online platform where family members and
others can buy preapproved essentials like
socks and underwear for people in prisons.
N E W PAT H WAYS
Launching Take2 was difficult, Smith says,
because each stakeholder—the funders,
employment partners, and a prison—was
reluctant to get involved without stakeholder consensus. It took Smith time to build
trust and relationships with them. Persuading tech companies, for instance, to hire
Take2 graduates was challenging because
of the stigma that formerly incarcerated
people suffer due to their criminal record.
Smith persisted in his effort to dispel this
bias, eventually winning their buy-in by asking them to shift their perceptions, be more
open, and give Take2 graduates a chance.
During its pilot program, Take2 discovered a flaw in the training program’s
design: Some students were unexpectedly
released from prison in the middle of their
training and thus were unable to complete
the program. And when the COVID-19
pandemic hit in 2020, the social enterprise
had to find a way to keep its program running amid government shutdowns, which
included limited visitor access to prisons.
To address both issues, the team built a
community hub in Auckland, with classrooms for those who have been released
in the middle of the program or those on
home detention, serving community sentences, or out on parole to continue their
education and complete the program.
Take2 currently has 25 participants—12
in the community hub and 13 at the Auckland
South Corrections Facility—with plans to
increase that number by bringing its program to prisons across New Zealand. The
team is working with the Department of
Corrections on expansion plans, including
to women’s prisons.
In 2023, Take2 launched Take2 Elevate,
which offers businesses services such as
website and web application design and construction and software testing and maintenance. The venture expands Take2’s mission
to forge employment pathways for formerly
incarcerated people by hiring them as apprentices. The revenue earned is used to cover operating costs for both Take2 and Take2
Elevate and for apprentices’ compensation.
Take2 Elevate has a mixed-staffing
model of senior industry professionals
coaching and training graduates from the
Take2 program as part of their apprenticeships, as well as an augmented-staffing
model whereby graduates work as contractors at businesses wary about hiring Take2
graduates as full-time employees.
“It’s an easier offering for some employers who may be on the fence to lean in
and take that first step,” Smith says. “If it’s
not working out, we can bring our graduates back into Elevate and find a more appropriate fit for them.”
Smith hopes that Take2 will prevent
reincarceration in New Zealand and chart
a course toward a better rehabilitation
system. Just as valuable as this systems
change is the real-life impact on the lives
of formerly incarcerated people.
“Seeing the people we’ve worked with
flourishing in the industry and giving back
[is] not something that we put a number
on,” he says. “When you’re on that journey
with them and you see them succeeding,
it’s hard for anything else to match.” O
R I NA D I A NE C A BA LLA R is a New Zealand-based
journalist covering tech and its intersections
with science, society, and the environment.
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2:40 PM
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AND
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In collaboration with
Stanford Social Innovation Review,
Stanford University Press is pleased to announce
the creation of a new series,
Stanford Social Innovation Review Books.
Books in the series will examine important topics
across sectors in philanthropy, nonprofits, business,
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18
Stanford Social Innovation Review / Summer 2024
CASE ST UDY
An inside look at one organization
Promoting
a
Culture
of
Caring
in
Education
For the past two decades, the Jed Foundation has led the fight to address the mental health crisis among
American youth. Its story highlights the importance of addressing the cultural causes
of the mental health crisis through systems change.
I
BY ALIS ON BADGETT
N OCTOBER 2021, OFFICIAL ALARM BELLS RANG ON A CRISIS DECADES IN THE MAKING:
018_027_case_study_6_sum24_proofedDA2.indd 18
I L L U S T R AT I O N B Y J U A N B E R N A B E U
“We have witnessed soaring rates of mental health challenges,” read the joint “Declaration of a National
Emergency in Child and Adolescent Mental Health” by the American Academy of Pediatrics, Children’s
Hospital Association, and American Academy of Child and Adolescent Psychiatry. This statement was
followed by an alert from US Surgeon General Vivek Murthy that warned “the future of our country” depends on mitigating the youth mental health crisis. Both statements underscored the long-term
trends behind the spike in mental health problems during the COVID-19 pandemic.
According to the national Healthy Minds Network survey, in 2013 just 17 percent of college students reported
feeling anxiety. This number rose to 31 percent in 2018, while rates of reported depression grew 68 percent over the
same period. At the high school level, one in three students reported persistent feelings of sadness and hopelessness
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CASE ST UDY
20
Stanford Social Innovation Review / Summer 2024
in 2019, a 40 percent increase from 2009, and one in six students
reported making a suicide plan, up 44 percent from 2009. Suicide
rates also increased among 10- to 24-year-olds by 57 percent between 2007 and 2018.
These numbers are not the result of increased awareness or reporting alone, the surgeon general’s alert explained. In addition to
academic stress, today’s students feel pressures from seemingly intractable societal problems, such as climate change, gun violence,
racism, and income inequality. In addition, they are suffering the
effects of social media, which Murthy singled out in a subsequent
advisory as doubling the risk of mental health problems for the
average teenager.
COVID simply exacerbated the ongoing mental health crisis
and exposed the dynamics at play among youth. “The isolation
and dislocation and suffering of young people may not have been
a surprise to child and adolescent mental health clinicians,” says
mental health advocate and former US Rep. Patrick Kennedy. “But
for the rest of the public, COVID woke everybody up to all of these
things.”
At the start of the pandemic in spring 2020, the Jed Foundation, America’s preeminent nonprofit supporting youth mental
health, spoke with a funder about the crisis before them. “A lot of
money is going to move into mental health now,” JED’s CEO, John
MacPhee, recalls the funder saying, “not to shore up nonprofits
fighting to survive, but those that are attempting to meet the moment. Are you going to meet the moment?” the funder asked. “Yes,
we are,” MacPhee replied.
Over the next two years, JED doubled in size, from 40 staffers
to 80, helping 450 colleges support mental health. The foundation
also launched parallel programs for high schools, school districts,
and community colleges, and a policy development arm. Buoyed
by $15 million from MacKenzie Scott in 2022, JED now intends to
triple the number of higher education students it reaches over the
next several years, aiming to support more than 50 percent of colleges and universities.
College administrators consider mental health their numberone problem, says Kevin Kruger, president of NASPA, the association of student affairs administrators in higher education. “John
[MacPhee] can pick up the phone and talk to any, I mean any, college president because they have that awareness and trust,” Kruger
says. “There’s so much noise out there.” In the context of a market
newly flooded with for-profit companies selling telehealth counseling and other services, “JED stands out,” Kruger says. “Because
they’ve been around for 25 years, you know they’re not going away.”
JED’s track record positioned it to capitalize on the mandate
that COVID provided schools to reimagine how and why they
should support student mental health—not just through more
counseling for students in crisis, but through creating a culture
of caring and a system of prevention. Despite its reach, JED is in
some ways still in the early stages of enshrining student well-being
in education. For the foundation, complete success requires shifting the perspectives and practices of students, staff, faculty, and
administrators campus by campus, as well as transforming the systems in which they are embedded.
Since its founding in 2000, JED has encouraged colleges to utilize a comprehensive set of research-based programming, policy,
and public awareness strategies to protect the emotional health
of students and prevent suicide. Over the course of two decades
supporting such work, JED came to recognize that maximizing its
impact required that it employ the same strategies itself, rather
than through intermediaries, for the mental health of all youth.
Today JED employs a holistic, systems change framework that can
serve as a model for other organizations.
D
THE AIR FORCE MODEL
ONNA AND PHIL SATOW lost their son Jed to suicide in
1998, while he was home on winter break as a sophomore at the University of Arizona. “We did not think
that suicide was in our lives, in our future,” Donna says.
“So when this happened to us, we were devastated beyond belief.”
Raised in bucolic Princeton, New Jersey, Jed was the youngest of three children in a happy, close-knit family. He was smart,
funny, and well-liked by his friends. During high school, he could
sometimes be withdrawn, impulsive, and angry—but nothing out
of the ordinary for a teenager, the Satows assumed. Jed also had a
learning disability, which played a role in his choosing the University of Arizona, for its renowned academic support program for
students with attention and learning challenges.
“Neither one of us had any knowledge, really, about suicide,”
says Donna, even though Phil was working with psychiatrists as
executive vice president of Forest Laboratories. “There was a lot
of conversation about drugs and drug prevention on a very simple
level. … But there wasn’t a lot of talk about suicide prevention and
what depression might look like in adolescence.” In Jed’s case, it
would have helped Donna and Phil to know depression’s link to
learning challenges and how it often presents as anger in adolescence. “We began to think we weren’t alone. We couldn’t have
been the only ones.”
The Satows researched the issue and discovered that suicide
was the second leading cause of death among college students.
“We had to know what happened,” Donna says. “How can we prevent this from happening? Because this is a preventable tragedy.”
The Satows looked to Jed’s life at the University of Arizona for
answers. They learned that a number of people had been worried
The Satows discovered that suicide was the second leading cause of
death among college students. “We had to know what happened,” Donna says.
“Because this is a preventable tragedy.”
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Stanford Social Innovation Review / Summer 2024
21
JED and MTVU launched the Half of Us campaign—an allusion
to a survey that found that 50 percent of college students had anxiety and
depression that disrupted their academic or personal lives.
about Jed, including his friends, teachers, and fraternity brothers.
He might have been identified as an acute risk had those around
him known what to look for and how to intervene. The Satows
met with the university president, who was emotional as he spoke.
“What would you have me do,” he said, “in a school of more than
30,000 students?” The Satows left the meeting intent upon answering his question.
They began by convening a group of experts on suicide in Washington, D.C. The team included Lanny Berman, executive director
of the American Association of Suicidology; professor David Brent
of the University of Pittsburgh, an expert in child and adolescent
psychiatry; clinical psychologist Kay Redfield Jamison, author of
the memoir An Unquiet Mind; and representatives of the Suicide
Prevention Resource Center (SPRC). The group identified a promising model implemented by the US Air Force that had reduced
suicides, as well as rates of homicide and domestic violence. The
approach was comprehensive and employed integrated strategies,
including training, education, prevention services, policies, and
protocols, intended to create a culture of caring.
They encouraged the Satows to consider adapting the model
to college campuses. Like the US Air Force, colleges and universities are circumscribed communities, with their own leadership
structure, culture, policies, and constituencies. In this way, they
offered a ready scaffolding to protect emotional health and prevent suicide.
T
JED’S COMPREHENSIVE APPROACH
WO YEARS AFTER THEIR SON’S DEATH, the Satows
founded the Jed Foundation, with a vision of codifying and promulgating a framework for suicide prevention on college campuses, grounded in the Air Force’s
proven approach. From the start, the Satows were committed to
scale; they had no interest in working with a handful of colleges
but were resolute on shifting the culture and practice of all American colleges. In collaboration with the SPRC, they developed what
became “JED’s Comprehensive Approach to Mental Health Promotion and Suicide Prevention for Colleges and Universities.” It
includes seven core strategies, with dozens of associated tactics.
Two of these strategies focus on protecting emotional health:
the first, developing life skills, the second, promoting social connectedness. Life skills such as resilience, grit, maintaining physical health,
and the ability to regulate emotion are correlated with both mental
health and academic success. Related tactics range from mindfulness training to encouraging exercise by making access to a fitness
center free for all students. Research shows that loneliness and isolation increase risk for mental health problems. Equity and inclusion
programs help promote social connectedness, along with training
residential and academic advisors to reach out to isolated students.
018_027_case_study_6_sum24_proofedDA2.indd 21
Strategies three and four focus on promoting early intervention: identifying students at risk and increasing help-seeking behavior.
The majority of students who commit suicide do not access treatment. Tactics to identify students at risk include training those
who interact with students, such as academic advisors, faculty, and
other students, to identify and refer students in need of support
to counseling, as well as incorporating screening tools for mental
health and substance abuse into primary health care. To increase
help-seeking behavior, JED recommends communications campaigns to increase awareness of campus services and to destigmatize accessing help.
Successful intervention presupposes that adequate treatment
is available. Accordingly, the fifth strategy of JED’s framework is
providing mental health and substance misuse services. Related tactics
might include expanding clinic hours and connecting students
with long-term care options in the community. Schools must also
make services available in the context of following crisis management procedures, JED’s sixth strategy. Crisis management tactics
can relate to a single event, such as supporting students after a
suicide, or to ongoing crisis support through, for example, a 24/7
crisis response line. The surest means to prevent suicide remains
restricting the means for suicide, be it limiting access to rooftops,
prescription drugs, or guns where state policies permit; this is the
seventh strategy in JED’s comprehensive framework.
“It took some time for me to understand why a public-health
approach is necessary to this issue,” says Hollie Chessman, director of research and practice for the American Council on Education (ACE). “Colleges and universities want the easy answer. They
want to just put a program in place and call it a day … but it’s not as
easy as that. It’s systemic and very complex,” she says. “I think one
of the great things about the JED model is it takes that complex
thing that has to happen on a campus and makes it more digestible
for people.”
“Sadly, the Jed Foundation was founded because Jed slipped
through the cracks,” says Kruger of NASPA. “That happens all the
time.” The comprehensiveness of JED’s model sets the foundation
apart, Kruger says, as well as their dual focus on providing resources to both campus professionals and students.
“Campus administrators struggle with how to reach students,”
Kruger says. “This has been a hallmark of my entire 45-year career.”
I
MARKETING TO STUDENTS
N 2004, Jed’s fraternity brother Ron Gibori, who was engaged
in JED’s founding, suggested an important idea for connecting with students in the foundation’s early days: MTVU, a
cable station on college campuses, could be an ideal vehicle
to reach students. MTV had just concluded its Rock the Vote campaign and clearly knew how to mobilize youth with an important
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22
message. Gibori and Donna Satow set about
trying to engage MTV and enlisted the help of
a JED board member, Larry Lieberman, who
had been vice president of marketing at MTV
Music Service.
While their initial inquiry was met with
interest by MTV, launching a national campaign would cost a lot of money for a new
nonprofit whose expenses totaled $450,000
at the time. But the Satows had a powerful professional and personal network from
Phil’s work in the pharmaceutical industry to
draw on. In the Satows’ SoHo loft in Manhattan, where they moved after Jed’s death, they
invited their friends and colleagues to hear
prominent speakers on salient issues—people like journalist Bob Woodward and former
US Representative and mental health advocate Patrick Kennedy. The night they hosted
Fareed Zakaria, an attendee approached the
Satows with a remarkable offer: They’d support the campaign with a $1 million donation.
In 2006, JED and MTVU launched the Half
of Us campaign—an allusion to the results of
a survey that found that 50 percent of college
students had anxiety and depression that disrupted their academic or personal lives. Half
of those surveyed also didn’t know where to
get help on campus, and 70 percent said they
were too embarrassed to ask. The campaign
featured videos of students as well as celebrities such as singer Mary J. Blige and Pete Wentz of Fall Out Boy,
who shared their personal struggles with mental health in an effort
to destigmatize and normalize help-seeking behavior. The videos
directed students to a website with screening tools and resources.
“We heard from fans how these stories literally saved their
lives,” says Noopur Agarwal, who joined MTV in 2007 as vice president of social impact. “These are artists that seemed to have it all
… and yet they were also struggling to the point of suicide.” Half of
Us netted a Peabody Award in 2008, along with an Emmy nomination. “It was really about culture change, really shifting the culture
around how we think and talk about mental health … infusing mental health themes into popular culture,” Agarwal says. “JED is truly
unique in … the way they prioritize culture change.”
JED went on to launch additional student-facing campaigns
over the years, including “Love Is Louder” in 2010 with MTV, in response to online bullying, and “Seize the Awkward” in 2018, in partnership with the American Foundation for Suicide Prevention and
the Ad Council. While nonprofits often cook up public awareness
campaigns in conference rooms based largely on the assumptions
of staff, JED conducted extensive market research to hone their
message and marketing channels. In research for Seize the Awkward, for example, JED found that nearly every 16- to 24-year-old
has a friend struggling with mental health, but they’re reluctant
to share that information with those who might help, fearing that
disclosure would betray the friendship. Seize the Awkward targets
018_027_case_study_6_sum24_proofedDA2.indd 22
From left to right: Donna Satow, former US Rep. Patrick Kennedy,
youth advocate Lauren Ashley Tipton, and
Phil Satow attend the 11th annual JED Foundation Gala
on June 7, 2012, in New York City.
these potential help givers, empowering youth to help friends obtain the support they need. Impact tracking by the Ad Council in
2023 found that 50 percent of surveyed youth were aware of Seize
the Awkward and were significantly more likely than those who
were not familiar with it to talk to a friend about what they’re going through (80 percent versus 67 percent), to encourage a friend
to seek help from a mental health professional (68 percent versus
50 percent), and to contact a crisis hotline to learn how to help a
friend (47 percent versus 27 percent).
D
STRUGGLING TO SCALE
ESPITE THE HIGH PROFILE THAT JED quickly estab-
lished by 2010 as a preeminent nonprofit in its field
only a decade after its founding, its operating budget was still just $1 million a year, with a staff of six.
And while JED was a nimble, entrepreneurial organization, it was
nowhere near achieving the Satows’ vision of all colleges implementing the foundation’s comprehensive approach. JED offered
best-in-class, evidence-based resources to colleges, but implementation was up to them. While JED staff had a strong reputation
with counseling offices, they had fewer relationships with college
leadership—presidents and deans of student affairs, whose active
engagement would prove critical to implementing campus-wide
strategies. Furthermore, most of JED’s supporters, its board and
funders, were associated with the Satows.
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CASE ST UDY
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Phil and Donna began to think about JED’s future and how
best to sustain and redouble its impact. Phil asked a former colleague, John MacPhee, to assess the situation. Satow had hired
MacPhee in 1995 as vice president of marketing for Forest Laboratories, a pharmaceutical company. There, among other products,
MacPhee oversaw the launch of depression and anxiety medications. When Satow contacted MacPhee about the Jed Foundation,
he did so knowing that MacPhee was considering changing his career to public health.
Earlier in life, MacPhee had intended to pursue engineering,
but he ran into trouble as an undergrad at Columbia University.
One semester he skipped classes altogether and flunked out, unable to cope with what he now sees was anxiety and potentially
depression. Eventually, caring adults at Columbia helped him get
back on track. When MacPhee returned to school, a pharmaceutical company was willing to pay for it.
“I just put one foot in front of the other and worked hard … to
prove to myself that I could,” ascending the ranks over 20 years
from pharmaceutical sales to leadership. “And then at a certain
point, I was like, okay, whatever I was trying to prove, I feel like I
proved.” He began to feel like his career “was about making money,
23
framework. However, some of the schools that qualified—especially the more prestigious schools—didn’t want public acknowledgment. All schools that engaged JED wanted to better support their
students, but mental health issues were still not widely discussed.
Some feared that a JED designation might change their applicant
mix by attracting more students seeking mental health support. So
JED waited on announcing their seals of approval until it reached
a critical mass of more than 30 qualifying schools.
W
BECOMING A CHANGE
ORGANIZATION
HILE PLEASED BY THE REACH OF their designa-
tion program, MacPhee saw a troubling pattern:
Colleges that qualified were better resourced,
skewing four-year residential Northeastern. “It
felt like there was an equity issue around this seal of approval,”
MacPhee says. “We hadn’t figured out what the programmatic interventions should be.”
MacPhee and his team had started talking with the Poses Family Foundation, a New York City-based philanthropy with a strong
focus on learning disabilities and capacity building for nonprofits.
P H O T O C O U R T E S Y O F T H E J E D F O U N D AT I O N
“Data is particularly helpful in the equity work,” Mullen says, “because it
allows us to hear not just what people think is happening, but what seems to be,
from the student’s perspective, working or not.”
and quarterly earnings, and maximizing profit,” he says, “and I felt
like we were not working on making the health-care system better.”
MacPhee enrolled in Columbia University’s master’s in publichealth program and began serving on nonprofit boards. When
Satow asked him for input on JED’s future, MacPhee was eager
to help. MacPhee saw JED as “a first mover” in the field of youth
mental health—a pioneer that could continue to lead the field in
new directions. “The space was wide open,” MacPhee said.
He was especially intrigued by a new initiative that the foundation intended to launch, a designation program that would assess
and provide colleges with JED’s seal of approval for implementing their seven-part mental health framework. However, he also
thought JED was far too small to have an impact at scale. He recommended the foundation commit to raising at least $10 million
a year and offered to lead JED as CEO if the board could make the
commitment. They did, and MacPhee became CEO in 2011.
Early in his tenure, MacPhee pushed to expand JED’s mission
from serving just college students to teens and young adults in
general, to reflect JED’s commitment to reach a broader audience.
MacPhee thought a more inclusive mission was especially critical in
light of data that shows that suicide rates among college students
are lower than those of non-college students of the same age.
He also set about operationalizing the concept of a designation
program. By 2013, they’d assessed 65 colleges for the JED seal of approval, using a rubric to establish fidelity to JED’s comprehensive
018_027_case_study_6_sum24_proofedDA2.indd 23
Its founding president, Shelly London, challenged JED to think
about whether they were a knowledge organization or a change
organization. “Her thesis was, you can’t get schools to implement
this the way you want without becoming a change organization,”
MacPhee says.
Like MacPhee, London came to nonprofit work from a successful corporate career, hers focused on turnaround strategy and
culture change. “This may not be a great analogy, but I saw them
as a family business,” London says of her initial perception of the
Jed Foundation. “I saw them as almost a sole proprietorship at a
significant, critical juncture.”
Her due diligence centered on understanding the vision of
JED’s leadership and how much they were willing to change in
order to achieve it. “To me they were great because they were in
curiosity mode,” London says, “I saw their growth mindset, the
leadership willingness to experiment and work hard and get out of
their comfort zone. They wanted the impact.”
This didn’t mean they didn’t disagree. “We had moments where
we went back and forth a lot, and that’s good,” London says. While
everyone on the JED board ultimately embraced adding what they
call “boots on the ground” support, it took roughly a year of discussion to work through the details of what became JED Campus.
“There were concerns about expense and sustainability,”
MacPhee says of the ambitious initiative. “Of course, it’s very helpful when you’re the ED or the CEO to have a funder with your
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Stanford Social Innovation Review / Summer 2024
board if you’re trying to socialize an idea that feels really big,”
MacPhee adds.
“We wanted to work with 4,000 schools,” recalls Phil Satow
about their deliberations. “So we wanted a model that we were able
to replicate without having to physically go school by school by
school.” Ultimately they settled on an advisory approach, according to which JED assesses the state of campus policy and practice
relative to their seven-part framework, provides targeted technical assistance to priority areas of improvement, and gives coaching
support through a campus advisor over the course of four years.
JED Campus launched in 2014 with two campus advisors,
growing steadily year over year, reaching 200 campuses by 2018.
By then, colleges were publicly promoting their engagement with
JED. MacPhee describes this progression as “a slow, steady build”
at the same time that mental health challenges were becoming
more acute on campus.
A
FROM PROMISING
TO PROVEN
S DEMAND FOR JED CAMPUS GREW, so too did JED’s
funding, enabling the foundation to start subsidizing
institutions with limited resources. By 2017, JED was
a $5 million organization, and in 2018, its revenue
jumped to $9 million, with the support of a multimillion-dollar
grant from Pivotal Ventures to help JED scale through enhanced
evaluation and related infrastructure.
“They said, ‘Listen,’” MacPhee recalls,
“‘we’ve been studying the space, and JED
Campus is a very promising program, but
we don’t consider it a proven program. We
want to help you get over the line to prove it,
and to really collect data in a more rigorous
way … so that you’re then postured to scale
after 2020.’”
“It was a very organic-type process,”
Michelle Mullen says of the early JED Campus program. Mullen is JED’s chief design
and impact officer. She joined JED in 2014
after the New York-based Poses Family Foundation recommended that JED hire such a
position. “I recognized that different schools
may have been getting very different things
and calling it the same thing,” she says. “You
could not actually scale.” Over time, JED
standardized campus planning, support,
and evaluation. This meant that previously
optional elements, such as a campus-based
mental health strategic plan and the Healthy
Minds student survey, became requirements
for participating colleges.
In addition to anxiety and depression,
the Healthy Minds survey captures rates of
suicidal ideation, loneliness, substance use,
and service utilization, as well as student
perception of stigma associated with mental health issues on campus. It also collects
018_027_case_study_6_sum24_proofedDA2_crx.indd 24
demographic information on students, enabling JED to evaluate
how identity affects mental health, who accesses services, and who
feels a part of campus life. An analysis of national Healthy Minds
data found similar rates of mental health issues among students
of different races but also that white students were far more likely
to seek treatment. Students of color were also more likely to feel
isolated at college.
“Data is particularly helpful in the equity work,” Mullen says,
“because it allows us to hear not just what people think is happening, but what seems to be, from the student’s perspective, working
or not.” JED partnered with the Steve Fund in 2017 to produce an
Equity in Mental Health Framework, which offers colleges strategies for addressing racial disparities in mental health surfaced by
their Healthy Minds survey, such as hiring counselors of color and
providing culturally competent care.
From a baseline self-assessment of policy and practice, the student survey, and a site visit conducted by a campus advisor, JED
rates colleges in each of its framework’s seven domains on a fourpoint scale. This evaluation, in turn, informs the development of a
strategic plan with a progression of steps in each domain. The JED
campus advisor uses the plan to guide implementation with help
from JED’s subject matter experts and evaluates progress quarterly. Throughout the process, the campus advisor meets monthly
with designated college co-leads for the work; they manage interdisciplinary teams responsible for developing and implementing
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Zainab Okolo, JED senior vice president of policy, advocacy,
and government relations, addresses the
inaugural JED Policy Summit on October 30, 2023,
in Washington, D.C.
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strategic priorities. These teams might include, for example, representatives from public safety and buildings and grounds, along
with the provost’s and president’s offices.
Jen Jacobsen, executive director of the Laurie Hamre Center
for Health and Wellness at Macalester College in St. Paul, Minnesota, says it was this interdisciplinary approach, what she describes
as “a four-year framework and tools for building not just collaboration across campus, but coalition-building with campus partners,”
that attracted Macalester to JED Campus. Jacobsen says a collaborative approach is critical to institutionalizing change, so it’s not
dependent on any one individual or department.
Audrey Seligman, a Macalester graduate who now serves as the
health promotion specialist for the college, led an interdisciplinary team to reduce the means for suicide on campus. She, together
with the departments of residential life, operations and maintenance, and public safety, walked the campus, analyzing how to restrict the means for suicide at 45 different places. JED provided
guidance on what to look for, which the team used as a springboard
for developing a comprehensive plan. “It’s easy to come up with a
lot of big ideas, but if we’re not careful, the implementation always
falls back to the health and wellness team,” Jacobsen says. “A lot of
the JED process work relies on the idea that mental health is part
of everyone’s work on a college campus.”
Without such sustained, campus-wide engagement, colleges
may struggle to implement their strategic plan goals. The Univer-
25
No JED campus completes the agenda for all seven domains
during their four-year engagement. Macalester, for example,
completed JED Campus in 2021 but is still working to educate
the campus on the relationship between mental health and substance use in a state that recently legalized cannabis. “It’s a long
game,” Jacobsen says. At the end of year three, colleges complete the self-assessment and student survey again, enabling
JED to track changes in policy and practice and to analyze the
relationship between systems-level changes and student outcomes at a college campus and across the portfolio of JED Campus affiliates.
Darcy Gruttadaro, chief innovation officer for the National Alliance on Mental Illness (NAMI), believes the broader field could
benefit significantly from what JED has learned. Gruttadaro joined
NAMI in 2000, the year JED was founded, as director of NAMI’s
Child and Adolescent Action Center. “I would like to see them
put out research focused on the impact of programs they offer,”
she says, “letting the world know what works well and supporting
other organizations … in expanding that work.”
In 2020, JED released a comprehensive evaluation of systemslevel changes at JED Campus colleges and is set to release a followup report on student outcomes. According to Mullen, preliminary
analysis of this data shows that the more progress a campus makes
on their strategic plan strategies, the more student outcomes improve. Statistically significant impacts on students include greater
P H O T O C O U R T E S Y O F T H E J E D F O U N D AT I O N
Faculty trained as academics may feel especially ill-equipped
to support students, but they chose to work with students in a college
environment—not, for example, at a think tank.
sity of Tennessee at Martin, a rural campus of the UT system, engaged JED in 2021 following a suicide on campus and in the local
community. At the time, UT Martin was the only campus in the UT
system that was not part of JED Campus. Jenifer Hart, clinical coordinator of Student Health and Counseling Services at UT Martin,
serves as co-lead for the JED Campus work. UT Martin prioritized
enhancing communication to the student body about available
counseling resources and creating a formal crisis response and a
24/7 crisis response number. Both were critical steps forward, Hart
says, but she’s disappointed that they haven’t made more progress
on the other elements of their strategic plan. Hart looks to UT’s
flagship campus in Knoxville and wishes she could implement some
of their initiatives at Martin. “But they have a wealth of resources
and staff. We don’t … that’s our biggest downfall.”
Most of the action steps JED recommends are not financially
expensive so much as time intensive. For this reason, Hart especially appreciates the dedicated support of the JED Campus advisor. But she feels that making more progress at UT Martin would
require dedicating at least half of her time to driving systems
change forward, when she’s already managing a counseling center
at full capacity.
018_027_case_study_6_sum24_proofedDA2.indd 25
knowledge of mental health resources; lower levels of shame related to seeking help; and reduced rates of anxiety, depression, suicidal ideation, and suicide attempts.
In analyzing the data, Mullen was surprised to find that no one
change disproportionately impacts student outcomes. “It’s the
accumulated effect that changes the student body,” she explains.
Student graduation and retention rates also improve with implementation of a JED Campus plan. “If students feel better, they do
better,” Mullen says.
ENGAGING THE ACADEMIC SIDE
D
OF THE HOUSE
relationship between mental
health and educational and institutional success
is particularly important to share with faculty
and staff who may see their educational mission
as distinct from mental health objectives, rather than interdependent. Jacobsen used Healthy Minds survey data to help
Macalester’s teaching and learning center understand the relationship. For example, Macalester’s survey revealed a correlation between students with financial challenges and the
ATA SHOWING THE
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number of days that emotional stress impacted their academic
performance. Such data indicate the importance of faculty getting to know students, Jacobsen says, in order to guide them
to appropriate resources. “The answer might not always be referred to counseling,” she says.
“Let’s be real,” says Chessman of ACE, “you could have
one-on-one [counselors] for all of your students in crisis; that’s
never going to fix your problem, because it’s systemic.” Chessman
believes “the real change at these colleges and universities isn’t
going to happen until you get the academic side of the house on
board.” For this reason, Chessman thinks a priority for JED going
forward ought to be “honing their message” for faculty, provosts—
“the academic side of the house.”
“If you work on a college campus … everybody’s on the front
line of the mental health crisis,” Kruger of NASPA says. “Nobody came into this field thinking that they were going to be
necessarily in that position, but more and more, that’s the job.”
Faculty trained as academics may feel especially ill-equipped to
support students, but they chose to work with students in a college environment—not, for example, at a think tank, says Kruger.
“People don’t realize the positive impact they can have by a
P
E X P A N D I N G T O K - 12 A N D
POLICY MAKERS
ART OF JED’S “well-being upstream approach” entails
reaching students before they enter college. In 2021,
JED launched a parallel program for high schools after
five years of contemplating the move. As with JED Campus, early interest in JED High School skewed to exclusive private
schools. But unlike their 2013 program launch, in 2021 JED not only
was intent on engaging public schools from the start but also now
had the fundraising and marketing capacity to make it possible.
JED received grants from several funders to implement JED High
School in diverse locations, from Montana to Colorado to Texas.
With 24,000 high schools, JED quickly recognized that scale
demanded a different approach. Engaging schools one by one
would take too long, and besides, high school principals simply
don’t have the authority of a college president. JED would have to
work at the district level to succeed.
In 2023, JED announced a collaboration with AASA, The School
Superintendents Association, to launch a “District Comprehensive
Approach.” Where a decade prior, it took several years to develop
JED must rely on others to help students gain agency. Its future
success depends in part on their school and university partners imparting a
civic commitmentto students to meet the moment we’re in.
018_027_case_study_6_sum24_proofedDA2_crx.indd 26
the infrastructure to systematically evaluate and improve upon
impact at the college level, JED approached proving out its district
model with rigor from the start. Through a request for proposal
(RFP) process, JED selected 16 K-12 districts in rural, urban, and
suburban areas of 14 states to participate in a four-year pilot, the
results of which will position the district program for scale.
In addition, with the surge in mental problems during the pandemic and the awareness it generated of long-standing trends,
states began to make significant investments in mental health,
with implications for both K-12 districts and higher education.
Zainab Okolo, who joined JED in 2023 as senior vice president of
policy, advocacy, and government relations, is acutely aware of
how important it is to use this funding wisely and prove the impact, in order to sustain funding. Too often, she knows, policy is
passed and implemented poorly.
“When it comes to mental health and suicide prevention, that
simply cannot be,” Okolo says, “data will continue to shame us if
it is.” With its programmatic and evaluative infrastructure, the Jed
Foundation may be uniquely well positioned to facilitate a positive feedback loop between policy development, implementation,
evaluation of impact, and advocacy.
To that end, in August 2023, JED launched a learning collaborative with the State Higher Education Executive Officers Association (SHEEO). Through an RFP process, JED and SHEEO
selected five states to participate in a 15-month project to develop
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simple conversation.” Kruger points to JED’s “Faculty Guide
to Supporting Student Mental Health” as a valuable resource.
Jacobsen also helped develop recommendations for “low effort” ways that faculty can support student well-being. An example she offers is setting 9:00 p.m. deadlines to discourage allnighters. “It cannot feel like one additional course prep to care
for student well-being,” she says. Faculty “don’t want to, nor
are they qualified to, nor do we want them to, act in any kind
of counseling role.” But “community-level challenges” require
“community responses,” she says.
Jacobsen recalls Macalester’s medical director once saying
to her, “What if college … were expected to be a well-being additive experience? What if you went to college and expected that
you would thrive and … add to your understanding of your own
well-being?” Jacobsen says, “I just thought … we can’t individually
counsel our way to that. … But we can, on college campuses, have
enormous influence over the culture our students live in.” That requires faculty, staff, and administrators alike to prioritize student
well-being.
Kruger appreciates that JED is focused not just on aiding students in crisis, but on what he calls “a well-being upstream approach” for all students, which he defines as “helping adolescents
in that coming-of-age part of their life manage the life that is in
front of them, which includes social media and exams and stress
and all kinds of things.”
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P H O T O C O U R T E S Y O F T H E J E D F O U N D AT I O N
JED CEO John MacPhee (center) and Vice President of Social
Impact at MTV Entertainment Noopur
Agarwal (right) speak at the 2014 Clinton Foundation
Health Matters Summit.
and implement state-based student mental health policy, sharing
out findings and recommendations for other states to learn from.
JED’s engagement in policy advocacy was not a foregone conclusion. Until recently, they felt they were simply too small to make an
impact. Ultimately, MacPhee drove the decision, says Mike Satow,
who in 2023 became board chair, taking over the role from his father. With the board’s limited experience in the advocacy realm,
Satow says, its support of the move was “once again in the spirit
of, ‘Let’s give it a try and see how well it works and what the response is’ … but the results, you know, have been really positive.”
In addition to state-level policy, JED is engaged in federal policy
discussions, collaborating with the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, the White House Domestic Policy Council,
the Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration
(SAMHSA), and the RAND Corporation, among others. They’re
also advocating for select federal bills, like the Kids Online Safety
Act, and legislation that would encourage schools to implement
comprehensive mental health planning akin to JED Campus.
E
PA R T O F A B R OA D E R AG E N DA
VEN IF JED SCALES TO every high school and every
university, key drivers of the mental health crisis may
remain intact and well beyond JED’s control. “A lot of
mental health organizations are there for the care and
feeding of their members,” says former US Representative Patrick
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27
Kennedy. “JED has a much more holistic approach. They are part of a team.”
JED participates in the Alignment for
Progress, launched by Kennedy in 2023 to
unite diverse stakeholders—mental health
and substance abuse practitioners, advocates, business leaders, insurance companies, government agencies, and politicians—
around a “90-90-90 in 10 years” strategy:
getting 90 percent of Americans screened for
mental health issues, 90 percent of those in
need into treatment, with 90 percent of them
living full lives.
“Kids today basically say some version of,
‘I’m completely stressed out. I’m angry, I’m
depressed, I’m on edge because of school
shootings, climate change, loss of reproductive rights, police violence, racism, microaggressions, etc.,’” MacPhee says. “‘And while I
don’t feel okay, I feel that my response is appropriate. The world’s on fire.’” JED can help
students cope with the emotional toll of their
reality, but the organization must rely on others to help students gain agency over it. JED’s
future success depends in part on their school
and university partners imparting a civic commitment to students to meet the moment
we’re in.
Some psychologists argue that the negative impact of social media on youth anxiety
and depression dwarfs other factors; here
too, the answer is not only to change the practice of students and
social media companies, but also to educate ethical future tech
leaders, rather than having to regulate ourselves out of preventable crises. Schools can build on the foundation that JED has laid
in helping students reflect on and enhance their well-being, by inspiring and preparing students to enhance the well-being of others
well beyond the confines of campus. The two are mutually reinforcing agendas. As US Surgeon General Murthy reminded us last
year in yet another alert, this one about the “epidemic of loneliness” extending to American adulthood, “There is nothing more
fundamental to the health and well-being of people in our country
than ensuring that we are building a moral and spiritual foundation that guides how we interact with each other. Toward that goal,
service is one of the greatest antidotes to loneliness.”
Surveys show that trust in higher education is at an all-time
low. In some ways, higher education is facing the same question
posed to the Jed Foundation 15 years ago: Are you a knowledge organization or a change organization? Universities might do well to
pursue a comprehensive model of public service education, recognizing from the start what JED had to learn along the way: Knowing and espousing what change requires will not alter student outcomes, but a systems approach to change will. O
A LI S O N BA D G E T T is associate dean for public service and director
of the Priscilla King Gray Public Service Center at MIT.
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Where
Strategic
Philanthropy
Went
Wrong
Dramatic advances in the scale and sophistication of
strategic philanthropy have not improved societal conditions at a national level.
We propose empowerment philanthropy as a new approach to fostering
political and economic self-determination by supporting people
in finding their own solutions and ensuring an
effective multiracial democracy.
THE US MODEL OF CH A R ITA BLE GI V ING H AS CR EATED A ND SUSTA INED SOME OF THE WOR LD’S
FINEST ACA DEMIC, CULTUR A L , A ND MEDICA L INSTITU TIONS. When it comes to solving our so-
ciety’s most urgent challenges, however, strategic philanthropy—philanthropic initiatives intended
to create lasting solutions to societal problems—has been astonishingly ineffective. Over the past
four decades, US philanthropic giving has expanded exponentially, while most social or environmental
problems have persisted or worsened. This failure of strategic philanthropy, we believe, is rooted in
a set of assumptions that originated more than a century ago and still shape our nonprofit sector today: that the beneficiaries of philanthropic support are incapable of solving their own problems, that
wealthy donors have the wisdom and incentive to solve society’s many challenges, and that the social
sector is an effective alternative to government in building an equitable and sustainable society.
Mounting evidence suggests that these assumptions are wrong. Individuals, even those living
in poverty, are able to improve their lives with modest amounts of unrestricted cash payments and
BY MARK KRAMER & STEVE PHILLIPS
Illustrations by Matt Chase
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support from their peers.1 Wealthy donors often lack the lived experience to understand the problems they attempt to solve and
may sidestep deeper solutions that undermine their own wealth
and privilege.2 Only government has the capacity to address social
and environmental problems on a national scale.
Philanthropy simply cannot compensate for the ongoing failure of our government to meet the needs of its entire population.
However, recent success engaging voters in Georgia, Arizona, and
other states demonstrates that philanthropy can mobilize voters
and empower the population to elect a more representative government that passes policies to benefit everyone. Philanthropy
can also foster self-determination through universal basic income
(UBI) payments, economic facilitation, and peer-driven change
that encourages individual success while neutralizing destructive
and racist social narratives that impede progress. Such an approach, which we call empowerment philanthropy, would require
a profound shift away from the current model of strategic philanthropy, which assumes funders will discover, evaluate, and scale
innovative solutions implemented by nonprofit organizations.
Instead of making choices for other people, philanthropists must
learn to empower individuals economically and politically to make
choices for themselves and then celebrate their successes to inspire others, thus opening a far more pivotal role in fast-tracking
widespread, lasting social and environmental progress.
to underwrite an open-ended process for change. This thinking first
emerged 20 years ago in “Leading Boldly,” a 2004 Stanford Social
Innovation Review (SSIR) article coauthored with Ron Heifetz
and John Kania about adaptive leadership, which argued that the
funder’s role is to create and sustain the conditions through which
stakeholders can generate their own solutions. And in 2011, “Collective Impact,” coauthored with Kania, demonstrated how lasting
change depends less on individual programs and more on continuous collaboration across sectors. Subsequent publications also observed how deeply embedded systemic racism and other forms of
discrimination maintain the status quo and how false social narratives—widely accepted racist and sexist explanations that purport
to justify that status quo—can mislead philanthropists.3
More recently, however, Mark had to acknowledge that philanthropy’s efforts on many issues seemed to be overwhelmed by
the scale and immediate effects of government laws, policies, and
court decisions. The Affordable Care Act and COVID-19 relief, for
example, showed how government can rapidly alleviate sickness
and poverty for millions of people. At the opposite end of the ideological spectrum, conservative politicians and judges, together
with corporate lobbyists, have been astonishingly successful at undoing decades of social progress on issues such as racial equity, reproductive rights, LGBTQ+ rights, poverty, child labor, gun safety,
voter protections, and environmental regulation. These setbacks
Philanthropy could never create a more equitable and sustainable society
without facing hard facts about its inherent limitations and dramatically increasing its
engagement with the political process. We need a radically different approach
to philanthropy to reverse the ongoing destruction of our democracy.
This is not an easy conclusion for us to reach as longtime proponents and practitioners of strategic philanthropy. For more than
25 years, Mark researched, published, and consulted on ways to
make philanthropy more effective, while Steve and his late wife,
Susan, have been major philanthropic donors.
For Mark, serving as a trustee of three small family foundations
established by his grandparents and parents, as well as serving on
several nonprofit boards and planning funder conferences as a twoterm chair of the Jewish Funders Network, led him on a search to
understand why philanthropy could do so much good and yet didn’t
seem to be solving our society’s problems. In the 1990s, he began
working to improve the practice of philanthropy, confident that
funding effective nonprofit programs was the key to social progress. Mark’s thinking, along with that of his former colleagues at the
global nonprofit-consulting firm FSG, continued to evolve, moving
beyond individual programs to develop well-researched funder
strategies for systems change that could lead to better outcomes—
and indeed they do. Unfortunately, even with those improved outcomes, strategic philanthropy didn’t bring about the scale of change
needed to create an equitable and sustainable society.
Mark long ago concluded that philanthropists’ most effective
role might not be to devise solutions to societal problems but rather
028_037_strategic philanthropy_proofedDA_.sum2024.indd 30
persuaded Mark that philanthropy could never create a more equitable and sustainable society without facing hard facts about its
inherent limitations and dramatically increasing its engagement
with the political process. After reading Steve’s latest book, How
We Win the Civil War, which described the need and opportunity
to create a true multiracial democracy, he reached out to Steve to
better understand how philanthropy could influence politics.
Steve is most known as a regular columnist for The Nation
and The Guardian, and as the New York Times bestselling author
of Brown Is the New White, which argued that, instead of focusing
nearly all voter outreach efforts on white swing-state voters, the
rapid growth of the voting population of color has created a new
majority: voters of color and progressive white voters together
make up 51 percent of all eligible voters. Steve is also the founder
of Democracy in Color, an organization focused on political strategy and analysis at the intersection of race and politics.
As someone whose formative years were shaped by the civil
rights movement, Steve has always been drawn to civil rights and
politics. He grew up attending a Black church, where his grandfather was a minister. In the 1960s, Steve’s parents tried to move
into a predominantly white neighborhood in Cleveland Heights,
Ohio. When the owner of a house they wanted refused to sell to
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them, Steve’s parents worked with a white civil rights activist to
purchase it and then deed it over to them. And in 1984, as a student
activist and head of the Black Student Union at Stanford University, Steve was inspired to join Jesse Jackson’s presidential campaign
and its Rainbow Coalition platform, which first showed him the
power of messaging, organizing, and voter mobilization.
For the past two decades, Steve and his late wife, Susan Sandler,
have been major philanthropists in the areas of electoral politics
and racial justice. In 2005, they were part of the inaugural efforts
by many of the country’s largest progressive donors to coordinate
their giving through the creation of the Democracy Alliance. Steve
was also involved in the financing and creation of several progressive institutions, including ProPublica and the Center for American Progress, the nation’s largest progressive think tank. In 2006,
he also created the California Donor Table, a circle of donors who
work together to invest in communities of color. A few years before
Susan passed away after a battle with cancer in 2022, she and Steve
invested more than $20 million in racial justice groups as part of
the Susan Sandler Fund’s ongoing $200 million commitment.
Steve and Susan’s investment in progressive civic groups has
demonstrated how philanthropy’s involvement in government and
electoral politics can create a more equitable and just society. Their
support for Living United for Change in Arizona in 2016 helped to
pass a ballot measure that raised the minimum wage to $12 per
hour. Their funding of the New Virginia Majority helped mobilize
voters to elect a Democratic majority that, in 2019, expanded Medicaid eligibility to more than 400,000 low-income Virginians and,
in 2021, increased minimum wages for 800,000 people.
All of his work and experience have led Steve to recognize that
a radically different approach to philanthropy is needed in this moment when our nation must overcome—to quote Pulitzer Prizewinning journalist and author Isabel Wilkerson—“the toxic pathogens that have been unleashed into the world” and reverse the ongoing destruction of not just societal norms but our democracy itself.
T
Carnegie’s False Premise
HE URTEXT OF modern-day strategic philanthropy, Andrew Carnegie’s Gospel of Wealth, published
in 1889, reveals the paternalism embedded in current approaches to strategic philanthropy. Carnegie
wrote that “wealth passing through the hands of
the few can be made a much more potent force for
the elevation of our race than if distributed in small sums to the
people themselves,” where it “would have been wasted in the indulgence of appetite.” He concluded that “the man of wealth [must
become] the … agent for his poorer brethren, bringing to their service his superior wisdom, experience and ability to administer, doing for them better than they would or could do for themselves.”
In short, according to Carnegie, the “poorer brethren” cannot be expected to know what they need to improve their lot or
be trusted to use unrestricted funds responsibly. Neither can the
solutions be left to government bureaucrats. Instead, those with
power and wealth are best positioned to devise solutions.
Carnegie’s perspective is further reinforced by the myth of the
American dream, wherein all people can achieve financial success
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31
by pulling themselves up by their own bootstraps and poverty is
a matter of personal responsibility, so the poor have only themselves to blame. The notion is so pervasive that many people living
in poverty even internalize it, undermining their sense of agency
and belief in themselves.4
Racism saturates this narrative of personal responsibility. In
the United States, those living in poverty are disproportionately
people of color, despite the fact that the US economy has always
depended on their labor to create white prosperity.5 As Steve writes
in Brown Is the New White, “since the beginning of US history people of color were placed in poverty as a group and kept in poverty
by government-sanctioned and government-promoted policies …
[while] whites were lifted up, privileged, and protected as a group.”
Pulling yourself up by your bootstraps is impossible when systemic racism has cemented your boots to the floor.
Most philanthropists in this country still model themselves after Carnegie, whether they know it or not. His view shaped the
entire structure of our trillion-dollar nonprofit sector, in which
resources go to programs, rather than people, and it is up to
well-meaning (and mostly white), wealthy donors to decide which
programs to fund. Subsequent publications on strategic philanthropy reinforce his idea that funders can best design interventions to change societal conditions.6 But was Carnegie right?
Many philanthropists have implicitly accepted the idea that
their financial success in business reflects superior wisdom that
is transferable to leading social change. But where is the evidence
that skills in business and social progress are interchangeable? Expertise does not often transfer across different domains: Einstein
was no good at painting, and Picasso couldn’t do math. Carnegie
would never have turned for business advice to his contemporary
Mahatma Gandhi, a legendary leader of social change, so why do
we assume Carnegie understood how to create a better society—
or that today’s billionaires do? There is a profound difference between the command-and-control approach that drives commercial
success and the combination of skills, empathy, and lived experience needed to inspire, engage, and empower others to mobilize
effective and enduring social change.
Carnegie’s solutions did not include changing his business practices, thus protecting his own wealth and privilege. Indeed, one can
always help this or that charity improve conditions for the people it
serves without confronting the broader conditions that created the
underlying social problems. One can donate to a food bank without addressing the relationship between low wages and corporate
profitability or between safety-net programs and tax revenues. In
short, when social progress is led by the wealthy, philanthropy can
all too easily act as a placebo, offering well-intentioned help at the
margins while diverting attention from more fundamental reforms
that might be less palatable to donors. This is the insidious and unintended consequence of relying on the wisdom of the wealthy for
social progress. As journalist Anand Giridharadas pointed out in
Winners Take All, the wealthy can “do their part” without doing the
structural work required to create sustainable change.
Carnegie was also mistaken in assuming that his “poorer brethren” cannot be trusted to use cash wisely, as demonstrated by a
growing body of research about unrestricted cash transfers (UCTs)
and UBI.7 Since 2008, GiveDirectly has distributed $580 million in
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UCTs to 1.4 million people around the world and rigorously tracks
the results. The recipients almost unanimously use the gifts wisely
to improve their lives. Spending on “the indulgence of appetite”
was nearly zero. Instead, randomized control trials of UCTs have
shown improvements in savings, nutrition, education, and mental health, as well as reductions in stress levels, child marriages,
teenage pregnancy, and domestic violence.8 And studies such as a
randomized controlled trial of UBI in Stockton, California, have
also shown that cash transfers enable “greater agency to explore
new opportunities related to employment and caregiving.”9
In short, Carnegie’s belief that the wealthy are wise because of
their wealth and those in poverty are ignorant because of their poverty laid the foundation for a persistently paternalistic approach to
philanthropy that endures to this day. No wonder philanthropy’s
track record is as underwhelming as it is.
Philanthropy Is No Alternative
to Government
U
S CH ARITABLE GIV ING has grown ninefold,
from $55 billion in 1980 to $485 billion in
2022—a 300 percent increase after inflation adjustments. Specialized social impact consulting
firms, such as FSG, Bridgespan, and Arabella;
academic research centers; and publications
such as SSIR have produced ever more sophisticated thinking
about philanthropy. Yet there has been no discernible progress
on our nation’s urgent challenges, including poverty, chronic disease, educational disparities, housing shortages, racial inequity,
and climate change. According to Giving USA, nearly two-thirds
of annual US charitable giving goes to support religious institutions, universities, art and cultural institutions, medical research,
or international causes that, at best, address these challenges only
indirectly. But for the roughly $150 billion in annual giving that
does directly target such issues, there has been little to show.
While charitable giving skyrocketed between 1980 and 2022,
the poverty level was virtually unchanged. During this time, homelessness grew nearly 600 percent and the racial wealth gap steadily
increased by an average of 0.1 percent per year. Mortality rates in
2022 were 3 percent higher than in 1980, and maternal mortality
rates doubled over those years, with a mortality rate three times
higher for Black women than white women.10 Carbon emissions
are well below their 2007 peak but were still about 5 percent
higher in 2022 than in 1980. Educational attainment has gradually and steadily improved at roughly the same rate over the years,
independent of growth in charitable support, until the COVID-19
pandemic resulted in learning setbacks for all children. Over the
past four decades, the percentage of college graduates doubled
from 17 percent to 35 percent, yet the poverty rate has remained
unchanged, exacerbated for 44 million people by $1.8 trillion in
student debt. Even religion, still the largest single charitable recipient, has seen a continuous decline in affiliation that hundreds of
billions of dollars in contributions have never reversed.
One could argue that social and environmental conditions would
have worsened even more without philanthropic interventions.
Philanthropy has funded numerous impactful programs that have
028_037_strategic philanthropy_proofedDA_.sum2024.indd 32
aided many millions of people. Yet abundant evidence proves that
philanthropy cannot solve societal problems on a national scale.
Indeed, the United States leads the world by a wide margin in philanthropic giving per capita, but it ranks near the bottom of Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) countries on many measures of social well-being and at the top among
many social ills. From 1990 to 2022, while real charitable giving doubled, the United States’ ranking on social progress compared to other countries dropped from 8th to 31st. This mismatch between charity and well-being is not limited to the United States. Countries with
the highest per capita charitable giving—the United States, Canada,
and the United Kingdom—tend to perform poorly on measures of
social progress. The countries that perform best—Scandinavian
countries, Germany, and Japan—give to charity as little as 2 percent
of what the United States gives per capita, relying on government
rather than philanthropy to meet their society’s needs.
The United States has also demonstrated that the government
can alleviate poverty in ways that philanthropy cannot. During
President Johnson’s War on Poverty in the 1960s, “Congress
passed legislation that transformed American schools, launched
Medicare and Medicaid, and expanded housing subsidies, urban
development programs, employment and training programs, food
stamps, and Social Security and welfare benefits,” Martha Bailey
and Nicolas Duquette explain in an article in the Journal of Economic History. “These programs more than tripled real federal
expenditures on health, education, and welfare, which grew to
over 15 percent of the federal budget by 1970,” and they cut the
poverty rate in half from 24 percent to 12 percent. More recently,
the emergency COVID-19 relief payments temporarily lifted more
than 12 million people out of poverty and halved childhood poverty by expanding the Child Tax Credit. (When Congress rescinded
the expanded credit in 2023, childhood poverty rates immediately
increased to pre-COVID rates, according to data from Columbia
University’s Center on Poverty and Social Policy.) No philanthropic program has achieved a comparable impact in such a short time.
The government’s ability to expedite or derail social progress
is also evident in comparisons between the cost effectiveness of
philanthropy and lobbying. Annual philanthropic contributions
vastly exceed political contributions and corporate lobbying:
During the 2020 election cycle, philanthropy exceeded political
contributions by a ratio of roughly 40:1.11 In 2022, for example, the
US fossil fuel industry spent $180 million on federal lobbying and
political contributions to preserve federal subsidies and obstruct
climate-change regulations. In the same year, charitable contributions to nonprofits to combat climate change totaled $7.5 billion.
But whose dollars had more impact?
In fact, Congress was well aware of the power of political expenditures when, nearly 60 years ago, it quashed the philanthropic
sector’s ability to leverage this option. Following foundation support for civil rights in the 1960s, conservative members of Congress passed the Tax Reform Act of 1969, which restricted foundations from engaging in lobbying and partisan political activity. The
Ford Foundation’s support of voter engagement among populations of color—which helped elect the country’s first Black mayor,
Carl Stokes of Cleveland, Ohio—was specifically cited in Congress
as one of the dangers of foundations’ meddling in politics.
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Today, individuals are able to hire lobbyists with taxable dollars,
but only corporations can lobby—often against the public interest—
and deduct those expenses from their taxable income. The restrictions on foundation lobbying have had a profoundly chilling effect
on the nonprofit sector’s willingness to engage in political activity or
even to protect the most basic functioning of our democracy.
Without changing government policy, even the most wellfunded and effective charities cannot come anywhere close to
meeting needs on a national scale.12 At its peak in 2013, for example,
Teach for America provided teachers for roughly 400,000 students
annually, but those students represented only 2 percent of the 20
million low-income students entitled to free school lunches. Or
consider Nurse Family Partnership (NFP), a well-funded and rapidly growing example of venture philanthropy that provides home
nursing support for low-income, first-time mothers. Backed by
33
Similar arguments could be made about climate change and
government’s subsidy of the fossil fuel industry, or about obesity
and the Farm Bill, which subsidizes the corn syrup used to sweeten
processed food products. The degree to which government choices
and corporate behavior determine social and environmental conditions—and the nonprofit sector’s inability to meaningfully alter
those conditions—applies across most issues that strategic philanthropy aims to address.
In fact, the current model of philanthropy is not only misleading
but dangerous. Philanthropists’ central focus on using the nonprofit sector to address society’s challenges deflects attention from the
dire need for a functioning, representative, multiracial democracy,
without which we can never achieve a more equitable and sustainable nation. The more we highlight philanthropy as the solution,
the more we excuse government and corporations from the need to
The model of philanthropy we have relied on has not delivered—
and cannot deliver—the societal improvements on a national scale that we so urgently
need. The more we highlight philanthropy as the solution, the more we
excuse government and corporations from the need to change.
millions of grant dollars with strong management and consulting
support over its nearly 30-year history, NFP now serves 55,000
mothers annually across 40 states—an extraordinary achievement,
but one that helps less than 4 percent of the 1.5 million babies born
to low-income families in the United States each year.
The challenge of achieving social progress through the nonprofit sector goes beyond scale to the even more fundamental question of whether philanthropic initiatives can solve the underlying
problems, rather than just alleviate the symptoms. Poverty, for
instance, is the direct result of government policy and corporate
behavior shaped by a history of structural racism that no nonprofit
program can redress. Fifty-four percent of those in poverty in this
country are children, the elderly, or people with disabilities—most
of whom are unable to work. The US federal government support
for this unemployable population is roughly half of OECD country
average.13 That gap alone is more than double the total US annual
philanthropic contributions.14
Among the remaining 46 percent who are employable, a majority are trapped in low-wage jobs. Forty-four percent of all US workers ages 18 to 64 have a median annual income of less than $18,000.
Even hourly workers who are paid above the minimum wage often
work unpredictable shift schedules that prevent them from working a 40-hour week or taking a second job. For more than a decade, low-wage jobs have been the fastest-growing segment of the
US economy. As a result, the United States simply does not have
enough living-wage jobs available to employ its entire workforce.15
In short, the US government has made intentional choices neither to provide an adequate livelihood for those deemed unemployable nor to require companies to pay living wages with humane
and predictable work schedules to those who are employed.16 The
impact of those choices cannot be offset by nonprofit programs.
028_037_strategic philanthropy_proofedDA_.sum2024.indd 33
change. The libertarian dream of minimalist government is imaginable only if the nonprofit sector can meet social needs in government’s place—something the social sector cannot possibly do.
If we really want to create an equitable and sustainable society,
we must leverage the power of a multiracial democracy. Strategic
philanthropy has long professed to seek the “root causes” behind
each societal challenge, but what if the primary root cause behind
every social and environmental issue facing the United States is
the failure of our political process to ensure the well-being of our
entire population?
T
An Unrepresentative Government
ODAY, A REM ARK ABLE deviation exists between
government action and the outcomes most Americans want. Two-thirds of Americans think climate change poses a major threat to the country
and want the government to take stronger action.
Eighty-five percent of Americans favor the right to
abortion; 80 percent believe that LGBTQ+ rights should be protected by law; and a majority believe in gender equality and racial
equity, prefer stricter gun control, and oppose banning books in
school libraries. Yet hundreds of legislative acts and court opinions
at every level of government increasingly take opposite actions.
This deviation between public opinion and political action is possible only because of the racial, economic, and ageist biases in voter
participation, a pattern greatly magnified by recent efforts to disenfranchise voters of color. This includes the Supreme Court evisceration of the Voting Rights Act in 2013, restrictive state voter ID
laws, gerrymandered districts, closed polling stations, and limits on
early voting. Recent voter restrictions have already reduced turnout
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by more than the margin of victory in many past elections. Hourly
workers—disproportionately people of color—lose income if they
take time off to vote during the workday and often face long lines at
sparse polling stations in their communities, while higher-income,
salaried workers and retirees tend to have access to more voting
sites with shorter lines and incur no financial loss for taking the time
to vote. As a result, the population that regularly votes is distinctly
older, whiter, and wealthier than the population overall.
“In a country with a multi-century history of systemic racism
and oppression,” Steve argues in How We Win the Civil War, “there
is little interest in making participating in our democracy as easy
as participating in our consumer economy.” The disproportionately affluent white voter base has encouraged politicians to make
choices that reinforce structural racism and economic inequality
for more than a century—even when it harms white people.
In The Sum of Us, author and policy advocate Heather McGhee
cites the hundreds of Southern cities that, decades ago, chose
to drain or cement over public swimming pools, depriving more
white than Black children from swimming, rather than accept
court-ordered racial integration. The pattern of discrimination is
no different today. In 2020, a decade after the Affordable Care Act
was passed, 10 states still refused free federal funding that would
have benefitted many more white people than Black people. Just
this year, 15 Republican governors turned down free federal funds
to provide student meals over the summer—despite the fact that
42 percent of people in poverty are non-Hispanic whites and only
24 percent are Black.17 McGhee concludes that our nation’s unyielding allegiance to systemic racism has sacrificed many opportunities that would have benefited everyone.
L
An Empowerment Approach
to Social Progress
ET US TUR N CAR NEGIE’S MODEL upside down
and trust the wisdom of the poor. Because society’s
problems cannot be solved without any cost to
those with wealth and power, we cannot rely on the
wealthy and powerful to find the solutions. Philanthropists need not come up with the answers to other people’s problems but should merely help empower people to
improve their own lives as they choose. This does not mean that
people can bootstrap their own success without any assistance;
rather, the assistance they need is at odds with many of our current
philanthropic and nonprofit practices.
Philanthropists who work toward a more equitable society must
ensure a functioning democracy that is truly representative of our
population, reject false and misleading social narratives that misdirect public opinion, and support the economic self-determination
of those living in poverty.
Ensuring a true multiracial democracy. | If government alone
has the power and scale to meet society’s needs, then philanthropists must learn how to influence government action. They must
confront “third rail” issues such as racial inequity, tax policy, voter
suppression, corporate regulation, minimum wages, and working
conditions. We must acknowledge that empowering those in need
cannot be accomplished without restricting the power of those
028_037_strategic philanthropy_proofedDA_.sum2024.indd 34
in charge—even if the end result is a more vibrant and equitable
economy that benefits everyone.
A true multiracial democracy requires that the political process
accurately reflects the diversity of its people. Because US elections
are routinely decided by a few thousand votes in swing states,
philanthropy could have a decisive influence through two activities
legally permitted for foundations and 501(c)3 organizations: voter
engagement and issue-specific voter education. Today these activities receive minimal foundation funding: In 2022, out of $105 billion
in foundation grants, only $408 million from 81 funders went toward voter engagement and education—less than half of 1 percent.18
The problem is not only the lack of funding but the ineffective
use of the funds. White men comprise 31 percent of the American
population and just 23 percent of Democratic voters, but they control nearly 90 percent of Democratic politics and progressive advocacy.19 As a result, campaigns routinely pay exorbitant amounts
to white male consultants and then spend millions of dollars on TV
ads targeting mostly white voters. These tactics help explain why
past voter engagement efforts have had minimal impact.
However, a different and highly effective approach is possible,
manifested most powerfully by Stacey Abrams and the civic engagement work she led at the New Georgia Project (NGP). The
NGP coordinated a network of voter registration and mobilization groups, drawn from the communities they seek to engage,
and worked consistently over a decade, rigorously studying voter turnout and using meticulously detailed spreadsheets to track
voter attitudes and demographics in pivotal districts. Their work
paid off, increasing the turnout by voters of color by almost 50 percent, from 625,000 in 2016 to 915,000 in the 2020 election.20 The
additional turnout was decisive in electing Democrats Raphael
Warnock and Jon Ossoff to the US Senate, the first time in its history that Georgia elected either a Black or a Jewish senator. Their
wins helped the Democrats to retain control of the US Senate and
ultimately enabled passage of the Inflation Reduction Act of 2022,
which generated $500 billion to support a clean-energy transition,
reduce health-care costs, and improve tax collection. Not bad for
an organization with an annual budget of just $13 million.
Similar progress engaging voters is underway in Virginia,
Arizona, North Carolina, and Texas. In the words of Susan Sandler,
“When our government … [is] responsive to—and, frankly, fearful
of—the people who most bear the brunt of inequality and injustice, then better priorities, practices, and policies follow.”
Refuting false social narratives that distort voters’ opinions
is equally essential work. Changing voter attitudes and piercing
these faulty mental models will not be easy in this time of extreme
partisan opposition, “alternative facts,” and social media bubbles.
But if all Americans were well informed and voted in elections, extremist views would carry far less weight, and strategic philanthropy—if it chose to promote voter education and participation more
aggressively—might see far more progress.
Imagine if even 5 percent of foundations’ annual funding—$5
billion—were dedicated to voter engagement on the NGP model. It would transform elections in the United States and enable
the start of a policy agenda at all levels of government that would
actually deliver, on a national scale, many of the outcomes funders
try so hard to achieve through nonprofit programs.
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Funders could go even further to influence government. The
one exception to the prohibition on foundation lobbying, known
as the self-defense clause, enables foundations to lobby Congress
on matters that affect foundations. In short, foundations could
lobby for the right to lobby in the public interest, which, as noted earlier, seems to offer the possibility of greater impact at much
lower cost—although such a change would be possible only in a
very different Congress.
Yet even without transforming national politics, philanthropy
could do far more to support people living in poverty by taking an
empowerment approach that encourages personal agency.
Fostering self-determination. | Government-funded UBI is one
part of a solution to poverty in America that donors should support. As Martin Luther King Jr. wrote in his final book, Where Do We
Go from Here?, “The dignity of the individual will flourish when the
decisions concerning his life are in his own hands, when he has the
assurance that his income is stable and certain, and when he knows
that he has the means to seek self-improvement.” And COVID relief funding, which could have funded a national UBI 10 times over,
showed that it is financially feasible given sufficient political will.21
028_037_strategic philanthropy_proofedDA_.sum2024.indd 35
35
Even without UBI, philanthropy can support
economic empowerment by leveraging the universal aspiration for self-realization. The model
of peer-driven change developed by MacArthur
“Genius Grant” awardee Mauricio Miller offers
one approach. In 2001, Miller created the Family
Independence Initiative (renamed UpTogether
in 2021) that launched a new approach to poverty reduction that did not depend on conventional government or philanthropic interventions. Miller organized monthly meetings of
25 low-income families in Oakland who were
surviving day to day. The participants received
virtually no funding from the program and no
external guidance, and participated in no other nonprofit programs.22 Gradually, they began sharing their hopes and goals, reporting on
their progress, and offering each other advice
and encouragement. Each person’s success inspired others, whether in pursuing education,
beginning a healthier diet, or paying down debt.
The requirement to track and report monthly
on their savings, health, and progress toward
personal goals focused their attention and reinforced their resolve. As their sense of community grew, they began to help each other, whether
in childcare, home repairs, or finding new job
opportunities. According to Miller, the process
imitates the way more affluent families routinely
leverage their networks for personal and professional advancement. After three years, household incomes had risen 40 percent. The project
was repeated in San Francisco, Hawaii, and Boston with similar results. After two years, San
Francisco participants’ incomes rose 23 percent
and savings increased 240 percent. One-quarter
of the participants who had been on government assistance programs no longer needed them.23
Miller has since launched the Center for Peer Driven Change,
championing this approach in struggling communities around the
world. Participants share knowledge, networks, and encouragement
to help each other reach their goals. Seeing someone from their
own community succeed, despite the same obstacles, provides a
source of motivation that no outsider could match. People emulate
and build on their peers’ successes, which requires knowing about
peers’ successes and, importantly, how they achieved them. In The
Power of Positive Deviance, professors Richard Pascale, Jerry Sternin,
and Monique Sternin observe that in every community that faces a
problem, there are people who have already improvised solutions,
but the rest of the community is generally unaware or skeptical of
these atypical behaviors. By carefully studying the community, one
can identify these positive deviants and encourage them to share
their approach with others in the community.
A similar empowerment approach, called economic facilitation,
developed by the author and economic-development advisor Ernesto
Sirolli, has helped people start their own businesses and created
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thousands of jobs in many regions around the world.24 The approach
focuses on stimulating small local businesses within a community,
instead of bringing in outside experts and funding to develop a largescale economic-development plan. As an economic facilitator, Sirolli
has a simple approach: Never initiate anything, and never encourage
anyone. When someone approaches him with a business idea, he
helps them think through what it would take to make it economically viable, including whom they might need as partners. If the idea
doesn’t make sense or they lose interest, the facilitator merely waits
for the next person with a different idea to come along.
Once a business succeeds, others in the community become inspired to try their own entrepreneurial ideas with the facilitator’s
help. Each business creates opportunities for other businesses as
suppliers, distributors, or market extensions, while the jobs increase local purchasing power to support additional enterprises.
Momentum builds over time, forming a strong local economy suited to the skills and resources of that particular community. The
economic facilitator’s—and we suggest, philanthropy’s—job is not
to create the solution but, as Sirolli writes, “merely to help remove
the obstacles that stifle the client’s growth.”25 These obstacles include the lack of a basic livable income, mutual support, similarly
situated role models, and a sense of agency.
The idea that people within communities can help each other
achieve economic success is not new. During US Reconstruction in
in ways that foster self-determination and enhance beneficiaries’
sense of agency. One innovative example is Ownership Works, a
nonprofit founded in 2021 that works with private equity firms to
grant stock ownership to hourly employees, extending the UCT
model from supplementing income to building wealth.
All of the models cited above, along with UBI—and, for that matter, collective impact and adaptive leadership—lack any predetermined outcomes. This lack of outcomes is anathema to prevailing
grantmaking practices in which donors seek to fund solutions they
hope will produce reliable and predictable results. The empowerment approach also goes beyond recent innovations, such as trustbased philanthropy, which trusts nonprofits to advance their mission without micromanagement or even participatory grantmaking,
in which community members make grant decisions. There are no
grand strategies or elaborate theories of change. Instead, we are recommending that funders support an open-ended process that enables people to define their own goals and discover their own solutions, uniquely situated to their needs and circumstances—solutions
that may never occur to wealthy donors or outside experts.
Other shifts will be required as well. Today, our philanthropic
system rewards need instead of success: The greater the need, the
more compelling the case for philanthropic support. But this approach creates perverse incentives that discourage individual progress or any sense of agency and pride in achievement. Even when
We must redirect our efforts toward the urgent necessity of
making our democracy more fully representative of our population. We must support
people in finding their own solutions, boosting their sense of agency,
and supporting them in building their own communities.
the 1860s and ’70s, hundreds of Black communities, such as Black
Wall Street in Tulsa, Oklahoma, thrived without any government
or nonprofit assistance. Black people created their own economy,
with Black-owned stores and banks, supported by Black lawyers
and doctors. Today, those examples are a distant memory after the
murderous white rage that destroyed Black Wall Street, the political tactics that continue to disempower and disenfranchise people
of color, and the dependency-producing social programs that undermine self-determination.
The approaches described above each required philanthropic
funding. But the funds underwrote an anthropological approach
to identifying existing models of success intrinsic to specific communities, then sharing what they found with others in an ongoing
supportive and encouraging process over several years. This is inherently local place-based work. Solutions spread as people come
to trust, identify with, and learn from their peers. Progress is gradual but cumulative. Staffing and budgets are still needed, although
the impact becomes self-scaling without the ever larger funding
needed to grow conventional nonprofit programs.
These approaches to economic self-determination require a
radical rethinking of conventional grantmaking—and the field
of philanthropy will need to learn its way into providing funding
028_037_strategic philanthropy_proofedDA_.sum2024.indd 36
an intervention succeeds, credit goes to the nonprofit or the funder,
not to those who converted the support into success. We need to
invert this pattern and begin to reward individual and communitydriven initiatives. Funders must search for glimmers of progress
within communities by identifying people on the path to success,
rather than those with the greatest needs. Funders must support
those efforts and then showcase their achievements to others in
their community. And we need to offer the same recognition, fellowships, and support that we currently provide to leaders of innovative and successful nonprofit programs to the community members themselves who have found ways to meaningfully improve
their own lives. These individuals—not only social entrepreneurs
or philanthropists—must become our social-sector heroes.
We are not suggesting that funders forgo supporting nonprofit
programs and institutions. We do suggest, however, that funders
spend less money chasing the latest social innovation, attempting
to scale organizations to national impact, or embarking on grand
visions to solve complex problems and instead redirect those funds
toward peer-driven change and voter engagement. The empowerment approach actually requires far less funding than today’s
efforts to sustain and scale nonprofit programs. Shifting a modest percentage of current funding would make a huge difference.
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Besides, we have a long way to go before our government is
responsive to its population’s needs or authorizes UBI payments. In the meantime, millions of people depend on today’s
nonprofit services.
O
Redirecting Our Efforts
V ER OUR RESPECTIV E philanthropic careers,
we have come to see that there is no single
right way to fund social progress. Many different approaches can each claim evidence of
their effectiveness, and, given the vastly different goals and circumstances that span philanthropic giving, the fact that no single answer exists should not be
surprising. Even Carnegie, despite his bigoted views, contributed
to social progress.26
Each philanthropic approach, however, also has limitations.
Ultimately, we must acknowledge the painful fact that the model
of philanthropy we have been relying on so far has not delivered—
and cannot deliver—the societal improvements on a national scale
that we so urgently need. Instead, we must redirect our efforts
toward the urgent necessity of making our democracy more fully
representative of our population. And we must support people in
finding their own solutions, boosting their sense of agency, and
supporting them in building their own communities.
We are in a battle for the future of our country against those
who use government to protect their own power and privilege at
everyone else’s expense. Their tools are control, suppression, and
false narratives. Ours must be empowerment, engagement, and a
deeper understanding of how systemic barriers like racism shape
our country. Empowering individuals economically and within the
political process is the most effective way for funders to contribute
to a more just and sustainable future for our nation. O
MARK KRAMER (Mark@Kramer.Capital) is a longtime contributor to SSIR and
Harvard Business Review. He is a cofounder, board member and former
managing director at FSG and a former senior lecturer at Harvard Business School.
He is also a cofounder and director of Maternal Newborn Health Innovations
and a partner in the impact investing fund Congruence Capital.
STEV E P H IL L IPS is a columnist for The Guardian and The Nation and has contributed
to the New York Times and The Washington Post. He is host of the Democracy
in Color with Steve Phillips podcast and author of the New York Times bestseller Brown Is the New White: How the Demographic Revolution Has Created a New
American Majority and How We Win the Civil War: Securing a Multiracial
Democracy and Ending White Supremacy for Good.
NOT ES
1
2
3
These ideas have been well articulated by others. See Mauricio L. Miller, The
Alternative: Most of What You Believe About Poverty Is Wrong, self-published,
2023; Richard Pascale, Jerry Sternin, and Monique Sternin, The Power of
Positive Deviance: How Unlikely Innovators Solve the World’s Toughest Problems,
Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard Business Review Press, 2010; Ernesto Sirolli,
Ripples from the Zambezi: Passion, Entrepreneurship, and the Rebirth of Local
Economies, British Columbia, Canada: New Society Publishers, 1999.
Anand Giridharadas, Winners Take All: The Elite Charade of Changing the
World, New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2018. See also Mark R. Kramer, “Are the
Elite Hijacking Social Change?,” Stanford Social Innovation Review, Fall 2018.
See John Kania et al., “Centering Equity in Collective Impact,” Stanford Social
Innovation Review, Winter 2022; the Stanford Social Innovation Review Fall
028_037_strategic philanthropy_proofedDA_.sum2024.indd 37
37
2014 supplement, “Collective Insights on Collective Impact”; the Stanford
Social Innovation Review 2022 supplement, “Collective Impact 10 Years
Later”; and John Kania, Mark Kramer, and Peter Senge, The Water of Systems
Change, FSG, May 2018.
4 Joe J. Gladstone et al., “Financial Shame Spirals: How Shame Intensifies
Financial Hardship,” Organizational Behavior and Human Decision
Processes, vol. 167, November 2021.
5 The poverty rate among Blacks is 19 percent, compared with 7 percent among
non-Hispanic whites. Mark R. Rank, Lawrence M. Eppard, and Heather E.
Bullock, Poorly Understood: What America Gets Wrong About Poverty,
New York: Oxford University Press, 2021.
6 See, for example, Paul Brest and Hal Harvey, Money Well Spent: A Strategic Plan
for Smart Philanthropy, Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 2018; Peter
Frumkin’s Strategic Giving: The Art and Science of Philanthropy, Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2006, and The Essence of Strategic Giving: A Practical Guide
for Donors and Fundraisers, Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2010; Helmut
K. Anheier, Adele Simmons, and David Winder, eds., Innovations in Strategic
Philanthropy: Local and Global Perspectives, Heidelberg, Germany: Springer, 2007;
Joel Fleishman, The Foundation: A Great American Secret; How Private Wealth Is
Changing the World, New York: Public Affairs, 2007; and Rajiv Shah, Big Bets: How
Large-Scale Change Really Happens, New York: Simon Element, 2023.
7 UCTs can be one-time or episodic payments, while UBI refers to steady
ongoing financial assistance.
8 Jade Sui, Olivier Sterck, and Cory Rodgers, “The Freedom to Choose:
Theory and Quasi-Experimental Evidence on Cash Transfer Restrictions,”
Journal of Development Economics, vol. 161, March 2023. See also
Jason DeParle, “Cash Aid to Poor Mothers Increases Brain Activity in Babies,
Study Finds,” New York Times, January 24, 2022.
9 Stacia West and Amy Castro, “Impact of Guaranteed Income on Health,
Finances, and Agency: Findings from the Stockton Randomized Controlled
Trial,” Journal of Urban Health, vol. 100, April 10, 2023.
10
Recent research suggests that the increase may be due to a change in data
collection methods, although that does not account for the racial disparity.
11 Data compared from Giving USA and Open Secrets.
12 This point was made earlier by Steven H. Goldberg, Billions of Drops in
Millions of Buckets, Hoboken, N.J.: John Wiley & Sons, 2009.
13 On average, OECD government payments reduce poverty by 63 percent,
but in the US government programs reduce poverty by only 35 percent.
Although our poverty rate before government payments is almost exactly the
OECD average, the poverty rate after all government payments are included
is double the average. See Rank, Eppard, and Bullock, Poorly Understood.
14 Only 2.2 percent of GDP is directed to poverty alleviation; another 2.2
percent goes to Medicaid. Doubling these expenditures to reach the OECD
average would cost $1.2 trillion. See Ibid.
15 Peter Georgescu, Capitalists Arise!: End Economic Inequality, Grow the Middle
Class, Heal the Nation, Oakland, Calif.: Berrett-Koehler Publishers, 2017.
16 Los Angeles passed a city ordinance to make retail worker shift schedules
more predictable and humane. Research suggests that such changes
can increase employers’ profitability by reducing turnover and increasing
productivity. See Zeynep Ton, The Good Jobs Strategy: How the
Smartest Companies Invest in Employees to Lower Costs and Boosts Profits,
Seattle: Lake Union Publishing, 2014.
17 While a higher percentage of Black people are in poverty than white people,
the larger white population means that the number of white people
in poverty is much lower than the number of Black people. See Rank, Eppard,
and Bullock, Poorly Understood.
18 See Foundation Funding for US Democracy; see also Kelly Born,
“The Role of Philanthropy and Nonprofits in Increasing Voter Turnout,”
Stanford Social Innovation Review, Winter 2016.
19 Steve Phillips, Brown Is the New White, New York: The New Press, 2016.
20
Steve Phillips, How We Win the Civil War, New York: The New Press, 2022.
21 COVID relief spending of $5.9 trillion, enacted without raising taxes,
was enough to pay each of the 38 million adults living below the poverty line
$1,300 monthly for a decade.
22 Initially, participants were paid $200/month to report on their income,
savings, health, and education, but the payments stopped after the first year,
as it became clear that they were not an necessary part of the solution. David
Bornstein, “Out of Poverty, Family-Style,” New York Times, July 14, 2011.
23 Ibid.
24 Sirolli, Ripples from the Zambezi.
25 Ibid.
26 See Maribel Morey, White Philanthropy: Carnegie Corporation’s
‘An American Dream’ and the Making of a White World Order, Chapel Hill, N.C.:
University of North Carolina Press, 2021.
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EFFECTIVE
GOVERNMENT
D E M A N D S
PA RT N E R S H I P
From climate change to national security threats,
the problems we face in the world are too big for government to solve
alone. Public-private partnerships demonstrate
how government can collaborate with the private sector
to catalyze and scale innovation.
A F T ER SERV I NG 1 4 MON T HS I N A C A LI FOR N I A COR R ECT IONA L FACI LI T Y, 39-year-old Latonya
Mosby was homeless and dealing with depression and anxiety. Like many formerly incarcerated
individuals, Mosby ordinarily would have received very little support upon reentering society. Without assistance to secure housing, job training, and counseling, returning citizens are more likely
to remain ensnared in the justice system. It is no wonder, then, that recidivism rates in the United
States are among the highest in the world: 44 percent of formerly incarcerated people return to
prison within a year. This dynamic is unjust, deprives families of breadwinners, and is expensive for
California taxpayers to maintain: $132,860 annually per inmate.
The state of California was eager to break this cycle. In 2020, the California Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation (CDCR) worked with the Department for Social Services and a group of nonprofit and philanthropic organizations to develop a new approach called Returning Home Well (now
called Returning Home Well Housing) to offer formerly incarcerated people housing, job training,
By Kathleen Kelly Janus
I L L U S T R A T I O N
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B Y
J O A N
W O N G
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Stanford Social Innovation Review / Summer 2024
mental-health and substance-abuse support, and cash assistance to
ease their reintegration into society. Thanks to this public-private
partnership and the wraparound supports she received, within
months of her release Mosby was reunited with her two children
and thriving in her community.
Returning Home Well Housing was possible only because of
California’s partnership with more than 20 national funders of
criminal-justice reform—including the Ford Foundation, Meadow
Fund, the Charles and Lynn Schusterman Family Philanthropies,
and Rosenberg Foundation. Their unrestricted private capital
provided the flexibility for government to move quickly with this
novel approach, with operational support from more than 200
well-established service providers organized by the Center for Employment Opportunities and Amity Foundation. California piloted
the program in 2020 for 13,817 individuals across the state. The
state tapped into flexible American Rescue Plan funding to allocate
$22 million toward short-term housing for the newly released. The
philanthropic community invested $20 million in job training and
health care, in addition to $1,500 in monthly cash assistance for
formerly incarcerated people to cover basic living expenses while
they were in the workforce-development programs. Together,
these programs helped participants obtain the long-term jobs they
needed to help break the cycle of recidivism.
Returning Home Well Housing has been so successful that
Governor Newsom allocated approximately $30 million over three
years to the state’s 2023 budget to turn the pilot into a more permanent program. Newsom also recognized that the monthly cash
assistance to cover living expenses was an essential component of
small-scale gains in comparison with government programming
and are often too disconnected from government to be implemented at scale through policy change. In short, this chipping away at
social problems is never going to garner the scale of change required to address them. Government programs are huge, but they
need the nimbleness of the private sector to innovate and bring
new models to scale. We need both.
Over the course of my career, I’ve invested in community-based
organizations as a founder, volunteer, donor, lawyer, and board
member. I teach social innovation at Stanford University and have
spent years researching how the best nonprofits scale—research
that I published as my book, Social Startup Success: How the Best
Nonprofits Launch, Scale Up, and Make a Difference. What I’ve come
to realize is that from climate change to poverty to homelessness,
there’s no shortage of either big problems or incredible leaders
who stand ready to solve them. But even the most successful organizations with cutting-edge ideas for how to improve people’s lives
and staff working tirelessly to achieve them reach only a sliver of
the population they aspire to serve.
Leading public-private partnerships while serving as California’s
first senior advisor on social innovation from 2019 to 2022, I witnessed firsthand that when you govern through partnership—
practicing social innovation inside government and drawing on
the strengths of the public and private sectors—the impact is both
immediate and exponential.
Working with Governor Newsom, I helped lead more than 50
public-private partnerships totaling $4.2 billion in investments,
changing millions of Californians’ lives. In those partnerships
In California we’ve helped build the muscle
for public-private partnership that
allows both sectors to draw on each other’s strengths
and resources to help more people
by working together.
workforce training and signed a policy—the first in the nation—
that permits workforce-development organizations to distribute
state funding (here, CalHIRE grants) as cash assistance.
Just as common as the lack of services for formerly incarcerated people is the conundrum that governments face in testing out
new programs like Returning Home Well Housing. While innovation always comes with risk, failure is not an option for officials
trusted with taxpayer dollars. In addition, government programs
are often stifled by bureaucracy that halts the engine of innovation.
The ability to move strategically and efficiently from pilot to
policy is the holy grail of the social sector. Yet private-sector
efforts, whether spearheaded by philanthropic organizations,
nonprofits, or even corporations, are always going to achieve
038_047_governing_proofedDA_sum2024.indd 40
we helped 27 departments and agencies partner with 202 corporate
and philanthropic partners and more than 1,600 community-based
organizations. But our success isn’t just about the numbers—it’s
about how we did the work. While in most jurisdictions the public
and private sectors work in silos, in California we’ve helped build
the muscle for public-private partnership that allows both sectors
to draw on each other’s strengths and resources to help more people by working together.
In what follows, I detail the tools that made governing through
partnership so successful in California. Specifically, successful publicprivate partnership has four essential ingredients: relationship
building, public and private leadership, crafting real solutions to real
problems, and communicating impact. I also offer lessons drawn
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from our successes and challenges to inform leaders of local, state,
and federal governments, as well as nonprofits, philanthropic organizations, and companies, in their own public-private partnerships.
I
W H AT A R E P U B L I C - P R I VAT E
PA R T N E R S H I P S ?
DEFINE PUBLIC-PRIVATE partnership as a strategic
relationship between government, business, philanthropy, and/or the nonprofit sector to solve social
problems in a collaborative way. Such partnerships
can take many forms that vary according to the
nature of investment and involvement required
from the government and the private sector. Some
partnerships allow for greater autonomy, such as information
sharing, while others are more integrated, such as coinvesting.
(See “The Public-Private Partnership Continuum” on page 45.)
Regardless of where a partnership falls on this continuum, it is
always essential that public and private partners regularly communicate, share resources, and align strategically.
Over the past two decades, local, state, and federal governments have built the infrastructure required to take a partnership
approach. From 2002 to 2013, New York Mayor Michael Bloomberg
led one of the most successful local partnership efforts through
the Mayor’s Fund to Advance New York City, which raised nearly
$400 million and worked with 40 city agencies and offices to support more than 100 public programs, from launching family-justice
centers that coordinated services for more than 93,000 victims of
domestic violence to raising more than $60 million for Hurricane
Sandy response efforts. Following his tenure, Bloomberg Philanthropies, Bloomberg’s philanthropic organization, established a
dedicated team to promote this model by advising municipal leaders on partnership structures and strategies in cities across the
globe from Los Angeles to Athens, Greece.
At the state level, Michigan was the first state to establish a Governor’s Office of Foundation Liaison (OFL) to identify and broker
innovative funding partnerships and strategic collaborations between state government and philanthropy. Since its inception in
2003, the OFL has raised private support for initiatives to increase
Michigan’s economic competitiveness through reforms in early
childhood development and education, K-12 education, college and
career readiness, health and well-being, and workforce development. Building on Michigan’s model, California, North Carolina,
and Maryland have created similar offices of strategic partnerships
and/or liaison roles to build partnerships between government and
the private sector. These have collectively brought in billions of
dollars in private support to leverage tens of billions in government funding that have advanced dozens of partnerships on policy
priorities ranging from child poverty to housing affordability.
At the federal level, President Barack Obama in 2009 established the first Office of Social Innovation and Civic Participation,
which sought to advance policy priorities through outcomesdriven approaches that identified and scaled effective solutions
with public and private capital. In addition, federal agencies including the Department of Housing and Urban Development
(HUD) and the State Department created senior-level strategicpartnership positions to coordinate partnerships with the federal
038_047_governing_proofedDA_sum2024.indd 41
41
government. For example, in 2014, HUD’s Office for International
and Philanthropic Innovation created the National Disaster Resilience Competition in partnership with the Rockefeller Foundation
to help communities develop solutions to recover from natural
disasters. More recently, the State Department’s partnership office collaborated with the US Chamber of Commerce to align private businesses with the federal government to support Ukraine’s
economic recovery.
Despite the rise and success of public-private partnerships
across all levels of government, they are not suited to every government problem. (See “The Different Worlds of Philanthropy
and Government” on page 46.) For example, certain functions, like
providing basic social benefits, education, or public safety, should
remain the responsibility of government. Additionally, commingling relatively small amounts of philanthropic capital—which,
when invested alongside government programs, can be more flexible in purpose and more quickly deployed—with greater amounts
of public dollars does not optimize the use of private funding. Instead, partnerships are best suited for leveraging less restrictive
private-sector resources as risk capital to design and test new approaches that can then be quickly scaled by the government.
Furthermore, partnerships are not a substitute for government
policy. Sometimes the most effective way to improve a government program is not to put more resources behind it but instead to
change the policies that are failing to produce positive outcomes.
Finally, partnerships are not about finding private dollars to fill
gaps in government funding. Rather, they aim to utilize the collective diversity of partners’ resources—from expertise to funding
to coordinated communications—to align on policy and programming for greater impact.
F
FOUR ELEMENTS OF SUCCESS
OR EV ERY SINGLE partnership opportunity I helped
create during my time as senior advisor to Governor
Newsom, I took hundreds of other meetings for potential partnerships that never came to fruition. From
this extensive partnership-building experience, I identified four
elements of a successful partnership: relationship-building, public and private leadership, addressing real problems with real
solutions, and communicating impact.
Relationship-Building | The success of a partnership hinges on
building a strong relationship based on trust. This requires meeting multiple times in person, sharing experiences and learning
from each other to identify mutual priorities, and staying in close
communication to seize ripe opportunities. I’ve worked with many
government and private partners who wanted to develop partnership strategies but hadn’t yet built the relationships necessary
to work in close alignment across sectors. As a result, they were
never able to get their partnerships off the ground. Every collaboration we developed in California came with continuous relationship-building efforts before, during, and after a partnership was
formalized.
During my first six months in the Newsom administration, I
met with more than 100 philanthropy CEOs and embarked on a
16-city, border-to-border listening tour to meet with Indigenous
tribes on the northern California border of Del Norte County,
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immigration organizations on the southern border in Tijuana, and
more than 750 community-based organizations in between. Getting to know community leaders in their local settings was critical to my understanding of how communities devised solutions to
their problems.
The rapport and trust established through the continuous
process of relationship-building proved invaluable resources for
future partnerships, especially during the COVID-19 lockdowns,
when I could not meet partners or communities in person. For
example, the success of Homekey, a program Governor Newsom
created in 2020 to purchase motels to house unsheltered Californians and those at risk of homelessness, and to provide services
to support them on the path to longer-term housing, originates in
these relationships, as well as those Governor Newsom made with
the private sector to address California’s housing crisis. In 2019, he
Rescue Plan and State General Fund toward purchasing the properties. Despite the benefit of added housing, local jurisdictions
remained skeptical of the proposal because of the significant
ongoing funding that housing would require for wraparound
services such as mental-health and substance-abuse support,
job training, and counseling to help residents secure more permanent housing. Furthermore, several motels needed additional
funding for renovations.
Fortunately, because of the preexisting relationships Governor Newsom had established with the California-based CEOs, we
were able to raise $65 million from Blue Shield of California, Kaiser Permanente, the Chan Zuckerberg Initiative, Meta, the Crankstart Foundation, and the Conrad N. Hilton Foundation to support
those services and renovations. We engaged Enterprise Community Partners, a nonprofit affordable-housing developer, to host the
Homekey exemplifies how relationship-building between
state and philanthropic leaders catalyzed
a collaboration that led to enormous impact.
Regular communication and coordination ensured
the successful distribution of funds.
met one-on-one with CEOs of some of the largest California-based
companies in the state, including Apple and Facebook, and negotiated a $3.5 billion commitment from those companies to invest
in affordable housing. Dozens of large companies also wanted to
help but couldn’t give nearly as much. In the fall of 2019, we organized a housing roundtable with Governor Newsom and the CEOs
of those companies—Airbnb, United Airlines, Ripple, and Stripe,
among others—to explore partnership opportunities to build affordable housing. The participants left the meeting energized, but
at the time we didn’t have a specific call to action.
Six months later, when California went into lockdown during
the COVID-19 pandemic, we found our call to action. One of our
biggest concerns was the virus’s potential to spread throughout
homeless shelters—refuge for more than 40,000 unhoused people. Since tourism had stopped, we also had empty hotel and motel rooms across the state. Drawing on these assets, Governor
Newsom proposed using Federal Emergency Management Agency
funding to pay the nightly rate for individual rooms for unhoused
people for up to two-week stays, a program he called Project
Roomkey, which served people experiencing homelessness who
either tested positive or were exposed to COVID-19 or who were
at higher risk of contracting the virus.
The program was so successful in housing people quickly, Governor Newsom proposed that the state enable local jurisdictions
to purchase these hotels and motels and use them for permanent
transitional housing and new interim housing, for a program he
called Homekey. He allocated $3.75 billion from the American
038_047_governing_proofedDA_sum2024.indd 42
funds and work closely with the California Department of Housing and Community Development (HCD) to allocate philanthropic funding to supplement continued operations. This partnership
gave many of the local jurisdictions extra flexibility and stretched
their Homekey funds further for capital renovations, construction,
and services.
Homekey was able to fund 250 local projects totaling more
than 15,000 housing units that will serve more than 160,000 of
California’s most vulnerable residents over the life of the projects.
In addition, the average per-unit cost to Homekey was approximately $200,000—well below the average cost of the more than
$500,000 necessary to build a new housing unit in California.
And according to Governor Newsom’s top housing advisor, Jason
Elliott, the biggest impact of this partnership is how it has contributed to long-term systems change. “Because of Homekey, we will
never go back to the old paradigm of building housing in this state
because we have shifted perceptions of what’s possible and opened
people’s minds about how we can quickly and efficiently generate
affordable housing,” he says.
Homekey exemplifies how relationship-building between state
and philanthropic leaders catalyzed a collaboration that led to
enormous impact. First, my listening tour enabled me to understand community needs more deeply and establish relationships
throughout the state to advance this project. Second, I was in regular communication with partners through roundtables, one-on-one
meetings, and our housing-and-homelessness working group,
so that when the partnership opportunity arose, I could quickly
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identify which partners might be interested in this work. Third, and
perhaps most important, I acted as a translator for both my state
colleagues and philanthropic partners, since the goals of philanthropy and government leaders are often opaque to each other.
(See “The Different Worlds of Philanthropy and Government” on
page 46.) Through relationship-building and as an expert in both
policy and the nonprofit sector, I was able to discern the goals and
pain points of each sector, help them identify where each could be
most impactful, and facilitate coordination. Finally, regular coordination between Enterprise and HCD was critical to ensuring the
successful distribution of philanthropic funds to state projects.
Entities wanting to build and deepen relationships to advance
partnerships should identify someone in their organizations who
can serve as an external liaison to stay in regular communication
with public and private partners, to be an internal translator to
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43
help colleagues identify and take advantage of partnership opportunities when they arise, and train both internal and externalfacing staff.
Public and Private Leadership | Successful partnerships require
public- and private-sector leadership. While this observation may
seem obvious, I have witnessed several partnerships fail to move forward because one side was too solicitous or overbearing, attempting
to push through its project without buy-in from all partners.
Three actors must play a leadership role in fostering this mutual buy-in: an internal government champion to create alignment
with government programs and policies; an external philanthropic
champion to help raise and coordinate foundation dollars; and an
intermediary champion—often a nonprofit organization, a community foundation, or a fiscal sponsor—to administer the partnership and ensure that it is grounded in the community being served.
Take the California Immigrant Resilience
Fund, a $150 million emergency relief fund for
undocumented communities. In March 2020,
the US Congress passed the Coronavirus Aid,
Relief, and Economic Security (CARES) Act,
giving Americans up to $1,200 per adult and
$500 per qualifying child. However, the relief
funding excluded undocumented residents—
who comprise 10 percent of California’s
workforce. Governor Newsom was committed to extending emergency cash assistance
to all Californians, including undocumented
workers, who were often on the front lines of
our COVID response in food services, health
care, manufacturing, construction, agriculture, and transportation. At the same time, I
had learned in my conversations with philanthropic leaders that Grantmakers Concerned
with Immigrants and Refugees (GCIR) was
considering developing a fund for cash assistance for undocumented communities, so I
initiated conversations between those philanthropic leaders and the state to explore a
potential collaboration.
Just one month later, those discussions
led to the creation of a partnership between
GCIR’s philanthropic California Immigrant
Resilience Fund and the California Department of Social Services’ (DSS’) Disaster Relief
Assistance for Immigrants, which collectively invested $150 million—with seed funding
from Emerson Collective, Blue Shield of California Foundation, The California Endowment, The James Irvine Foundation, the Chan
Zuckerberg Initiative, and, later, MacKenzie
Scott and nearly 70 other foundations—to
provide more than 322,000 undocumented
Californians with one-time cash assistance of
up to $1,000 per household. The partnership
was so successful in helping families to stay in
their homes—according to GCIR, 64 percent
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of cash went to rent—and keep food on their tables that it was replicated in dozens of cities and states around the country.
The California Immigrant Resilience Fund would not have happened without internal state champions in Governor Newsom and
DSS committing to this new initiative and distributing $75 million
in cash assistance; an external champion in GCIR, which helped
raise $75 million from philanthropic partners; and intermediary
organizations—more than 70 grassroots community-based organizations, who distributed the cash assistance via debit cards to
families in need.
Strong leadership from all partners grounds the continuous
communication that is necessary to coordinate operations. I was
in daily communication with GCIR for months to help raise money
for the program, and we held regular meetings between DSS and
GCIR to coordinate funding distribution to reach as many California communities as possible.
Community leadership, whether through CBO partners, intermediaries, or whoever is closest to the problem, also plays a central
role. In this case, the combination of public and private funding
meant that we could work with larger statewide organizations like
California Rural Legal Assistance Foundation, as well as smaller
community-based organizations that lacked the capacity to apply
for government funding but that served as trusted messengers to
undocumented workers.
Crafting Real Solutions to Real Problems | Successful partnerships are rooted not only in strong relationships and leadership
but also in a shared determination to delve below the mere appearance of problem-solving. I heard a story of a well-known leader
vegetables to those in need, but they couldn’t afford to hire workers to pick, pack, and deliver the produce to food banks.
Working with the California Department of Agriculture and the
California Association of Food Banks, I helped develop a targeted
partnership to support the Farm to Family program by employing $2.86 million from state and federal funds and $2.75 million in
philanthropic support to pay farmers a pick-and-pack fee to hire
workers to harvest the excess produce and drivers to deliver it to
food banks. The state of California provided additional funding
supports to food banks to distribute the fresh produce at the local
level. The combined efforts of this partnership resulted in 22 food
banks receiving more than 30 million pounds of fresh fruits and
vegetables, providing 25 million meals to Californians facing food
insecurity. The infusion of funds established new relationships
with contributing California farms and helped to grow the Farm to
Family program, which now sources 40 percent more produce annually than prepandemic, supplying more than 270 million pounds
of produce to food banks in 2023 alone. The US Department of
Agriculture has also applied lessons learned from this success and
invested $900 million into a new program called the Local Food
Purchase Assistance program to allow state and tribal governments to procure and distribute nutritious local and regional foods
and beverages.
True partnership is what happens after the public announcement of the collaboration. All of the coordination that goes into
implementation—making sure that funding needs are met, state
and local programs are coordinated, and communities’ needs are
supported—requires work. We aligned around the challenges we
While partnerships are about more than a press release,
communicating impact is critical, not only
to give partners credit but also to protect the future
of the partnership. Our success must become open-source
solutions for others to replicate.
in federal government who asked a foundation leader for funding
that he could mention in a forthcoming “big policy announcement.” Unfortunately, the funder refused to give because the federal official missed the point: A press release is not a partnership.
True partnerships are about addressing social problems with cocreated solutions and substantive resources.
The COVID-19 lockdowns resulted in an economic downturn
and widespread job losses around the world. In California, approximately one in four Californians, or 10 million people, experienced
food insecurity—a figure closer to one in three among Black and
Latinx families. At the same time, once most restaurants were
closed, farmers in California held millions of pounds of fresh produce that they could not sell. They wanted to donate the fruits and
038_047_governing_proofedDA_sum2024.indd 44
wanted to solve—food insecurity, a surplus of produce, and agricultural workers in need of jobs—and utilized flexible private dollars to support an innovative strategy to provide healthy food to
Californians in need while also enabling farmworkers who would
otherwise not have been working to stay employed. And we held
weekly meetings with the California Department of Agriculture
and the California Association of Food Banks for months to guarantee that this program remained operational beyond its launch.
Communicating Impact | While partnerships are about more
than a press release, communicating impact is critical, not only to
give partners credit but also to protect the future of the partnership. Our successes must become open-source solutions for others
to replicate.
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45
T H E P U B L I C - P R I VAT E PA R T N E R S H I P C O N T I N U U M
Public-private partnerships can span from information sharing to fully integrated
partnerships involving shared decision-making and cofunding.
} } } } }
MORE AUTONOMOUS
Informationsharing
Philanthropy
and government
have periodic
meetings
or convenings,
sharing strategic
information,
and shared
learnings
Networkbuilding
Philanthropy
and government
coordinate
to bring together
parties who
have shared
goals
Technical
assistance
Philanthropy
provides
expertise or
knowledge to help
solve a
government
challenge
MORE INTERGRATED
Intermediary
Government
and philanthropy
find ways to
align, and
philanthropy
offers what it can
to accomplish
shared goals
Cofunding
Government
and philanthropy
fund together
in a coordinated
way
Fully
integrated
partnerships
Shared
decision-making,
funding, staff,
and other
resources to
address
a problem
This figure is adapted from “Catalyzing Collaboration: The Developing Infrastructure for Federal Public Private Partnerships,” 2014,
with permission from the USC Center on Philanthropy & Public Policy.
During the 2020 US Census, California partnered with philanthropy to collectively deploy $217 million to convince communities—particularly racially marginalized communities who are less
trusting of government because of the historic misuse of data or
the fear of potential deportation for sharing citizenship status—to
complete the census form. The campaign engaged trusted messengers like Ethnic Media Services and community foundations and
community-based organizations like United Ways of California
and California Rural Legal Assistance to get the word out about
how the census informs the distribution of federal dollars to their
communities.
Little did we know at that time that those same trusted messengers would play a crucial role in the effort to encourage communities to get vaccinated for COVID-19. In California, one of our top
leaders from the state census office and other census staff moved
to the Department of Public Health to lead what became one of the
nation’s most comprehensive state COVID-19 public awareness
and outreach campaigns. We collaborated with one of our main
census partners, The Center at Sierra Health Foundation, to help
distribute $23.3 million in state grants to 157 nonprofits to educate
vulnerable communities on the safety and effectiveness of the vaccine. We also worked together on the center’s $21.1 million philanthropic Vaccine Equity Campaign to fund 116 organizations working to increase access to appointments and vaccines and provide
transportation, interpreters, childcare, and other supports to Black,
Brown, and Indigenous communities. The center and the state
also partnered with the Public Health Institute (PHI) on Together
Toward Health, a $35 million philanthropic initiative with leadership from The California Endowment and the California Health
Care Foundation that worked with more than 548 communitybased organizations for services including creating and delivering
community-specific messages about COVID-19 testing, vaccination, and safety protocols; hosting pop-up and mobile testing and
vaccination clinics; and arranging transportation to and from vaccination sites.
038_047_governing_proofedDA_sum2024.indd 45
As with the census initiative, communication was essential to
getting people vaccinated. The flexible philanthropic dollars we
helped raise with Together Toward Health and the Vaccine Equity
Campaign were critical to reaching small organizations that had
deep connections to California’s most vulnerable communities. As
a result of this outreach, we saw a 34 percent increase in vaccine
uptake in those zip codes. TODEC Legal Center in the Inland Empire relied on the trust it had built over decades of service to immigrants to convince them to get vaccinated, hosting accessible popup vaccine clinics in the crop fields for as many as 250 workers a
day during their shifts to avoid lost wages. Leadership Council for
Justice and Accountability offered bilingual registration services,
hosted mobile clinics, and incorporated on-site food distribution,
facilitating the vaccination of more than 3,000 Central Valley residents. And the California Consortium for Urban Indian Health
worked closely with Indigenous communities to increase vaccinations through practices reflecting and celebrating Native cultures,
by sharing information about vaccine safety through town halls
and talking circles and incorporating Native artwork in the consortium’s educational materials.
Before Governor Newsom held a press conference to talk about
our vaccine outreach, I briefed him on the impact of our Vaccine
Equity Campaign and Together Toward Health partnerships so that
he could speak publicly about our 870 CBO partners and their extraordinary work. Newsom used this information to illustrate how
California was focused on the health of its most vulnerable communities. It also boosted the power of the partnership because those
trusted messengers were recognized as part of a broader effort.
At the local level, vaccine-safety messaging to underserved
communities was so effective that a recent survey of public-health
departments around the state reported that they have adopted this
same community-focused outreach strategy in their work. The effort was so successful—informing more than 27 million individuals
about vaccine safety and assisting 1.4 million people with vaccine
appointments—that in 2022 Governor Newsom established a new
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all established a universal vested
interest in preventing the spread
THE DIFFERENT WORLDS OF
of the virus. As a result of this
PHILANTHROPY AND GOVERNMENT
crisis, the outpouring of support
Philanthropy and government have different
from companies, nonprofits, and
timelines, goals, and approaches.
philanthropic organizations was
extraordinary. One of the biggest
Philanthropy
Government
challenges that governments face
Has some flexibility on timing
Bound by annual budget cycles
in motivating the private sector is
Has long-term commitment
Bound by election cycles
creating this same level of urgency
Has limited priorities
Has hundreds of responsibilities
around long-standing crises like
Can be selective on priorities
Does not have flexibility on priorities
poverty, homelessness, and climate
Does not fund gaps in government programs
Tries to get funding for defunded programs
change. Now that more than four
Government is mysterious
Foundations are mysterious
years have passed since the start of
the pandemic, many governments
This table is adapted from “Philanthropy and Government Working Together:
are returning to their siloed apThe Role of Offices of Strategic Partnerships in Public Problem Solving,” 2012, with permission from
proaches to problem-solving. We
the USC Center on Philanthropy & Public Policy.
have an opportunity to reverse that
trend by learning from and building
on the collaboration that the pandemic demanded of us.
Conflicts of Interest | Both real and perceived conflicts of interest
Office of Community Partnerships and Strategic Communications
are obstacles to partnership. First, when government works with
(OCPSC) to support additional high-priority issues, such as water
private entities, those entities might misconstrue financial conconservation and extreme heat. OCPSC’s trusted messenger nettributions as entitling them to enhanced access to public officials
work of CBO partners (many of whom were also partners in the
and the ability to barter for their own favorite program or policy
census and vaccine-rollout efforts) currently covers 91 percent of
initiative. Donations, too, always present the potential of a conflict
the most vulnerable zip codes in California, providing services in
of interest, since donors and the public might presume that finan34 languages and reaching nearly 18 million people.
cial donations for a partnership program might equate to political
Because we knew that we had to work to overcome misinforadvantage. To avoid these impressions, governments and donors
mation about vaccines, we thought about our overarching message
must set clear boundaries between partnership and advocacy.
from the very beginning of the partnership development. We knew
Governments and private partners must work with their legal
that the more trusted messengers we could fund, the greater our
teams to identify the legal limits of partnership and operate with
reach in vaccinating vulnerable communities would be. Accordingtransparency. In California, we addressed conflict-of-interest conly, my colleagues in the governor’s office and I coordinated with
cerns by, among other steps, reporting and publishing all donations
The Center at Sierra Health Foundation and PHI communications
to the California Fair Political Practices Commission in accordance
teams early in the process to create culturally appropriate and
with the law of behested payments so that the public had free access
consistent messaging for press releases. We constantly updated
to donation records. Additionally, we equipped our communications
the governor’s talking points with the number of CBOs involved,
team with talking points about the importance of partnerships in
how many people they were reaching, and the creative outreach
increasing resources for taxpayers and those in need.
strategies they were employing. The governor’s social media team
Lack of Internal Capacity | One of the biggest barriers to govregularly posted stories about our partner organizations’ creative
ernments engaging in public-private partnerships is a lack of uncommunity outreach strategies. Our partner organizations also
derstanding about how to advance them and a lack of capacity to
posted publicly about the efforts to raise awareness about the imundertake all four elements. I devoted my time to building partnerportance of getting vaccinated. The all-hands-on-deck communiships, from meeting with state agencies, nonprofits, foundations,
cations approach was critical to making this partnership—and our
and companies to identifying areas of synergy and opportunities
vaccination efforts—a success.
to developing a shared agenda. I worked closely with a team from
Freedman Consulting, a strategic consulting firm supported by
CHALLENGES AND LIMITATIONS
philanthropy, to help coordinate partnerships in California. Before
ESPITE THE PROMISE OF public-private partnerships
I left my role, I worked with Governor Newsom to establish partto amplify impact by bringing together the strengths
nership liaisons in a dozen state agencies to develop additional caof various sectors, they must overcome several barpacity throughout state government. Federal, state, and local govriers to succeed. Leaders could follow all the eleernments that seek to build strategic partnership initiatives must
ments of this approach and still not achieve the level of success
establish internal capacity and infrastructure to ensure success.
that we had in California. I have identified six of these barriers:
Lack of External Capacity | Governments also need capacity
Lack of Urgency | The COVID-19 pandemic catalyzed urgency
from participating companies, nonprofits, and foundations to
and innovation like never before. The risk of illness and death to
D
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help build partnerships from the private side. In California, one of
our primary partners was Philanthropy California, a membershipaffiliate group for 600 charitable foundations that helps to strategize, identify, and communicate partnership opportunities and
coordinate their members to engage with the governor’s office.
Additionally, private capacity can be built by hiring policy liaisons and mandating that they work with government to develop
partnerships. Finally, none of these partnerships would have happened without a firm commitment from nonprofits and intermediaries to help implement the partnership.
No Motivation | Another barrier to partnerships is a lack of motivation to participate in them. When I began working in my role,
I had to sell the idea of partnerships to several of my colleagues.
Bureaucracies have a deep attachment to the status quo, and people often don’t like change because they are already overwhelmed
with work and don’t have the time, expertise, or risk tolerance
to try new ways of doing things. Many state leaders also worried
that tapping into private dollars would require a lot of work and
for minimal return, given that foundation dollars are a drop in
the bucket compared with California’s state budget, which was
as much as $300 billion annually. Potential private partners also
said that investing in government relationships could be a waste
of time if they had to rebuild those relationships after the next
election. Early in my tenure, I focused on identifying leaders
eager to partner with us so that we had a few early partnership
successes to sell the case for public-private partnerships to both
my colleagues and external stakeholders. By the time I left the
administration three years later, we had worked with more than
1,800 private partners and 27 departments and agencies, all of
47
challenges, I worked closely with our policy team to avoid any missteps with powerful interest groups.
Finally, political transitions can result in partnerships’ being deprioritized in new administrations. Even when politicians
create the infrastructure to advance partnerships within their
administrations, partnership liaisons and offices can be dismantled upon the arrival of a new administration. President Donald
Trump, for example, disbanded President Obama’s Office of Social Innovation shortly after his inauguration in 2017. The longterm success of partnerships requires that institutional guardrails be established to sustain these positions through political
transitions.
D
I N N O VAT I O N AT S C A L E
ESPITE THE IMMENSE promise of govern-
ing through partnership, this approach
is still nascent, and all sectors must lay
the foundation for this work to become
a success. We need communities of practice so that the experts leading partnership development can learn from each
other and connect with peers working on the ground. We need
more partnership liaisons at the federal, state, and local levels
to build government capacity, and we need asset-mapping research to understand the strengths and opportunities that each
of these jurisdictions brings to partnerships. The field must
also coordinate on strategic communications to promote the
value of public-private partnerships. All of these areas are ripe
for philanthropic support.
Despite the promise of governing through partnership,
this approach is still nascent, and all sectors
must lay the foundation for this work to become a success.
Innovation at scale is the
promise of public-private partnership.
which had learned the value of partnerships and built the muscle
to continue this work in the future.
Political Factors | We also faced several political challenges that
were difficult to foresee. Unions protested our vaccine outreach
strategy to fund community-based organizations to be trusted
community messengers because those partnerships hired nonunionized nonprofit leaders to do work. In addition, they demanded that Homekey hire union labor to do the hotel and motel renovations. Governor Newsom also faced a recall election in 2021,
which meant we had to be very politically cautious, and some of
the potentially more politically controversial partnerships that I
had developed were paused until he prevailed. Through all these
038_047_governing_proofedDA_sum2024.indd 47
I am encouraged that the partnerships we started in the
Newsom administration have continued to thrive and to improve
the lives of millions of Californians. Now that a few years have
passed since the launch of many of these partnerships, I can see
that the impact reaches far beyond the work of the partnerships:
Systems and communities have changed for the better. Innovation
at scale is the promise of public-private partnership. O
K AT H LE E N K E LLY JA NU S is a senior advisor at Freedman Consulting
and a lecturer at Stanford University’s Program on Social Entrepreneurship.
Before joining Freedman, she was the senior advisor
on social innovation to California Governor Gavin Newsom.
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R E V I TA L I Z E
P A R K S TO
TUCKED AWAY IN THE CASCA DE MOUNTA INS OF CENTR A L WASHINGTON, amid miles of hiking trails
and fruit orchards, sits Methow Park on the south side of the small town of Wenatchee. In stark contrast with the verdant ecoregion, Methow Park once embodied the community’s inequitable living
conditions: a patchy soccer field, two netless basketball hoops, and deteriorating playground equipment. More than 4,200 people lived within a 10-minute walk of the one-acre park, the vast majority of
whom are Mexican and Mexican American farmworkers in an otherwise white and middle-class town.
In 2014, Trust for Public Land (TPL), a national conservation organization that creates parks
and protects land for people, was invited by the City of Wenatchee to engage residents in renovating
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S
O
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The Trust for Public Land developed a framework to build community power
through the creation and stewardship of green spaces.
Our work demonstrates the power of parks to enrich democracy.
STRENGTHEN DEMOCRACY
B Y G E N E VA V E S T , C A R Y S I M M O N S & H O WA R D F R U M K I N
11 T H S T R E E T B R I D G E P A R K
The park in Washington, D.C., will be open to the public in 2026
after more than a decade of community engagement.
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Methow Park. For more than a year, conventional attempts at involving the community, such as meetings in school gyms and online surveys, saw poor results. Besides, renovating a park seemed
trivial compared with the community’s broader civic and health
concerns. South Wenatchee residents had experienced decades of
city disinvestment, underrepresentation in local government, and
an absence of Latino advocacy groups.
The dynamic began to change when TPL’s team committed to
meeting the community where they were. TPL’s program director,
Cary Simmons, staffed a table at the popular Northwest Mariachi
Festival, where he met Teresa Zepeda, a South Wenatchee resident,
who, according to Simmons, “saw me fumbling to engage attendees because I couldn’t speak Spanish.” Zepeda helped Simmons
translate at the festival and later connected TPL with neighbors
of Methow Park. Rather than holding stale public meetings, TPL
started hiring residents to enliven the park with classes that highlighted neighborhood talents, such as piñata design and folkloric
ballet dance. “We were connecting the community to the park and
to each other,” says Teresa Bendito, Zepeda’s daughter and a TPL
intern in summer 2018.
As trust grew, community input poured in, informing an ambitious park design that exceeded the initial $2 million budget. Rather
than sacrifice amenities, a dozen South Wenatchee neighbors attended their first city council meeting to demand an expanded
park budget. They succeeded. Realizing that Methow Park would
need advocates after its renovation was completed, members—
among them the Zepeda-Bendito duo—adopted the name Parque
Padrinos (Park Godparents) and began planning for the operation
and stewardship of the park.
The Parque Padrinos evolved to be much more than just a
“friends of the park” group. With more than 1,000 members
within four years of its formation, the Padrinos serve as a bridge
between the Latino community and powerful institutions. After
the organization’s early win securing park funds, Zepeda says,
“I learned that when we speak up, make demands, and go talk to
public officials, we can actually change things.” This inspired the
Padrinos to partner with the Latino Community Fund of Washington to engage the community in political action, which ultimately led to a remarkable 300 percent increase in Latino voter
turnout in the 2018 midterm election. Then, when COVID began
devastating the Latino farmworker community in the spring of
2020, the Padrinos received a grant from Wenatchee’s regional
hospital system to lead culturally relevant outreach that helped
vaccinate more than 3,000 people.
11 T H S T R E E T B R I D G E P A R K
Public life at the park, which spans the Anacostia River, will unfold among
features designed by and for the community.
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“All that relationship and trust-building helped us when we really needed it to get through something that affected the whole
world,” Bendito says of COVID. “When I see neighbors and new
faces at the park, it’s a reminder that all the work was worth it.”
The Common-Ground Framework
A
COMMUNITY’S POWER TO shape its social, cultural, and
physical environment is a cornerstone of a healthy
democracy, but for too many citizens, this vision is
out of reach. Before she was a parque madrina distributing COVID personal protective equipment, Beatriz Elias was a
full-time housewife who felt that she was “in a well” and that “no
one ever asked [her] what [she] wanted to see in the neighborhood.” Elias is not alone in this feeling. People’s doubt in their own
political efficacy, rampant social polarization, and an epidemic of
loneliness have all surged in the past decade. A 2022 survey found
that only one in four Americans agree that “people like them” can
influence political systems. The fact that Americans trust each
other less and experience loneliness significantly more than they
did 50 years ago corresponds with levels of polarization nearing
historic highs. All this alienation unfolds in segregated cities that
51
every community is entitled to power but that structural barriers
may stand in the way. The question confronting philanthropists,
researchers, and policy makers is, what interventions remove barriers to equitable community power?
Parks and green spaces that enable community engagement and
organizing are often overlooked interventions for building community power. Parks have enormous unrealized potential to serve
a critical function for the nation: social infrastructure. An emerging concept, social infrastructure is described by sociologist Eric
Klinenberg as the “physical places and organizations that shape the
way people interact.” These include parks, libraries, schools, barbershops, places of worship, and other venues. Klinenberg adds that social infrastructure includes the “physical conditions that determine
whether social capital develops,” serving as a stage upon which civic
life unfurls, social divisions are bridged, and bonds are forged. While
many communities enjoy bountiful social infrastructure, marginalized communities routinely confront a deficit of quality green space.
A 2021 TPL study revealed that parks in communities of color are,
on average, half the size of those serving predominantly white populations and serve five times as many people per acre.
Not the natural settings we often consider them to be, parks,
plazas, trails, and preserves are physical manifestations of human
P H O T O S O N PA G E S 4 8 - 4 9 A N D PA G E 5 0 C O U R T E S Y O F O M A + O L I N
SUPERFICIAL OR PERFUNCTORY COMMUNITY ENGAGEMENT CAN
RESULT IN NEIGHBORHOOD PARKS WITH IMPROVED AMENITIES, BUT
NOT THE KIND THAT RESPOND TO COMMUNITY NEEDS.
silo neighbors from backgrounds, perspectives, and income levels
different from their own.
It is hard to experience social isolation, polarization, and flagging trust in democracy, so to confront these trends can feel daunting and even hopeless. However, recent years have seen public and
private institutions emerging to tackle them at the root cause. The
COVID pandemic, coinciding with a national reckoning with racial
discrimination, instigated unprecedented legislation that directs
major investments toward historically neglected communities,
including the American Rescue Plan of 2021, the Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act of 2021, the Inflation Reduction Act of 2022,
and the CHIPS and Science Act of 2022. The promise of a just and
sustainable recovery, though, hinges on the ability of communities
most in need to absorb and employ these funds.
Such vast investments acknowledge that repairs to our torn
social fabric must be systemic in nature. One emerging approach
among social sector practitioners and philanthropists is to shift
the focus of their interventions from factors such as environment,
health, and education to community power. Anthony Iton and
Robert Ross, of The California Endowment, and consultant Pritpal
Tamber define community power as “the ability of people facing
similar circumstances to develop, sustain, and grow an organized
base of people who act together through democratic structures to
set agendas, shift public discourse, influence who makes decisions,
and cultivate ongoing relationships of mutual accountability with
decision makers that change systems.” This definition implies that
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decisions. City parks are typically created and managed by local
governments that are responsible for engaging neighbors in park
design and programming, theoretically with the purpose of reflecting community input in shaping the environment. However,
definitions of community engagement are highly variable in the
parks field and can encompass a range of approaches. Some parks
departments employ the International Association for Public
Participation’s (IAP2) “Spectrum of Public Participation” model,
which features a continuum of citizen engagement: inform, consult, involve, collaborate, empower. In a 2024 TPL survey of the
nation’s 100 largest cities, public-park agencies were more than
five times as likely to aim to inform the public (“always” or “most
of the time”) as they were to empower the public.
Superficial or perfunctory community engagement can result
in neighborhood parks with improved amenities, but not the kind
that respond to community needs. (A classic example would be
building a tennis court where the community prefers a basketball
court.) What could have been an inviting setting for leisure, active
recreation, and self-expression—and their many attendant social
and health benefits—may become an underused, poorly maintained
blight on the community. Therefore, we employ the term “community engagement” to mean the practice of building relationships
with representative communities in ways that earn trust, legitimize
community voices, nurture grassroots collaboration, build capacity,
and center the community in decision-making about issues that affect community members’ daily lives and environments.
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TPL’s experience working in Wenatchee and hundreds of communities across the country reveals that parks can be a generative
setting for social infrastructure, community engagement, and community power. Inspiration from field organizers and community
partners led to the creation of TPL’s theoretical model called the
Common Ground Framework (henceforth “the Framework”) for
building community power through the creation and stewardship
of parks and green space. The Framework suggests the development of three goals: community relationships, community identity,
and community power. These elements generally operate sequentially: At first, the Padrinos were a group of trusting neighbors, who
then gradually formed a collective identity as caretakers of Methow
Park; this identity enabled the creation of social networks and
shared agendas needed for community power to blossom.
Though positioning parks as catalysts of community power is
a novel concept, the Framework’s progression of relationships,
identity, and power is hardly original. Two important concepts
reinforce the Framework: social capital and intergroup contact.
Social capital can be defined in many ways; here, we follow sociologist Nan Lin, who defines it as “the resources embedded in a
social structure which are accessed and/or mobilized in purposive
actions.” This construct includes both tangible resources (say, a
job reference or a tip about an affordable apartment for rent) and
intangible ones (such as being able to count on neighbors for help
during a natural disaster) while emphasizing resources that give
rise to action. Bonding social capital arises in close-knit groups,
Several studies have found that accessing green space promotes stronger social ties, reduced loneliness, heightened place
attachment, greater social cohesion, and higher rates of community trust in local government. In one study of three inner-city
parks in Manchester, United Kingdom, researcher Aleksandra
Kaźmierczak found that residents who visit parks regularly
have 66 percent more social ties than those who do not visit
parks. Parks increase not only the number of social bonds but
also the diversity and strength of those bonds. Parks are ideal venues for intergroup contact; park visitors can bond over
shared interests (such as sports, hobbies, and recreational activities), participate in community stewardship projects (building playgrounds, painting murals, and gardening), and organize
collective action around civic and political issues (equitable
parks policy and cultural representation in park monuments).
Community identity emerges as a pivotal factor shaping the
quality and functionality of parks as social infrastructure. As measured by social cohesion, sense of community, place attachment,
and sense of ownership, community identity can form around
shared geography, religion, occupation, ethnicity, and countless
other factors and be based on person-to-person interactions, virtual interactions, or a combination of the two. In the context of
parks, we focus on place-based community identity. Communities,
like individuals, embody multiple identities; a great strength of
parks is that they facilitate place-based identity that cuts across
and can unite other dimensions of a person’s identity.
POWER PERPETUATES ITSELF IN A VIRTUOUS CYCLE;
BY CONTRAST, THE ABSENCE OF COMMUNITY POWER CAN
BREED MISTRUST, DISTRESS, AND POOR HEALTH.
such as friends, families, and coreligionists, and reinforces shared
(and sometimes exclusive) identities. Bridging social capital, by
contrast, stems from connections outside one’s close networks,
often across different socioeconomic and ethnic divisions.
Intergroup contact theory, proposed by psychologist Gordon
Allport in his 1954 book The Nature of Prejudice, holds that contact
between groups with distinct identities can reduce prejudice and
promote conviviality, particularly if that contact features equal
status, intergroup cooperation, common goals, and support by
social and institutional authorities. Even in unstructured settings
such as parks and other public spaces, intergroup contact can improve intergroup relations.
Anchoring the Framework is the irreplaceable value of in-person
community relationships. As measured through social ties and social networks, community relationships are formed through everyday interactions in social infrastructure. They can be characterized
as strong or weak social ties; strong ties represent close bonds, and
weak ties involve superficial (but often gratifying) interactions.
Community relationships are closely associated with improved
well-being, including lower mortality rates, reduced depression,
increased safety, and heightened civic engagement, and are essential building blocks for community identity.
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Quality parks and green spaces are potent drivers of community identity. They function as settings for both bonding and bridging social capital. When friends and family convene in parks, their
shared sense of belonging and place attachment intensifies. Robust
community identity is a predictor of a community’s success in resisting displacement from green gentrification, in which longtime
residents are displaced geographically and culturally when investments in green infrastructure lead to rising property values and
demographic shifts. Parks also serve as locations for diverse communities to converge and forge a shared identity. They are particularly promising settings for immigrants and new arrivals to receive
messages of belonging, express their heritage in public, and find
comfort in cultivating a shared history with US-born park users.
Leveraging community identity as a foundation, members can
begin to work toward common goals by exercising community power
through democratic processes. Community power can be measured by civic participation and collective efficacy and is evidenced
in actions such as stewardship of the commons, attending public
meetings, influencing political decisions, and other acts of civic involvement. Communities with deep reserves of community power
are more resilient to acute crises, such as those inflicted by climate
change and the pandemic, and can more effectively confront chronic
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Stanford Social Innovation Review / Summer 2024
53
crises, such as structural racism. Power perpetuates itself in a virtuous cycle; by contrast, the absence of community power can breed mistrust,
distress, and poor health.
Owing to their proximity and perceived sociability, parks significantly
elevate social capital and civic engagement, countering the broader trend
of diminishing social capital. For decades, environmental stewardship
groups such as the Parque Padrinos
have been a rare exception to declining civic participation by offering an
avenue for local volunteerism. For
instance, one study led by William
Yagatich found that members of a
Maryland-based environmental stewardship group were 58 percent more
likely to attend public meetings than
the average American.
ALAKOKO FISHPOND
The progression of relationships,
Students have fun while tending to Alakoko Fishpond. Alakoko was built on the curve of the Hulē‘ia
identity, and power transcends parks
River on Kaua‘i more than 600 years ago by the island’s earliest inhabitants.
and can be observed in power-building
settings such as labor organizing and
even in the digital commons. But their
nature as social infrastructure makes parks and green spaces parevents, advisory boards, and partnerships with park stewardship
ticularly opportune for building and sustaining community power.
groups, although these practices are often not codified in policies
One crucial attribute of social infrastructure in which parks
and their effectiveness is rarely formally evaluated. However, these
especially excel is public accessibility, both physically and psychowidespread practices form a strong vehicle for implementing elelogically. Unlike other built environments, most parks have few
ments of the Framework.
barriers to entry: They typically are free to access, close to home,
The presence of a park does not in and of itself ensure that it
and nonprescriptive in terms of use. These traits encourage longer,
will function optimally as social infrastructure, or even be accesmore frequent visits and greater opportunity for forming an array
sible to all. Physical and emotional access requires designing for
of community relationships.
all abilities and identities. This is especially true for BIPOC, immiUnlike libraries or museums, parks offer flexible uses for ungrant, disabled, and LGBTQ+ communities that carry personal or
programmed recreation. Unstructured, neutral spaces encourage
generational trauma associated with public spaces. These groups
bridging and bonding interactions among users and offer settings
often find themselves navigating public spaces designed by people
for spontaneous user activation. Parks designed for a mix of uses
who do not share their experience or values. Engaging marginal(such as open space, a playground, a performance stage, and a
ized communities in the design, programming, and stewardship of
community garden) invite and encourage interactions among a
green space is one big step toward preventing exclusion. But it is
diverse array of visitors.
important to keep goals realistic; decades, if not centuries, of injusParks also carry important cultural and political meaning. The
tice cannot be addressed by just one park project, no matter how
very nature of parks as shared commons makes them lightning rods
extensively communities are engaged. A successful project can,
for strong opinions on ownership, rights, and representation. For
however, set communities on a path to creating a more inclusive
instance, deep questioning of whose histories are memorialized in
and robust social fabric.
park statues and monuments has triggered contentious debates
about cultural representation in the public sphere. Parks as civic and
Community-Power Building at Work
social infrastructure therefore offer a platform for gauging, debating,
and reconciling public opinions, as well as media for communities to
U ILDING COM MU NIT Y POW ER through revitalizing
translate their beliefs into their built and social environments.
parks may sound like a daunting task, but examA vibrant piece of social infrastructure requires management
ples of the Framework’s success abound. Across the
and maintenance by an organizing body. For parks, this function is
country, local residents are transforming their commost often handled by park departments, community-based nonmunities by using parks to exercise their power in many differprofits, and park stewardship groups. Most park agencies engage
ent ways. From securing favorable park policies to protecting
their communities through public meetings, community volunteer
sacred land to converting gray infrastructure to green,
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B
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communities have successfully applied the Framework in varied contexts. The common thread of these projects’ successes
is the Framework’s sequence: Communities build relationships
with their environment and with each other, coalesce around a
place-based identity grounded in their shared passion, and ultimately consolidate and exercise community power to transform residents’ lives for the better.
For some communities, access to park space is really about access to the resources needed for communities to thrive. The 11th
Street Bridge Park (Bridge Park) in Washington, D.C., is set to
open in 2026, but for more than a decade it has been a platform
for economic development and housing security in historically
disinvested communities. Bridge Park, which breaks ground in December 2024, will transform a decommissioned bridge spanning
the Anacostia River into a seven-acre park. On the east end of the
bridge is Ward 8, and to the west is the affluent neighborhood of
Capitol Riverfront. Ward 8 is a historically Black neighborhood
that was once a thriving economic and cultural hub for African
Americans (Frederick Douglass made his home on this side of the
Anacostia River), but decades of disinvestment, isolation from
downtown D.C., and urban renewal projects have resulted in 46
percent of the population living below the poverty level, according
to nonprofit Building Bridges Across the River (Building Bridges).
In conversations about transforming 11th Street Bridge into a
world-class park, Ward 8 residents expressed the hope that such
an investment would not only improve access to green space but
also bring economic opportunity. Bridge Park was spearheaded
by Building Bridges, which held more than 200 listening sessions
with Ward 8 and Capitol Riverfront residents. The nonprofit did
not simply gather feedback, though; Building Bridges carved out
PARKS4ALL
Community members attend a Parks4All orientation in Fresno, California,
to gain expertise in parks policy change.
048_057_greenspaces_13_sum2024_proofedDA_crx.indd 54
opportunities for residents to run community programs, such as
hosting the much beloved annual Anacostia River Festival, and
make the final decision on the park design.
Residents and local nonprofits held Bridge Park accountable
to the community by cocreating an equitable development plan
(EDP). The EDP distills community goals into four topical areas: affordable housing, workforce development, preservation
of Black-owned small businesses, and arts and cultural equity.
Implementing the EDP has resulted in dozens of initiatives. For
example, Bridge Park’s Community Leadership Empowerment
Workshop has equipped more than 100 Ward 8 residents with the
fundamentals of civic engagement and advocacy. Building Bridges
worked with housing nonprofits to establish a homebuyers’ club to
forestall green gentrification. The EDP program that senior vice
president Scott Kratz is proudest of is THRIVE East of the River, a
COVID relief effort that distributed $3 million in direct deposits to
more than 500 families in Ward 8. The success of these programs
hinged on the trust built and networks formed among residents
over years of community engagement.
In the decade leading up to groundbreaking, Bridge Park has
raised more than $92 million for the EDP implementation alone—a
funding level that matches the cost of actual park construction.
Given this success, an audience member asked Kratz at a recent
meeting, “Do you even need to build the park?” Another audience
member immediately countered, “You better! I designed that park!”
Whereas Bridge Park is an urban example, the Framework is
equally salient in rural and suburban areas, where green space may
abound but private landownership often denies access to precious
natural areas. In Hawai‘i, landownership is antithetical to native
Hawaiian practices, which view ‘āina (land, or that which feeds) as
a family member and not something
to be owned. Protecting land from
rampant development in Hawai‘i
means protecting native Hawaiian
cultural sovereignty.
Alakoko Fishpond was built into
the curve of the Hulē‘ia River on
Kaua‘i more than 600 years ago by
the island’s earliest inhabitants. For
countless generations, people came
to Alakoko to work, play, and feed
their communities, cultivating a
healthy watershed that nourished the
estuary with fish and seaweed. After
Alakoko came under private ownership, the fishpond became choked
with invasive red mangrove trees.
Mālama Hulē‘ia, a grassroots nonprofit formed by canoers who practiced near Alakoko on the Hulē‘ia
River, was permitted access in 2018
to gradually clear the area of mangroves. In just a few years, Mālama
Hulē‘ia engaged more than 3,000 volunteers to remove mangrove trees
and plant native wetland species. In
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doing so, volunteers were not just helping rebalance the watershed
but cultivating a relationship with ‘āina, kūpuna (elders and ancestors) from whom they inherited Alakoko, and the ‘ohana (family)
of today’s caretakers.
When the 102-acre property was put on the market in 2021,
Mālama Hulē‘ia and TPL organized a campaign to protect Alakoko
from purchase by developers. More than 5,500 community members signed a petition and sent letters to Kaua‘i County to fund
the purchase of Alakoko. During a county commission meeting,
dozens of Mālama Hulē‘ia volunteers, from children to elders, provided testimony. The county recommended funds for protection
of the site, but ultimately a private donor—the Chan Zuckerberg
Kaua‘i Community Fund of the Hawai‘i Community Foundation—
provided funding for this purpose, and public funds were reallocated toward protecting other culturally significant sites. Ownership
of Alakoko Fishpond was transferred to Mālama Hulē‘ia, in a transaction brokered by TPL. This success followed from community
members developing relationships with each other and with ‘āina,
nurturing their identity within the place, and exercising their collective power to protect Alakoko.
Now that the fishpond is in the community’s hands, “they have
the sovereignty to decide its future,” says Reyna Ramolete Hayashi,
55
North Fresno had 4.5 times more park acreage per 1,000 residents
than South Fresno, where most of the city’s Black, Latino, Indigenous, and Hmong populations live. Second, Fresno was updating
its General Plan, which projects land use for the next 20 years
and which had major implications for the Fresno in which young
people would grow up. Finally, Fresno BHC continued to hear
from South Fresno youth that, more than anything, they wanted
to have more and better parks.
“We used parks as an entry point for young people to get involved in the General Plan,” says Sarah Reyes, of The California
Endowment. Thanks to stipends from Fresno BHC, a council of
South Fresno youth took the lead in creating Parks4All, a parks
advocacy campaign to ensure that language for equitable park improvements would be included in the General Plan.
For the next year, the youth council organized intergenerational community events at parks, surveyed park users on desired improvements, and became regular attendees at city council meetings. Parks4All planned to run ads on buses that placed ParkScore
data over a photo of a young girl split between a black-and-white
park in South Fresno and a full-color park in North Fresno. However, the City of Fresno deemed the ad too political and refused to run
it. This decision led to public backlash and national media attention
FOR PARKS TO SERVE AS SOCIAL INFRASTRUCTURE,
COMMUNITY ENGAGEMENT MUST BE INSTITUTIONALIZED WITH
ADEQUATE INVESTMENT, POLICY, STAFF, AND TRAINING.
project manager at TPL. Alakoko incubates education sovereignty
rooted in ike Hawai‘i, or traditional Hawaiian knowledge. Partnerships with local schools allow thousands of students to learn science, technology, engineering, and mathematics concepts through
traditional Hawaiian aquaculture. “To have the community care
for this place means that not only are they preserving […] ike
Hawai‘i, [they are] relearning sustainability,” says Enoka Karratti,
a Hawaiian educator.
Food sovereignty is an especially important goal for Hawai‘i,
which imports 90 percent of its food. “We aim to be feeding spiritually, physically, and mentally,” says Peleke Flores, director of
‘āina and community engagement at Mālama Hulē‘ia. To reach
this goal, thousands of community members continue to restore
and maintain the watershed in partnership with Mālama Hulē‘ia.
“I think it’s super important to get [Alakoko] as close as we can to
how it was traditionally,” Flores says, “so that we can have a physical manifestation of all the stories that we’ve been told.”
If Alakoko represents the profound meaning that a single
land protection project can carry, the Fresno Parks4All campaign
shows how the Framework can operate on the scale of an entire
city, and even a state. Fresno Parks4All began as a response to
three factors that Fresno Building Healthy Communities (Fresno BHC), an initiative of The California Endowment, could not
ignore. First, from 2012 to 2015, Fresno placed at the very bottom
of TPL’s ParkScore, a national ranking of park systems for the 100
most populous American cities. These same data revealed that
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that pushed the city to update its General Plan according to community demands, including updating the 1989 Parks Master Plan.
Soon after this win, the Parks4All coalition jumped back into
action when it became clear that the city was not being held accountable to invest dollars in accordance with the General Plan.
In 2018, Parks4All designed ballot Measure P, which would apply
a five-eighths percent sales tax to raise $2 billion over 30 years
for parks and arts. Youth leaders of Parks4All garnered 35,000
signatures, enough to put Measure P on the 2018 ballot. It received 52 percent of the vote. The city council, however, disputed the results, asserting that a citizen-led sales tax needed twothirds of the vote to win.
“We mourned for 30 seconds and then said, ‘Wait a minute,
let’s use the courts,”’ Reyes says. In 2021, the case made it all the
way to the California Supreme Court, which held that a citizeninitiated measure indeed needs only a simple majority to pass.
Measure P was the first of its kind to employ this rule, paving
the way for future citizen-led measures in California to pass
with a simple majority. Measure P was certified into law and
raised $58 million in a single year to equitably fund parks and
arts in Fresno.
The impact of the Parks4All campaign reached far beyond
numbers and dollars. Sandra Celedon, president and CEO of
Fresno BHC, describes a cultural shift in how South Fresnans see
themselves. Rather than asking for permission, “young people
are like, ‘Look, you can invest in our communities or we are going
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to figure out a way around you,’” she says. To her, seeing the construction of new parks is not just an infrastructural win but “a
philosophical win.”
H
Applying the Framework
OW CAN THOSE COMMITTED TO untapping the potential of social infrastructure apply the Framework to
achieve similar successes and support the progression
of community relationships, identity, and power? As
the previous stories demonstrate, a whole ecosystem of stakeholders, from enterprising nonprofit leaders to selfless park advocates
to responsive public officials, is involved in activating the Framework. Two stakeholder groups are especially well situated to elevate
park-building to community-building. First are parks staff, specifically community-facing staff and parks directors, in the public and
private sectors (e.g., parks departments, conservancies, “friends of”
groups, and landscape architects). The other is social impact philanthropists, such as foundation leaders, individual donors, and public
grant administrators (e.g., the National Endowment for the Arts
and the Environmental Protection Agency). We recommend several
strategies for these stakeholder groups to activate the Framework,
keeping in mind that these recommendations are applicable beyond
parks and can enhance social infrastructure of all kinds.
For parks to serve as social infrastructure, community engagement must be institutionalized with adequate investment, policy,
staff, and training. Community-power building is a slow process,
for collaboration. “Friends of” park groups can commit to broadbased community representation on their boards and staffs. In
some cities, large destination parks have well-resourced “friends
of” groups, while smaller local parks, especially in low-income
neighborhoods, lack this support; established “friends of” groups
can consider sister park partnerships through which they share resources with less privileged communities.
For funders, supporting initiatives geared toward policy change,
campaigns, and democracy-building can be a strategy for mobilizing residents and coalitions to action through their local park
and recreation systems. As in the specific cases we have described,
seemingly insignificant early investments can yield civic results
well beyond the boundaries of the park. Similarly, funders can support not only on-the-ground practitioners but also coalitions that
work with local government to change parks policies.
The manifestations of community power in the cases we have
examined—sturdy park stewardship groups, the promulgation of
public policy, more equitable access to financial resources—didn’t
happen overnight. Rather, years of community engagement that
prioritized trust-building accompanied the physical realization of
these park initiatives. To build trust, community-based organizations operated with open-door policies, in which anyone was
invited to attend meetings, give feedback, and volunteer, and in
which underrepresented communities received targeted outreach.
Furthermore, the initiatives earned trust through iterative engagement: Communities saw their efforts implemented in small wins,
PARK FUNDERS MUST BE CONSCIOUS OF NOT FALLING INTO
THE EVALUATION TRAP. OFTEN, EVALUATION REQUIREMENTS
PLACE UNDUE BURDEN ON GRANTEES.
and time dedicated to community engagement provides the necessary incubation period for residents to form relationships, coalesce around a common identity, and forge important alliances
that sustain community power. Institutionalizing community engagement—from park inception to programming—will safeguard
communities from the whims and nuances of funders and practitioners during this time- and resource-intensive process.
Community engagement is an important job, and it deserves
to be staffed and resourced accordingly. Practitioners should approach community engagement as they would a valued friendship:
Spend quality time with the community, and not just when you
need something; show appreciation for community expertise and
time by compensating community members; connect the community to other agencies that can benefit and sustain their causes. Such habits cannot be reliant on the goodwill of exceptional
practitioners. Rather, parks directors are responsible for codifying community engagement standards and adequately resourcing
project-level staff with funding, capacity, and training.
Important policies that enable community-power building include language on community compensation, park stewardship
groups, community-engagement staffing, community-led steering committees, and other strategies that prioritize engagement
048_057_greenspaces_13_sum2024_proofedDA.indd 56
such as a park’s design reflecting their feedback, and successful
community-organized celebrations. While the physical process of
constructing a park may take just a year or two, nurturing trusting
relationships, identity, and power is a long-term project with ripple effects across a community.
Funders should consider long-term commitments and structure grants in ways that allow for time and demonstrate trust.
Funders too often impose artificially short deadlines on the projects they fund, shift priorities with leadership changes, and impose
expectations that grantees become financially self-sustaining at
the conclusion of a funding period. Instead, funders can support
community engagement that builds power by providing unrestricted grants, multiyear gifts, provisions for pass-through funding, and backbone support for technical assistance and coalitionbuilding. Further, funders can embody trust through progressive
philanthropy models such as participatory budgeting and trustbased philanthropy, placing decision-making power directly in the
hands of communities and grantees. For example, The California
Endowment exhibited several of these trust-building habits in its
partnership with Fresno BHC.
Once a park is open to the public, monitoring its performance
is important. The social outcomes of parks and green space need
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57
evaluation and measurement, especially related to community engagement.
Like many dimensions of parks, community engagement is a predictor of
a park’s performance as social infrastructure, the principal outcomes of
which are relationships, identity, and
power. This performance can be measured and evaluated—with successes
replicated and failures harvested for
the lessons they teach.
Of the attempts to measure community engagement in parks and
social infrastructure, the most thorough may be Reimagining the Civic
Commons (RCC). RCC is a $40 million initiative by five foundations to
revitalize social infrastructure in five
cities through investment in capital
projects paired with deep community engagement. RCC evaluated comME THOW PARK
munity engagement in public space
The newly renovated Methow Park in Central Washington is a physical manifestation of
through mixed methods, including
the community’s vision and power, largely stewarded by the Parque Padrinos.
on-site surveys, online surveys, focus groups, social media analysis,
and observational analysis. A report
by the Knight Foundation used a selection of these tools to deter(GIS) mapping tools enable practitioners to layer priority areas,
mine how RCC communities fared during COVID and found that
such as health, environmental justice, and racial equity. We recdeep community participation led to greater trust from residents
ommend adding indicators of community power, such as voter
and increased sense of attachment to the spaces.
turnout, concentration of nonprofits, and rates of trust. Funders
What about social infrastructure projects without an eightcan ensure park equity, too, by channeling resources toward infigure budget? Practitioners can still make evaluation a routine
dividuals and organizations with a track record of trusting compart of their work, complementing surveys and observational data
munity relationships. Relationship-building—the foundation of
(such as number of attendees at an event) with qualitative data
the Framework—without a lens toward equity will only reinforce
and storytelling that document relationship-, identity-, and powerpower imbalances.
building. Practitioners can expand the field by collaborating with
At this writing, the United States is facing the run-up to the
social science researchers on user-friendly evaluation methods for
2024 presidential election. The strength and integrity of Americommunity engagement in parks processes.
can democracy are again salient concerns among a tapestry of inParks funders must be conscious of not falling into the evalutersecting crises, such as climate change, public health, political
ation trap. Often, evaluation requirements place undue burden on
polarization, and institutional racism. It is natural to feel powgrantees where trust would suffice. Funders should ask themselves:
erless and hopeless against such odds and high stakes. But if we
Would it yield better data and outcomes if we were to hire evaluahave learned anything from working deeply with communities, it
tion consultants, rather than put that responsibility on project staff?
is that power and hope emerge in surprising places. Envisioning,
Otherwise, they should consider applying the rule of thumb to alplanning, creating, and stewarding a park exemplifies social infralocate 10 percent of any social infrastructure grant toward impact
structure, enabling communities to address social issues on their
and process evaluations. Funders can work with grantees to identify
terms and replace despair and frustration with hope and action.
manageable data collection methods and outcomes; ensure that any
To respond to the times, parks and public spaces must become not
data collected can answer specific, practical questions; and promptjust passive spaces but catalysts in forming a healthy polity. In carly share results with all stakeholders. Evaluation can greatly inform
ing for the commons of parks and green spaces, we nurture social
grantmaking, multiplying the impact of individual investments
solidarity, civic engagement, and a thriving democracy. O
through sharing of results and laying the foundation for communityengagement training for parks practitioners.
G E NE VA V E ST is program manager of community strategies
One of the most important park outcomes to evaluate is eqat Trust for Public Land.
uity. Parks practitioners are increasingly embedding equity in inC A RY S I M M O NS is director of community strategies at Trust for Public Land.
vestment prioritization, but few consider community power as an
H O WA R D F R U M K I N is senior vice president and director of the Land
outcome of such decision-making. Geospatial information systems
and People Lab at Trust for Public Land.
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How
Regeneration
Is Redefining Business
Aiming for sustainability has
not fundamentally altered
the environmentally destructive effects of business. Only by embracing
regeneration as a model can we meet
the challenges posed by
today’s biggest global crises.
W E A RE A LL USED TO HEA RING A BOUT SUSTA INA BLE DEV ELOPMENT. For example, the United
Nations’ Sustainable Development Goals aim to address 17 global issues, from eradicating
poverty to ensuring access to clean water. But current approaches to sustainability embrace
a philosophy of “do no harm” focused on minimizing negative impacts. Today’s runaway
climate change, inequality, biodiversity loss, and global health crises, however, indicate that
our systems require a complete overhaul. While a balance among economic, societal, and environmental factors may have been feasible decades ago, we need to recognize that to meet
these challenges, maintenance or even mere repair is not enough. We must shift our focus
from sustainability to regeneration.
The idea of regeneration has its roots in agricultural practices, such as cyclically rejuvenating soil and plant life. When extended to business, it encompasses much more than harm reduction. The goal of regeneration is to make systems better, to give back more than is taken, to
replenish the planet’s natural resources, and to render communities and society more equitable
BY C H RISTO P H E R MA RQ U I S
Illustrations by Caco Neves
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and resilient. Regenerative approaches to business advocate for
wholesale transformation across domains as broad as agriculture,
industry, and communal health.
For example, Vincent Stanley, Patagonia’s director of philosophy, described to me how shifting from a mindset of sustainability
to one of regeneration can unlock new ways of thinking for a business and creating value for society and the environment. Starting
in the late 1990s, Patagonia sought, according to its mission statement, to “build the best products, cause no unnecessary harm, and
use business to inspire and implement solutions to the environmental crisis.” But the company concluded, Stanley reports, that
the “clause of ‘cause no unnecessary harm’ acknowledged that almost everything we do to improve our practices is still extractive;
they take from nature more than we know how to return and do
not actually create positive good.” This dynamic is fundamental to
sustainable practices that focus on mitigation of harm, instead of
transforming systems to avoid harm in the first place.
What is a socially responsible business to do? The Patagonia
case provides insight: Companies can rethink their business models by shifting away from the linear “take, make, waste” model
that has defined business for at least a century. When Patagonia
entered the food business in 2012, it saw the power of regenerative agriculture whereby farming practices can be designed not
to deplete the land, the way traditional agrichemical practices do,
but restore soil health, biodiversity, and the ecosystem. The entire
company then began embracing regeneration as an ideal. In 2017,
Patagonia changed its mission statement to “We’re in business to
save our home planet.” Regenerative ideas have spread to the company’s apparel business, influencing every stage in its value chain.
Upstream, it is sourcing regeneratively grown cotton and other
sustainable materials to produce its clothing. Downstream, it encourages reduced consumption through a “Don’t Buy This Jacket”
campaign that challenges Black Friday shopping norms and creates
systems to foster life-cycle extension through the reuse and repair
of its products.
Regeneration has a straightforward association with natural
systems, but adopting the idea as a business model goes well beyond agriculture. Regeneration in business means more than reducing harm or achieving sustainability and aims to enhance ecosystem health, promote social equity, and generate economic value
through innovative approaches. By redefining what types of value
to prioritize, regenerative businesses contribute positively to the
environment, society, and the economy, creating a circular and inclusive model of growth that benefits all stakeholders, including
future generations.
But such an approach requires a fundamental shift in business
models and mindsets and a complete overhaul of our man-made
systems from the ground up, from how energy is consumed to how
products are produced and even marketed to consumers. Today,
most companies use business models that pass on the costs from
their pollution and waste to society and the environment, and so
powerful vested interests stand in the way. Furthermore, as regenerative ideas gain currency, many companies are quick to adopt
the term without rigor and in turn can confuse consumers and
the general public. But by analyzing the core of these companies’
business models and their impacts, including downstream and
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upstream value chains, and by developing new forms of finance,
accountability mechanisms, and mindsets, we can begin to understand how to bring about these needed changes.
S
Shifting Businesses’ Dominant Paradigm
H A REHOLDER PRIM ACY, the dominant logic of our
economic system since at least the 1970s, overwhelmingly orients companies to their short-term
profits. At its core, this model prioritizes maximizing
value to owners, often at the expense of broader social and environmental considerations.
Reform efforts have picked up pace in recent years, aimed
mostly at broadening business goals to respect the interests of
stakeholders, such as employees, communities, suppliers, and the
natural environment, under the assumption that this approach
will deliver financial returns over the long run. The best-known
articulation of this focus is the Business Roundtable’s (BRT’s)
“Statement on the Purpose of a Corporation,” which in 2019 declared that companies should deliver value not just to shareholders but also to stakeholders.1 That an association of more than 200
elite American CEOs issued such a proclamation initially sparked
optimism among many.
However, in hindsight, the BRT’s proclamation has proven to
be a mere public relations campaign to forestall greater governmental oversight.2 Many of the companies whose CEOs signed
the BRT statement subsequently had higher carbon emissions
and more environmental infractions than similar nonsignatory
firms.3 What’s more, BRT signatories did less for their stakeholders than companies whose CEOs didn’t sign while returning more
money to their shareholders.4 Similarly, the BRT lobbied to help
pass $1.5 trillion in business-friendly tax cuts during the Trump
administration.5 It also campaigned against meaningful climate
action, including lobbying against the Biden administration’s environmental agenda and vehemently opposing the US Securities
and Exchange Commission’s proposals mandating corporations to
measure and report greenhouse gas emissions from their supply
chains.6 Ultimately, the BRT’s support for stakeholder capitalism
as it defines the concept is yet another instance in which those
in power propose peripheral solutions to deal with problems that
only buttress their own position and deter genuine reform.
A core problem with this stakeholder focus is that it rests on
the notion of “doing well by doing good.” As Alex Gorsky, CEO
of Johnson & Johnson and chair of BRT’s corporate governance
committee, summarized, “investing in employees and communities is an essential part of generating value for shareholders.”7 But
such an approach frequently relies on selective accounting that
overemphasizes the positives for stakeholders while ignoring the
negatives generated from company production. For instance, consider PepsiCo, one of the BRT signatories. The company trumpets
a variety of stakeholder-oriented programs under the moniker
PepsiCo Positive, claiming commitments to sustainability in agriculture, labor in supply chains, and healthy food choices.
While these programs may deliver their intended value, they
distract attention from the deleterious nature of the company’s
business model: the sale of sugary beverages sweetened mainly
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with obesity-linked ingredients like high-fructose corn syrup, and
snack foods formulated with ingredients to make them addictive.8 The production and distribution of these foods and drinks
ultimately contribute to increased health-care problems that are
borne collectively across the globe, and their model of transporting liquids long distances in single-use plastic bottles has massive
effects on greenhouse gas emissions and the proliferation of plastic waste, on top of extensive depletion of local water sources.
The depth of Pepsi’s hypocrisy is evident in plastic. If it really
cared about its stakeholders, it would also acknowledge that less
than 10 percent of all plastic is recycled and therefore more rigorously target advancing production and distribution strategies
to avoid this material. Instead, the company runs ads promoting
recycling—thereby shifting responsibility to consumers—while it
remains one of the largest source of plastic waste in the world.9
How can such negative impacts be addressed and potentially
reversed? We need to start with better questions about the types of
value that businesses create and their fundamental impact on society and the environment. Instead of asking how stakeholder focus
can lead to profits, we need to ask more fundamental questions
about the societal effects of a company’s business model.
The externalities of a company reflect the costs or benefits
to society and the environment from that company’s production
that are not reflected in the prices the company pays. Typically,
accounting for externalities focuses attention on the negative
side of the ledger. Carbon emissions are a canonical example:
61
economic growth. Unsurprisingly, Pepsi also spends millions in lobbying and PR campaigns to hide the health impacts of its products.
Focusing on regeneration presents the flip side of the negativeexternalities coin. Patagonia’s embrace of the concept demonstrates how a company can orient its business model to generate
societal benefits through its activities. But for society to embrace
and enact such systems, we need to change how they are assessed
for their impacts. Businesses can’t get credit just for selective
good works in the way advocates of stakeholder capitalism propose. We must instead examine the types of value they deliver and
extract and hold them accountable for the damage to our communities and the natural world. Such accountability may involve
public-awareness campaigns, policy change, new investment approaches, and, importantly, business model innovation to move
from a linear conception of production to a circular one that can
create positive externalities.
While this framework may seem unrealistic in our current system, some pioneering companies are starting to be more systemic
in assessing both the positives and the negatives of their business
model and being transparent about their effects. For example,
Brazilian personal-care and cosmetics multinational Natura recently began assessing its operations’ human, social, and natural capital—both positive and negative—through an integrated
profit-and-loss statement. This report provides a comprehensive
accounting of the types of value created (and extracted) by the
company’s operations. For example, it uses financial estimates
Our disconnect from the natural world has
far-reaching consequences for our future. From the food we eat to the clothes we wear, our reliance on
the earth’s resources is profound and largely
underestimated among affluent nations.
Their environmental cost is not borne by the emitter but rather
imposed on society at large, leading to negative impacts such as
climate change. Many other conspicuous forms of pollution are
externalities that enable companies to reap higher profits while
society bears the costs. But exploiting them is essential to corporate profitability. Pepsi has little incentive to reduce plastic at
its source when the company can look responsible by promoting
recycling and avoid the costs associated with rethinking its core
distribution model.
Societal externalities, such as poverty and inequality, are often
less obvious but have become increasingly prevalent. Who pays for
these societal ills? Companies benefit from offering lower wages
and, in the United States, not supporting employees’ health care,
despite the resulting burden on public-health systems due to increased illness and chronic conditions. Meanwhile, those making poverty wages suffer want, and widening inequality stifles
058_066_regeneration_9_sum2024_proofedDA_crx.indd 61
that acknowledge the damage to land, waterways, and communities from harvesting natural ingredients, and it explains how they
address these issues at the source, such as through forest restoration. The company also quantifies how much employing more
than two million direct-sales representatives leads to economic
development through job creation and skills enhancement. Yet
the company also discloses that its lower-level consultants earn
below a living wage and quantifies the effect of this negative externality on society.
Through this approach, Natura seeks to account for the positives and negatives across its different core business activities. This
commitment helps the company not only to identify areas of learning and improvement but also to assess its overall contributions
to its financial bottom line, to society, and to the environment.
For 2022, Natura concluded that, overall, for every $1 of revenue,
it delivered $2.7 in benefits to society. In this way, the company
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exemplifies the type of analysis—accounting for the costs and
benefits of the business model throughout all related value
chains—that all businesses should be required to perform in order
to assess their impact on the world’s resources.
O
A Cornerstone of Regeneration
UR DISCONNECT FROM the natural world has
far-reaching consequences for our future.
From the food we eat to the clothes we wear,
our reliance on the earth’s resources is profound and largely underestimated among affluent nations. Even though agriculture comprises only a small fraction of GDP in developed countries, its
impact on our lives is immense, driving climate change and biodiversity loss. Incumbent agribusinesses grow the same crops year
after year using established agrichemical practices that exacerbate soil degradation, environmental harm, and other negative
effects on the world.
By contrast, regenerative agriculture aims to restore ecosystems
and create new practices that benefit the planet. Regenerativeagriculture proponents ask, Is the way we’ve been doing it for the
past century really the best way to do it? Or can we bring back traditional practices before the era of factory farming that were quite
regenerative, innovate and find other practices that also restore
systems, or even create new ones?
Regenerative agricultural practices are gaining popularity
largely because of their potential to decarbonize while restoring
ecosystems. For example, the hooves of grazing animals loosen
soil and accelerate organic processes, while cover crops like mustard and clover protect soil from erosion and nourish microbes.
Moreover, regenerative agriculture promotes biodiversity by
fostering habitat diversity and providing food and shelter to various wildlife species. And beyond environmental considerations,
advocates of regenerative agricultural practices also typically
prioritize equity and gender equality by involving marginalized
groups like women in agriculture and promoting fair income and
improved working conditions.13
However, this model threatens incumbent agribusinesses because it challenges conventional farming and industrialized approaches that bring them billions in profits. By prioritizing soil
regeneration, reduced chemical usage, and holistic ecosystem
management, it disrupts the demand for agrichemicals and genetically modified organisms (GMOs) promoted by agribusiness
giants. It also undermines the centralized control that agribusiness exerts over seed patents, fertilizers, and pesticides, fostering
greater autonomy and resilience among smallholder farmers.
Despite this resistance, many leading companies are successfully pursuing regenerative models. Global coffee producer Illycaffè,
for instance, increasingly focuses on just these issues. “Drought,
floods, high temperatures—many different climatic kinds of disasters are impacting production,” third-generation owner Andrea
Illy says. Illy is a chemist who in 2018 took a sabbatical to study
insetting (practices to keep more carbon in the soil) and emerged
with a plan. “If you have a healthier soil thanks to regenerative agriculture, then you probably have a healthier plant and a healthier
food and a healthier consumer,” he told me.
The company has a three-stage approach to the pursuit of
soil and human health with its farmers. “We determined that
what are needed first are improvements in agronomic practices;
second, developing new cultivars and varieties that are more resilient to the effects of climate change; and third, migrating coffee
Overall, redefining consumer perceptions of
regenerative agriculture becomes imperative in fostering a
more equitable and sustainable food system
that prioritizes the well-being of all stakeholders,
from farmers to consumers.
Soil organic matter reduces nutrient loss and erosion and makes
plants more resilient to pests and diseases.10 A 2023 study found
that regenerative practices, including no-tilling and cropping systems whereby the soil is not plowed, turned, or mixed and different plant species are rotated, can significantly increase soil carbon
levels, contributing to better soil health and reduced atmospheric
carbon.11 With every 1 percent increase in organic matter, soil can
retain an additional 20,000 gallons of water, enhancing crop resilience against droughts and heavy rain. By improving water infiltration and storage capacities, regenerative practices reduce reliance
on irrigation, promoting water independence.12
058_066_regeneration_9_sum2024_proofedDA_crx.indd 62
plantations to higher latitudes or higher altitudes,” Illy says. The
company is piloting carbon-free plantations and is disseminating
advanced agronomic practices to all its farmers to scale up sustainable coffee agriculture.
Some practices of regenerative agriculture—such as letting soil
sit fallow for periods—can be costly to initiate, but the system ultimately requires fewer input costs, so farmers can break out of debt
and start to earn profits. For instance, Robyn O’Brien, cofounder
and former managing director at rePlant Capital, an investment
firm scaling agriculture-based climate solutions, told me about a
farmer in Indiana that her company helped to transition his 7,000
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acres away from genetically engineered corn and soy; in the first
year, this step saved half a million dollars. Those savings are especially important because the politics around GMOs, agribusiness,
and pesticides are so fraught.
“When you’re talking about climate or you’re talking about
the environment, it can be a polarizing political conversation,”
O’Brien says. “But when you simply make it about the math for the
farmer, that this is the smartest financial decision that they can
make, that’s really where our team shows its strength.”
Beyond cost savings, regeneration can lead to new sources of
revenue. Sustainability consultancy Native, a Vermont-based company that develops renewable-energy and clean-water projects
that generate carbon offsets, is developing unique market mechanisms to promote regenerative practices that reduce financing
hurdles. One example is its Northern Great Plains Regenerative
Grazing Project in Montana, which uses detailed management
plans to ensure that cattle graze smaller plots of grasses for shorter periods, allowing longer periods of rest and regrowth for each
plot. After a few seasons, carbon is returned to the soil and can be
sold as offsets. Company leaders now follow the mantra “Soil is
the new wind,” as soil regeneration can help sequester high levels
of CO2 from our atmosphere and creates monetizable benefits for
farms, ranches, and our food systems.
Standing in the way of these practices are entrenched systems,
such as the need for financing up front, which is why projects like
those of rePlant and Native are so important to this transition.
Farmers need access to capital to escape the trap. “The costs occur
at the outset, while the carbon and soil health benefits occur over
decades,” says Jennifer Cooper, a vice president at Native. “[We]
should not be asking first-mover farms and ranches to take on all the
costs and risks of figuring out which practices work for their farm.”
A Need for New Standards
and Mindsets
A
NOTHER OBSTACLE IS the need for shared stan-
dards. Many major companies, including PepsiCo, tout their involvement in regenerative approaches as a means to improve environmental
impact. Beyond the potential for greenwashing
if these projects are not actually delivering regenerative value, we return to problems with selective accounting.
Pepsi’s claim of being at the forefront of regenerative agriculture is
not unlike petrochemical giant BP’s claim of being “beyond petroleum,” when only a small fraction of its business is in renewables.
In the European Union, impending bans on unproven environmental claims like “climate neutral” will provide needed scrutiny
of such claims. Regenerative terminology similarly needs clarification. But businesses need not wait on governmental action.
Some private-sector actors are working together to try to provide
a definition of the term. Renowned for its high-quality, multiuse
soaps and its mission of social responsibility and environmental
sustainability, Dr. Bronner’s started in 2020 to obtain regenerative
organic and fair-trade certifications for its ingredients, fostering
international relationships with farmers in Sri Lanka, Ghana, and
India. In doing so, the company came to know the farmers and
058_066_regeneration_9_sum2024_proofedDA.indd 63
63
their products “from the root to the fruit,” as president Michael
Bronner told me.
Over time, Dr. Bronner’s realized that despite these certifications, it was not sufficiently focused on giving back to the land and
to farmers. In 2017, Dr. Bronner’s, Patagonia, the Rodale Institute,
and a number of other companies and farmers established the
Regenerative Organic Alliance (ROA) to create certification standards for animal welfare, social equity, and organic sustainability.
The resulting Regenerative Organic Certification (ROC), Bronner
explained, “is kind of like the maxim from Lord of the Rings: ‘One
ring to rule them all.’”14
Other certification and verification programs that have developed in this area include Land to Market Verified, Certified Regenerative, Regenified, Ethos Regenerative Outcome Verification,
and others, each of which has its own areas of focus and levels of
rigor. For example, the Union for Ethical BioTrade (UEBT) has
developed a certification that focuses on treatment of labor and
biodiversity for nature-sourced ingredients. Such programs will
continue to play a crucial role in today’s market for regenerative
agriculture. They enhance public trust by empowering consumers
to make informed choices about easily identifiable regenerative
brands (which may allow for premium pricing), fostering transparency to combat greenwashing. Additionally, certifications are educational tools, influencing retailer sourcing decisions in favor of
environmentally and socially responsible products and ultimately
aiding them in fulfilling supply chain commitments.
But not all certifications have the same thresholds. Elizabeth
Whitlow, executive director of the ROA, highlighted to me the importance of including organic standards in any regenerative systems, because nonorganic regenerative practices may still allow
the use of synthetic pesticides and fertilizers that can degrade soil,
decrease biodiversity, and disrupt natural nutrient cycles.
Rethinking agriculture also requires shifting the mindsets
of both companies and consumers. For instance, Tablas Creek
Vineyard in Paso Robles, California, is working with the ROA to
promote consumer understanding and acceptance of this certification.15 Jordan Lonborg, the vineyard’s viniculturalist, told me
that when people think of vineyards, they just see grapevines. But
if you’re “going to start farming regeneratively,” he continued,
“you need to hit that reset button and reevaluate what you think
a healthy vineyard should look like. There shouldn’t just be grapevines. It should be as far from a monoculture as possible. That
could mean planting fruit trees throughout your property, or vegetable gardens or perennials … doing whatever you can do to create
more of a biodiverse ecosystem.”
Since regenerative agriculture involves a closed-loop philosophy that limits the use of external products, Tablas Creek generates its fertilizer on-site. “That’s basically what regenerative farming is,” Lonborg said. “It’s nothing new, but it’s a way people have
been farming for hundreds and hundreds and hundreds of years,
although, as with other certifications, it forces you to look at your
property a bit differently.
“We’re a speck on the fingernail of agriculture as a whole,”
added Lonborg, who nevertheless maintains that the company’s
visibility can have an outsize impact. “Corn farmers aren’t getting
media coverage. You don’t have powerful people visit a corn farm,
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but you have people from all walks of life coming to California and
drinking wine.”
Overall, redefining consumer perceptions of regenerative agriculture becomes imperative in fostering a more equitable and
sustainable food system that prioritizes the well-being of all stakeholders, from farmers to consumers.
W
Rethinking Production Systems
HILE REGENER ATI V E IDEAS are root-
ed in nature, they have important
implications for manufacturing and
production. Moving downstream in
value chains emphasizes two important aspects: first, achieving true netpositive operations by relying on renewable energy and producing more energy than is consumed, and second, adopting circular approaches to minimize waste and maximize reuse, repair,
and recycling. Instead of a linear “take, make, dispose” model, a
circular focus creates a closed-loop system that regenerates resources and reduces environmental impact.
Many sustainability efforts have floundered from rebound effects in which emissions savings are offset by people consuming
more and generating greater emissions overall. Companies often
hide this problem by selectively communicating progress via efficiency metrics that make them look good. In fact, efficiency in-
innovative recycling techniques that convert waste into new materials or energy, or can reuse strategies that give products new life.
The environmental impact of waste can be turned from a problem
into a solution for other processes.
Thibaud Hug de Larauze, the CEO and cofounder of Back Market, for example, created a global marketplace for professionally
refurbished electronics: everything from iPhones to laptops to appliances. He sought ultimately to make refurbished electronics the
first choice for tech purchases. The company is growing steadily,
from 1.5 million customers in July 2019 to 6 million in 2022. As of
this writing, Back Market is worth more than $5.7 billion, which
makes it France’s most valuable start-up.16 Even IKEA is working
to become a fully circular business by 2023. It began this process
with a buyback program for customers to return products and receive credits of 30-50 percent of the original price. The returned
items are then made available for repurchase.
Although these initiatives inspire hope, we need to maintain
skepticism: As with regenerative agriculture, companies can lay
claim to circularity without really engaging in it. For instance, in
the fashion industry, many companies assert circularity while ignoring its impossibility in many cases, because materials degrade
with recycling. Moreover, studies have shown that consumer behavior may not support these practices yet, which is part of the
reason changing popular mindsets is essential.17
Most examples of production systems becoming increasingly
regenerative involve companies that manufacture and sell physi-
Moving toward a regenerative mode of business
goes well beyond transforming production. It requires a wholesale rethinking of the fundamentals of business and
the models of shareholder interests that have dominated for decades.
novations such as LED lightbulbs and enhanced heating systems
present a known paradox in which electricity and heating use
become less costly, thereby contributing to increased overall consumption and, therefore, greater overall emissions and undermining their original purpose.
As the energy sector increasingly shifts to regenerative models, clean-energy sources such as wind and solar are becoming
available. These sources can not only generate renewable energy
but also contribute to ecosystem regeneration. To be fair, these
practices are not perfect; for instance, their construction can also
harm ecosystems. Thus, production approaches should prioritize
avoiding emissions or waste in the first place.
But once established, circular approaches—whereby material and energy loops are minimized or closed by more thoughtful
consideration of resources and waste—should be adopted as a
gateway to a more regenerative system. These models can include
058_066_regeneration_9_sum2024_proofedDA.indd 64
cal products. But as we more fully assess the impact of business
models, we must also turn to overcoming externalities in service
industries. For example, consider banking. When done right, allocating capital can trigger the multiplicative spillovers that are
characteristic of regenerative systems. However, the banking industry, under its current practices, is one of the most egregious
enablers of selective accounting. For instance, a March 2022 report
by InfluenceMap showed that the cash deposits gathered by major
financial services companies are being lent out to support fossil
fuel infrastructure, significantly undermining both the depositing
companies’ and banks’ climate goals.
Despite the impressive growth of regenerative practices, they
have yet to command consumer awareness; because of ingrained
habits, consumers typically don’t consider the net effects of companies’ business models. But that tendency can easily change. In
2019, only 3 percent of consumer purchases on Back Market were
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for ecological reasons, but that number has jumped to more than
25 percent today, Hug de Larauze says. As we continue to assess
business models based on their true effects on societal value, we
also need to consider how to challenge the consumptive nature of
our current economic system.
M
Rethinking Business Models
OV ING TOWA RD A regenerative mode of
business goes well beyond transforming
production. In fact, it requires a wholesale rethinking of the fundamentals of
business and the linear, profit-first models of shareholder interests that have
dominated for decades. Again, we need to break out of selectively
communicating good works in isolation and consider company ac-
058_066_regeneration_9_sum2024_proofedDA.indd 65
65
tivities holistically. Rethinking business models
extends the idea of regeneration to issues such as
consumer demand and product life, prompting a
fundamental reevaluation of company goals and
objectives in the fashion of leading companies
such as Patagonia, Illycaffè, and Natura.
Interface, the global flooring manufacturer,
is another example of a company innovating and
adopting new models of regeneration. Instead of
selling floor coverings to customers, the way most
carpet companies do, Interface has pioneered a
service model in which the customer simply leases the flooring. Installation, maintenance, and removal of Interface flooring and carpets are bundled under one monthly fee. When the consumer
no longer needs or wants them, the company
takes them back and recycles or resells them.
Interface’s closed-loop system helps extend
the life span of resources and minimizes waste.
The company has even begun selling carbonnegative carpeting.
Such an approach also unlocks new markets
for used products and repair services. Richard
Henkel, a German manufacturer of steel-tube
furniture, embodies this ethos by eschewing
planned obsolescence and prioritizing long-term
value for investors and customers. A substantial
part of its business is based on repair, refurbishment, and recycling, replacing the linear model
of “take, make, waste” with a closed loop.18 Business models like these also encourage investors,
partners, employees, and customers to embrace
regenerative thinking. In doing so, they foster innovation and sustainable practices up and down
the value chain.
This approach contrasts sharply with that of a
traditional company like Apple. While the launch
of the iPhone 14 in 2022 offered minimal technical
advancement over its predecessor, Apple stuck
to its schedule to introduce a new product, contributing to increased pollution and waste. Despite Apple’s commendable recycling programs like Apple Trade In and Daisy,19 the
company passes on the environmentally superior choice because
it prioritizes value to shareholders. Instead of encouraging consumers to buy and then recycle, how about reducing unnecessary
production and consumption? Apple instead focuses on the selective positive side effects, ignoring the negatives associated with its
underlying business model.
By contrast, Fairphone, an Apple competitor based in the Netherlands, has developed an alternative business model to address
the social and environmental challenges of the electronics industry. Founded in 2013 as a social enterprise that prioritizes smaller
environmental footprints and fair labor conditions, Fairphone encourages customers to repair their phones, rather than replacing
them, aiming to minimize the use of conflict minerals and promote sustainability in the electronics industry.20
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Fairphone’s approach may seem impractical given the demands
and expectations that companies face. Of course Apple needs to
keep making new products. How else would it grow? But if we want
to make progress on the existential crises we face today, we must
examine our deeply ingrained expectations more carefully and
question our assumptions. Our mindsets are shaped by the existing models of capitalism and corporate success that have long been
formalized and reinforced by institutional systems, such as stock
markets and investors’ demands for quarterly earnings growth.
However, by rethinking production and redesigning products and
services in the ways we have reviewed, we can move to a more regenerative and circular model.
W
Change Is Afoot
E H AV E SO FA R focused largely on entrepreneurial and corporate innovations, because reconceiving business
models is fundamental to shifting
human society to a more regenerative
system. But reforming business demands rigorous and interconnected work across all major societal
sectors, as well as more coercive measures to spread and institutionalize these ideas more widely.
Crucially, important precursors to such shifts are also happening in the policy realm. For instance, the European Union’s legal
approach to environmental regulation has recently moved toward
increased rigor and a broader scope with a stronger emphasis on
sustainability reporting and accountability, overseeing companies
through their value chains in ways they have never experienced
before. The EU’s European Sustainability Reporting Standards
(ESRS) include clearer definitions of what constitute environmentally sustainable activities and of targeted actions against environmental issues such as deforestation and biodiversity loss. Larger
companies operating in the European Union will be mandated to
disclose their emissions through their value chain (scope 3), starting with 2024 activities. Similar requirements are set to take effect
in California by 2027. As these and other regulatory pressures—
such as on greenwashing—mount, businesses are increasingly incentivized to embrace regenerative practices as an essential strategy for reducing the environmental footprint of their entire value
chain and meeting evolving compliance standards.
In fact, some investors have already started to adapt to a new
era that holds companies accountable for their contributions to
environmental damage, especially universal owners—those whose
portfolios are highly diversified across asset classes, such as stocks,
bonds, real estate, and other financial instruments. Effectively,
their returns reflect the health of the entire economy.21 These investors cannot ignore systemic risks, such as climate change, biodiversity loss, and inequality, because they are inevitably affected
by them. Should one company in their portfolio take a shortcut on
pollution abatement or employee benefits to boost its returns, the
consequences will likely spill over to other investments, negatively
affecting their overall returns. Instead of simply attempting to pick
winners and avoid losers, universal owners acknowledge that the
health of their portfolios depends on the health and stability of the
058_066_regeneration_9_sum2024_proofedDA.indd 66
overall economic system. Consequently, they pressure companies
by advocating for contributions to the positive side of the societal
and environmental ledger, instead of juicing their profits by exploiting the negatives.
Moving beyond sustainability to achieve such regenerative aspirations will not be easy and will not rest on one solution. We need
multifaceted action across many domains. While we have seen that
regenerative business models are viable in many fields, creating
a genuinely regenerative economic system will require wholesale
rethinking of business models and social organization. Such an effort may seem daunting, but without reorienting our systems and
demanding that companies be accountable for the entire scope of
their business, the future looks bleak. However, if we follow regenerative approaches, a pathway toward a more sustainable, resilient,
and equitable future for all can emerge. O
C H R I STO P H E R M A RQ U I S is Sinyi Professor of Chinese Management at
the University of Cambridge’s Judge Business School and author, most recently,
of The Profiteers: How Business Privatizes Profits and Socializes Costs.
NOTES
1 Business Roundtable, “Statement on the Purpose of a Corporation,”
August 19, 2019.
2 Geoff Colvin, “America’s Top CEOs Didn’t Live Up to Their Promises in
Business Roundtable Letter, Researchers Find,” Fortune, August 5, 2021.
3 Aneesh Raghunandan and Shivaram Rajgopal, “Do Socially Responsible Firms
Walk the Talk?,” Social Science Research Network, April 1, 2021.
4 Jerry Useem, “Beware of Corporate Promises,” Atlantic, August 6, 2020.
5 Peter S. Goodman and Patricia Cohen, “It Started as a Tax Cut.
Now It Could Change American Life,” New York Times, November 29, 2017;
Adam Lowenstein, “US Corporations Push to Roll Back Trump-Era Tax
Policies They Once Endorsed,” Guardian, January 12, 2024.
6 Adam Lowenstein, “How a Top US Business Lobby Promised Climate
Action—but Worked to Block Efforts,” Guardian, August 19, 2022.
7 Alex Gorsky, “Why the Business Roundtable Redefined the Purpose of
a Corporation (and Why It Matters),” LinkedIn, August 20, 2019.
8 Ian Lecklitner, “What’s in This? Mountain Dew,” MEL Magazine (accessed
September 19, 2019); Michael Moss, “The Extraordinary Science of Addictive
Junk Food,” New York Times Magazine, February 20, 2013.
9 #BreakFreeFromPlastic, Branded: Five Years of Holding Corporate Plastic
Producer Accountable, November 2022.
10 Daphne Miller, “The Surprising Healing Qualities ... of Dirt,” Our World,
United Nations University, February 22, 2014.
11 Aaron M. Prairie, Alison E. King, and M. Francesca Cotrufo,
“Restoring Particulate and Mineral-Associated Organic Carbon through
Regenerative Agriculture,” Proceedings of the National Academy of
Sciences, vol. 120, no. 21, 2023.
12 Tara Lohan, “California Drought: Six Years in, How Will the State Keep
Saving Water?” KQED, December 12, 2016.
13 Amy Bracchio and Neelam Chhiber, “How the Regenerative Economy
Can Advance Social Equity and Gender Equality,” World Economic Forum,
January 5, 2023.
14 Christopher Marquis, “From Soap to Chocolate: Dr. Bronner’s Launches into
Food as Extension of Supply Chain’s Positive Impact,” Forbes, July 2, 2021.
15 Tablas Creek Vineyard, “Tablas Creek Is the First Regenerative Organic
Certified™ (ROC™) Winery in America,” press release, August 17, 2020.
16 Newsfile Corp., “Back Market, the Renewed Electronics Marketplace,
Raises $510 Million and Is Now Valued at $5.7 Billion,” press
release, January 12, 2022.
17 Ken Pucker, “A Circle That Isn’t Easily Squared,” Stanford Social Innovation
Review, Summer 2023.
18 James Kennelly, Richard Henkel GmbH: Growing Profits, Not Sales,
Ontario, Canada: Ivey Publishing, 2022.
19 Apple, “Apple Expands Global Recycling Programs,” April 18, 2019.
20 Fairphone, Fairphone’s Impact 2021, June 2022.
21 Ellen Quigley, “Universal Ownership in the Anthropocene,”
Social Science Research Network, May 13, 2019.
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67
VIEWPOINT
Insights from the front lines
Volunteerism’s
Diversity
Problem
A lack of resources should not
prevent young people from serving
their communities.
B Y YA S M I N E M A H D AV I
I L L U S T R AT I O N S B Y D AV I D P L U N K E R T
A
t the dawn of every Sunday
last winter, my teenage son
paired up with his ski patrol
mentor to learn how to prepare the mountain for the day’s visitors.
Throughout the day, he responded to calls
to help children who had lost their parents
and skiers who had suffered injuries requiring emergency medical care. At dusk,
he swept the icy mountain again, ensuring that all had safely left for the day. In
one season, he completed more than 120
volunteer hours as a young adult ski patroller. After the season was over, I asked
him if he wanted to continue next year. “I
want to help people,” he responded.
Enabling others, especially young people, to engage in such volunteer work is my
career. I serve as the director of analysis
and impact at DoSomething, a digital hub
for youth-centered activism and service.
Since 1993, we have helped millions of
young people discover their civic spark and
equipped them to make an impact on the
issues they care most about. Volunteering
enables young people to acquire skills and
traits that they wouldn’t have gained in a
classroom and the confidence and capacity
needed to serve our communities.
Yet young people’s access to volunteerism is fraught with inequality. Many
young people lack the opportunity and
encouragement to serve. At DoSomething, we are determined to build bridges
067-074_viewpoint_12_sum24_proofedDA.indd 67
to social, economic, and human capital
for young people so that they have access
and can realize their potential as leaders
of change.
LACK OF CAPITAL
For volunteers, the benefits of participa-
tion range from higher reported happiness
and life satisfaction to lower levels of stress
and anxiety. The perception that volunteering is for the greater good of society and a
broader meaning of life also correlates with
higher self-esteem, self-control, and confidence. These findings were reinforced by
a DoSomething focus group whose participants said that taking part in DoSomething
volunteer opportunities resulted in a sense
of pride, increased self-awareness, and a
feeling of connectedness with their communities and peers.
Volunteering is also a vital contributor
to the economy. In April 2023, the Inde-
pendent Sector estimated
the latest value of a volunteer hour to be $31.80, an
increase from 2018, when
it was valued at $24.69,
equivalent to $197.5 billion
per year.
We at DoSomething have
found that young people are
very keen on volunteering.
In fact, last spring, in our
semiannual Pulse Check
Survey, 81 percent of DoSomething members who
were minors said they were
very interested in community service and volunteering. And although girls and
women are usually overrepresented in volunteering
activities, our survey found
that 62 percent of boys and
men were also interested.
(By contrast, 78 percent of
women and girls said they were interested
in volunteering.)
Many young people, however, are excluded from volunteering because of a
lack of social, human, or economic capital.
Some simply cannot afford to volunteer,
because they cannot give up paid work or
duties such as caring for members of their
family. The inability to balance the needs
of the family due to lack of personal resources makes the path to volunteerism
prohibitive and a real factor for those
whose families struggle financially.
In addition, volunteer opportunities
are disproportionately advertised to those
with larger networks, which often make access to technology, professional memberships, mentors, or coaches a prerequisite.
So young people with limited social capital
are more likely to have fewer connections to
institutions that either facilitate or provide
opportunities to participate in civic life.
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Pedagogy also influences young people’s access, or lack thereof, to volunteerism. While most states require students to take civics courses to graduate,
only 11 states require students to be involved in service learning projects. What’s
more, only one state, Maryland, requires
community service hours for graduation.
And even then, the depth of experiences
is inconsistent. In the 2018 Brown Center
Report on American Education, 70 percent
of 12th graders reported that they had
never written a letter to give an opinion
or solve a problem, crucial skills for a civically engaged citizenry.
In addition to these barriers, we in
the social sector could do a better job
of offering richer volunteering experiences. Instead of having young people
gain agency by learning, doing, and connecting to their communities, we have
opted for transactional experiences. We
have treated volunteerism as a proxy to
reach our communities with sporadic,
disconnected 30-minute activities. While
nonprofits commonly track volunteer
to these opportunities and can realize their potential as leaders of change.
Drawing inspiration from Dr. Martin
Luther King Jr.’s commitment to service,
we are guided by the following principles
in our efforts.
Use inclusive language. | To motivate
young people to lean into volunteer opportunities, we use language that recognizes
their existing strengths. For example, DoSomething’s brand guidelines deliberately
avoid terms like “empower,” acknowledging that young people have power—our
role is to shepherd and guide them in exercising it effectively.
Improve civic education. | To build more
civic-minded leaders at scale, we must also
turn to upstream solutions in the classroom. As part of our broader work on equity
and justice, DoSomething mobilizes young
people to support the Civics Secures Democracy Act, which broadens access to US
history and civics education by providing
funding to states and districts. Additionally,
in our work co-leading the NYC Civic Coalition, we are collaborating with New York
For instance, one of our inaugural fellows, Arnold Ludd, used the fellowship to
strategize the expansion of his initiative
Jiggabite Gloves Up, Guns Down. Running in multiple New York City schools,
the program offers a youth-led solution
to counteract the gun violence that he
and his peers face in their communities.
The initiative provides boxing and fitness
training, as well as a safe space for teens
to discuss community safety issues and
learn new skills from experts such as conflict mediation and other alternatives to
gun violence.
Forge collaboration to build community. |
Our programs aim to integrate young people’s experiences, guiding them to harness
these valuable assets as tools for contribution and leadership in their communities.
Last year we introduced the E.M.B.E.R.
collective, a cohort of DoSomething members engaging in a community of practice.
The model brings together young people
with common interests to engage in collective learning to develop their own individual mental health projects and advance
While most states require students to
take civics courses, only 11 states require students to be
involved in service learning projects.
volume—numbers and hours—we often
don’t ask deeper questions, such as what
volunteering teaches us about ourselves
and our communities. And in doing so, we
have missed opportunities to use volunteering to deepen a sense of commitment
for young people to become members,
partners, problem solvers, change makers, and leaders of our communities.
ENABLING COMMUNITY
ENGAGEMENT
At DoSomething, we are conscious of our
own complicity in how structural impediments of volunteerism models have blocked
many from participation. In alignment with
our strategic plan, we are responding to
this shared challenge with a renewed commitment to diversity, equity, inclusion, and
belonging, as well as to building bridges
to social, economic, and human capital
so that more young people have access
067-074_viewpoint_12_sum24_proofedDA.indd 68
City-based organizations to drive adoption
of the Seal of Civic Readiness, a formal recognition that a student has attained proficiency in civic knowledge and participation.
Resource existing leaders. | By bringing
financial and social capital to existing
leaders, we can help reinforce the idea
that they can use their time and expertise
to be part of the solution and to create a
ripple effect, influencing their peers and
communities to join them. In 2023, DoSomething launched our Civic Fellows
program to address the barriers posed by
limited social and economic capital that
hinder young people from participating
in service. Each month, young leaders,
being compensated for their contributions, were provided with training, mentorships, and resources enabling them to
scale interventions to address problems
affecting their community and attract
their peers as volunteers and participants.
the shared goals of the collective. The collective is developing a range of initiatives,
from increasing access to books addressing eco-anxiety to youth open-mic nights
for sharing collective grief. More important, our members are learning from their
peers and integrating each other’s perspectives into their projects.
Our country’s meager investment in
young people’s education has contributed
to social disconnection, reduced upward
socioeconomic mobility, and diminished
innovation and progress. It behooves all
of us—the social impact sector, privatesector employers, elected officials, and
adult community members—to invite
and ensure that young people have a
meaningful seat at the table. This can and
will change lives. O
YA S M I NE M A H DAV I is the director of analysis
and impact at DoSomething.
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The
Longer-Term
Impact of
Fixed-Life
Foundations
A small foundation that eschews
perpetuity in favor of maximizing social
impact can continue to sustain and
scale long after its doors close.
B Y A N N A D E L A C R U Z & D AV I D L E H R
A
lthough most private foundations are designed to last
forever, many philanthropists
and impact investors are beginning to question this model. The prevailing approach has foundations operating in perpetuity, granting only 5 percent
of funds annually, and continuing to amass
wealth to be deployed in the future. This
strategy may miss the mark by focusing on
financial indicators rather than the social
impact these foundations are designed to
generate. Despite such questioning, few
examples exist of foundations that have
adopted a fixed time frame.
One such rarity is Linked Foundation.
Since its formation in 2006, Linked planned
for a fixed 20-year time frame to achieve its
mission of improving the health and economic self-reliance of underserved women
in Latin America and the United States. Given its limited corpus of $20 million, founder
Dorothy Largay believed that the fixed-life
approach would provide focus to learn
quickly, develop important partnerships,
achieve results, and have greater impact.
“As a small foundation, we ultimately
realized that going it alone was not the
most effective approach,” Largay says.
“Partnering with others allowed Linked to
access a rich pool of talent, resources, and
shared passions that far surpassed our own
capabilities.”
Largay’s strategy exemplifies the ability of a fixed-life foundation to leverage its
discrete investments to catalyze a larger
movement that will continue to generate
impact even beyond its existence. By ushering in the inaugural women’s health-care
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impact fund in Latin America and cultivating partnerships and collaborations that
would outlast its term, Linked demonstrates the potential for the philanthropic
sector to take a bolder stance in mobilizing
capital to solve problems, even under the
constraints of a limited life span.
THE INVESTMENT
PORTFOLIO
Linked Foundation made its first traditional
grants in 2006, marking the beginning of
their journey into philanthropic investment. By 2007, they evolved into a microfinance loan guarantor and joined an impact
investment syndicate that boosted their
understanding of, and confidence in, financing approaches that could be blended
with philanthropy to catalyze impact. This
move led to their first direct social venture
investment in 2008 and a long running
partnership with the nonprofit impactinvesting firm Global Partnerships (GP).
Together with GP, Linked made several
loans to health-focused social enterprises
in Latin America. These were often earlystage ventures that GP considered too risky
to support by itself and that would have
required a loan infrastructure that Linked
did not have. To mitigate the risk of these
investments and play to their respective
69
strengths, Linked provided
the funds and health-impact
analysis, and GP supplied
financial due diligence, international loan underwriting,
and loan servicing expertise.
The first loan went to a
Mexican diabetes-care enterprise, Clínicas del Azúcar
(CDA), which used the funds
to open some of its initial
clinics. GP also helped CDA
to develop its financial statements and overall management process, ultimately
preparing them to seek
future investment. CDA
is now a prized enterprise
in the portfolios of several
global impact investors and
has become Mexico’s largest
provider of specialized diabetes care.
Subsequently, Linked
brought two other Mexican health enterprises to GP to partner on
a similar de-risked loan model: maternal
health clinics Reina Madre and eye care
company Sala Uno. Alongside debt financing, Linked Foundation provided grants to
fund projects that would deepen each enterprise’s social impact: a call center staffed
by female patients that would become a
critical part of the business model (CDA);
training programs to increase the number
of doctors who could provide women’s
cancer screenings targeted to underserved
women (Reina Madre); and eye screening
and referral to diabetes care for low-income
Mexicans in rural areas (Sala Uno).
These partnerships enabled Linked and
GP to co-invest in social enterprises that
they could not have pursued on their own.
This strategy unlocked scarce, early-stage
patient capital for these ventures that they
needed to demonstrate the scalability and
impact of their models. All three organizations have continued to scale and generate
social impact for low-income women in
Latin America. For example, CDA now has
about 40 clinics throughout Mexico that
have treated more than 300,000 patients,
the majority of whom are low income,
and the call center has become critical to
its entire clinic network. While the grantfunded call center began as a social impact
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strategy, it has enhanced CDA’s financial
sustainability, increased client retention,
improved diabetes outcomes, and provided jobs to individuals living with diabetes,
who know firsthand the challenges that
CDA’s patients face.
Linked’s blended-finance approach with
Friendship Bridge (FB), a nonprofit social
enterprise creating economic opportunities for women in Guatemala, provides
another example. In addition to investing
in FB through senior loan debt, Linked in
2016 provided funding to pilot a women’s
health-care program. While FB is not a
health organization, its rural Mayan women
clients lacked access to preventive care such
as Pap exams, contraception, and diabetes
screenings, which adversely affected their
daily lives and ability to manage their businesses. FB wanted to test a partnership with
a local health NGO and hypothesized that
improving clients’ health would increase retention and loan repayment rates enough to
fully cover the costs of the program. After
successfully expanding to more branches,
and health expertise to the first global
GenderSmart Investing Summit (now 2X
Global) and to RHIA Ventures, for further
women’s health landscape mapping.
Building upon these activities, in 2020
Linked and New Ventures, a Latin American impact investor, collaborated to establish Empodera 360, a health social-venture
accelerator. The accelerator’s primary goal
was to gain a deeper understanding of the
market and develop the appropriate financing mechanisms to support women’s
health-care companies in Latin America.
To achieve this end, they enlisted the support of five additional investors from both
the philanthropic and business sectors
who also offered valuable technical assistance in shaping the accelerator’s overall
design and impact methodology.
This year, New Ventures launched Empodera Impact Capital, an investment fund
that seeks to raise $30 million and to reach
3 million women with health services. The
fund is specifically focused on providing
patient capital to meet the financing needs
entrepreneurs get what they need. For
Linked this means spending time in the
field with those entrepreneurs to understand their approach and the constraints
they face. Linked also avoids unnecessary
bureaucracy such as requests for proposals (RFPs) and deliverables that become
unnecessary based on new insights as the
enterprise progresses.
Second, build trust and foster an ecosystem, both with other funders and with
implementing partners, and between the
two where you can’t play a direct role. No
one person or organization has all the skills
or answers, and everyone will be better
served if we are driven by the end impact
goals and the quickest path to reaching
them. Assess where the funding gaps are,
share the findings, and mobilize partners
to work together to fill them.
Third, provide technical support in
areas where you have strength and expertise. Linked focused on impact measurement and fundraising. Assessing impact
is critical to identifying and testing as-
If we prioritize the longevity of foundations,
we may fail to solve the problems they were created
to address in the first place.
Linked’s investments with FB achieved 121
percent cost recovery by 2021, and these
women are now healthier and more effectively running their businesses.
In addition to providing direct philanthropic investments, Linked has invested
in mission-aligned impact funds such as
GP, Root Capital, Advance Global Capital,
and MCE Social Capital. Linked also joined
MCE Social Capital to absorb loan risk as a
guarantor. Linked’s backing makes it easier for MCE to borrow from institutional
funds and unlocks more money for the social enterprises borrowing from MCE.
The need to provide for women’s health
care in Latin America will continue long
after Linked closes its doors. To help ensure continued investment and awareness,
Linked funded a 2019 health-care landscape
analysis with the William Davidson Institute (WDI) to identify needs and potential
investment opportunities for the region.
Linked also provided significant support
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identified by Empodera 360. Additionally,
it will offer technical support for business
development, social impact management,
gender equity, and social inclusivity to
health enterprises in Latin America.
The structure of a fixed-life foundation created an urgency and a focus that
enabled Linked to take risks where others
might not and to find opportunities where
small amounts of capital and technical
support could make a big and measurable difference. By keeping an open mind,
learning from mistakes, and continuing
to iterate their approach, Linked learned
some important lessons for emerging catalytic philanthropists.
LESSONS FOR CATALYTIC
PHILANTHROPISTS
sumptions and to ensuring movement toward intended outcomes and is not a skill
set that most entrepreneurs begin with.
Linked also has a strong network of partners and an executive director with deep
experience in fundraising and was able to
connect social ventures to funders and
other support even when there was no
further role for Linked.
Finally, act with urgency and don’t be
afraid to take risks. The surest way to catalyze long-term change is to concentrate on
how to start solving important problems
today with solutions that will last. If we prioritize instead the longevity of foundations,
we may fail to solve the problems they were
created to address in the first place. O
A NNA D E LA C R U Z is chief impact officer
First, the entrepreneurs creating impact
at Linked Foundation.
in their communities know best how to
succeed. Rather than dictating the programs you want implemented, help these
DAV I D LE H R teaches entrepreneurship, finance,
and social innovation at the University of
North Carolina and at Santa Clara University.
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Who
Knows
Agroforestry
Best?
Current scientific approaches to
agricultural sustainability may in some
contexts prove counterproductive to
environmental preservation.
B Y E V E LY N R . N I M M O ,
A N D R É E . B. L AC E R DA , L E A N D RO
BONFIM & JOEL BOTHELLO
C
ommodity-driven agricultural
practices account for at least
three-quarters of the world’s
deforestation. Roughly onethird of these losses have occurred in
Brazil alone. Multiple ecosystems in the
country—including but not limited
to the Amazonian rainforests—have suffered drastic reductions in forest cover
and biodiversity. The widespread and uncontrolled use of agrochemicals and pest
control has also led to substantial soil,
water, and air contamination. Socioeconomic consequences include dwindling
rural populations and the displacement of
Indigenous communities.
The problem is about epistemology as
much as it is about economics. Traditional
and Indigenous knowledge of agricultural
practices in Brazil is rapidly being replaced
by monoculture practices, which are promoted by scientific methods that decontextualize agriculture, emphasize controlled
experimentation, and optimize around a
single variable of interest—typically crop
yield. These approaches fail to account for
the value of agricultural systems that are
highly complex, context-specific, difficult
to measure, and deeply intertwined with
social and cultural arrangements.
Brazilian nonprofit CEDErva (Center
for the Development and Education of Traditional Erva-Mate Systems) is tackling this
problem head on. CEDErva is at the forefront
of efforts to combat the commoditization
of erva-mate (also known as yerba mate), a
tree native to South America’s subtropical
forests whose leaves are traditionally used
to make teas and infusions. In parallel, the
067-074_viewpoint_12_sum24_proofedDA.indd 71
organization also promotes traditional and
Indigenous shade-grown erva-mate cultivation practices across the region. Based in
Curitiba in the state of Paraná, CEDErva
leads the Observatory of Traditional and
Agroecological Systems of Erva-Mate, an
integrated support network composed of
public policy makers, industry representatives, civil society organizations, and
scientists. This observatory seeks to promote the conservation and regeneration
of traditional knowledge systems that will
enable smallholder family farms, as well as
Indigenous and traditional communities,
to protect and regenerate native forest
ecosystems through erva-mate production
while maintaining their livelihoods.
T R A D I T I O N A L E R VA- M AT E
PRODUCTION
Erva-mate has featured prominently in the
origin stories and cosmologies of the local
Guarani and Kaingang Indigenous peoples
for centuries, if not millennia. Shade-grown
erva-mate is also common among other
groups in South Brazil, including traditional
settler groups such as quilombolas, who are
descendants of runaway slaves, and the
Faxinal, descendants of Eastern European
settlers who leave their land as a community commons for grazing animals. In southern Brazil, Indigenous groups, small-scale
71
farmers, and traditional settler communities have, over
multiple generations of experimentation, developed
sustainable agroforestry cultivation practices around ervamate. This intercropping uses
a wide diversity of native
and introduced plant and
animal species, offering a
form of diversified on-farm
land management. Through
their continued use, these
practices have had an important role in sustaining native
forests in the region.
However, a recent economic study on the ervamate value chain suggests
that traditional practices
are insufficiently productive to be economically viable for small-scale farmers. The study advocates
shifting to monoculture, based on narrow scientific studies demonstrating that
open-field erva-mate production is higher
due to increased light exposure. Omitted,
however, is the price of that increased productivity, not only in terms of inputs but
also in terms of the externalities around
the deterioration of the sociocultural and
ecological environment in which the ervamate tree grows. The framing of this discussion—centered upon financial viability and productivity—therefore crowds
out other important aspects of traditional
shade-grown erva-mate.
Such production has its own benefits
that are underappreciated. It requires little
investment in terms of inputs and labor.
The natural cycle of the forest generates
nutrients for the trees and the ecosystem
to thrive, despite regular harvesting. Pursuing the monoculture approach advocated by scientific and corporate interests, on
the other hand, necessitates the removal
of shade offered by the forest canopy. Although this removal may increase yield, it
disrupts a delicate balance in the ecosystem: Pests and diseases of the erva-mate
plant, normally kept in check by natural
predators and alternative food sources,
proliferate through the open-field crop, requiring the use of expensive and damaging
pesticides and other chemicals. The push
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to adopt monoculture practices is also illsuited for smallholder farms that harbor
important forest reserves.
SUPPORTING TRADITIONAL
A LT E R N AT I V E S
What alternative solutions can support
the continuation of traditional farming
practices that are so essential to maintaining biodiversity and food security?
To answer this question, CEDErva has
been implementing a series of steps to
empower traditional communities and
smallholder farmers to protect the socialecological systems and the cultural heritage of traditional erva-mate production,
which is part of their identity as traditional communities.
Developing community identity/ies and
knowledge | Traditional agroforestry sys-
tems are found in Indigenous communities, traditional settler communities,
and small-scale family farms; erva-mate
production, based on the use of local and
agroecological knowledge and practices
impacted traditional communities and
smallholder farmers. To address these challenges, many farmers have experimented
with regenerative practices—based on
agroforestry techniques—that enable
them to restore forest cover and rejuvenate natural springs on their properties.
CEDErva and its partners are studying,
facilitating implementation, and monitoring these systems.
Bringing awareness and recognition to local
traditional knowledge systems | CEDErva is
also leading an effort to obtain recognition
of traditional erva-mate systems through
the Globally Important Agricultural Heritage Systems (GIAHS) program, bestowed
by the Food and Agriculture Organization
of the United Nations (FAO). This program recognizes agricultural systems that
have developed over generations and are
intimately tied with the unique ecosystem and culture in which they are found.
This program brings together elements
of cultural heritage and social organization with agrobiodiversity conservation,
compensation to farmers for the vast array of ecosystem services that they provide to the region, including clean water
and air, biodiversity, healthy soils, and
habitats for natural pollinators, among
many others. They are thus engaging
multiple stakeholders at regional and national levels in these discussions.
While carbon markets and other schemes
have caught the attention of large corporations looking to neutralize their carbon
footprint, these processes often leave
small-scale farmers and traditional communities behind, with limited access to
compensation schemes. Advocating for
this community-of-practice is an important step in ensuring that its members are
compensated for their role in protecting
and regenerating the ecosystems where
erva-mate naturally grows.
In conclusion, conventional approaches to sustainable agriculture are no longer
working. The emphasis on agribusiness
and economically oriented solutions to
sustainability may in fact be doing more
The continuation of traditional practices that have
existed over many generations is essential to the stewardship
of local social-ecological systems.
and the preservation of the native forests,
is the link that ties these communities together. CEDErva realized that, although
these groups have diverse histories, their
shared knowledge and practices and attachment to the land have similar roots
and a clear impact on the landscape. In addition, the identities, histories, and memories of erva-mate producers are deeply
intertwined with the practices of cultivating diverse forest environments, harvesting trees, and consuming erva-mate with
friends and family.
Promoting local and innovative solutions to
forest conservation and regeneration | CEDErva
has also supported local models of forestry
and agriculture that have proven to be more
sustainable than monoculture. In recent
years, the region where CEDErva works has
been affected by some of the worst water
shortages and droughts on record, interspersed with periods of excessive and damaging rainfall, which has disproportionately
067-074_viewpoint_12_sum24_proofedDA.indd 72
food security and sovereignty, landscape
preservation, and traditional knowledge,
thus providing a systemic and holistic
view of the importance of these practices. Recognition of this social-ecological
system will bring legitimacy to the traditional erva-mate production systems,
which in turn creates an opportunity to increase the market value of erva-mate from
recognized properties when compared
with nontraditional systems.
Seeking alternative compensation for
communities | Finally, CEDErva is seeking
to boost the economic vitality of traditional farming practices. Although forecasting through conventional financial
and scientific metrics is certainly insufficient to address the needs of traditional
erva-mate communities, completely neglecting economic viability can also pose
a threat to their survival. In response,
CEDErva and its partners from the Observatory are investing in promoting fair
harm than good for communities who live
in—and make their livelihoods from—traditional social-ecological systems.
The continuation of traditional practices that have existed over many generations is essential to the stewardship of local social-ecological systems. By expanding
the scope of value to include sociocultural
and environmental elements of traditional
knowledge systems, CEDErva is seeking to
demonstrate that these systems have a viable future. O
E V E LYN R . NI M M O is president of CEDErva.
A ND R É E . B. LAC E R DA is a forest engineer and
researcher at Embrapa Forestry.
LE A ND RO BO NF I M is an assistant professor
of management and organizations at the Kenneth
W. Freeman College of Management at
Bucknell University.
J O E L BO T H E LLO is an associate professor of
management in the John Molson School
of Business, Concordia University.
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A Cashless
Economy Is
No Utopia
The future of money may be digital, but
we must not underestimate the resilience
and freedom that cash offers.
BY SEEMA PREM
W
ith massive support from
governments and the
tech industry, digital payments are becoming the
norm globally. This shift got an inadvertent
push during the COVID-19 pandemic, when
people around the world switched to online
and contactless payments. Calls for a 100
percent cashless economy are getting louder,
and countries such as Norway, Sweden, and
the Netherlands are well on their way.
Despite being the cofounder and CEO
of a social impact fintech setting up digital
payments infrastructure, I believe that going cashless comes with its own dangers—
and not only for those on the fringes of
digital society.
To be sure, digital payments offer many
advantages to consumers and businesses.
For consumers, they eliminate the need to
carry physical cash or cards. Transactions
are generally quick and secure, thanks to
enhanced security such as encryption,
biometrics, and two-factor authentication. And they often come with rewards
offered by banks, credit cards, and payment partners.
For businesses, this convenience and
speed translate into increased sales and
cash flow. With digital payments, users interact with their banks via their phones at
least once a week for payment-related matters. This connection makes payment apps
a great platform to cross-sell other products and services. Digital payments also
leave trails of valuable information that
can be used to generate consumer insights
and further business.
But on the flip side, cash provides a crucial layer of redundancy, offering an alternative means of transaction and reducing
the dependence on a single pathway, such
as the internet or digital platforms. Cash
is “free” in that it can be exchanged many
067-074_viewpoint_12_sum24_proofedDA.indd 73
times without the need for complex digital infrastructures. Redundancy helps ensure that the system can adapt and recover
from disruptions. It also mitigates the risk
of catastrophic failures that result from
a single point of failure. Embracing cash
alongside digital methods will ensure a
more resilient financial infrastructure.
Given these and other benefits, I do not
believe that moving toward a fully cashless
economy is the right move, at least for the
foreseeable future.
TWO STORIES
To better understand the financial mar-
ginalization that a cashless economy can
unleash on individuals from different backgrounds, consider the following two stories. (Names and identifying details have
been changed to protect their privacy.)
Bandana Kumari (33), Gurugram, India |
Each day, Bandana Kumari walks two miles
from her single-room dwelling in a congested slum to the high-rise condominium
in Gurugram where she works as a maid.
A third-grade dropout, Kumari has never
handled a smartphone, let alone a digital
wallet. She never even worked outside her
home until her husband, a factory worker,
lost his job during the COVID-19 pandemic.
A year in, further tragedy struck the
family when he succumbed to cirrhosis of
73
the liver. Their entire savings was depleted in the
desperate attempt to save
his life. Now a widow with
three children ages 16, 14,
and 12, Kumari is burdened
with the debts incurred for
her late husband’s treatment. Without medical
coverage, her family and
those like hers must borrow to meet hospitalization requirements.
To add to her woes,
Kumari lost 3,000 rupees
($36)—the equivalent of
10 days’ wages for her. She
did not get pickpocketed
or scammed. She lost it to
her husband’s digital wallet.
When her husband’s smartphone malfunctioned, the
repair charges of $50 were
beyond her means. After his
death, she could not afford to keep recharging the SIM, which led to its deactivation.
The loss is significant for a family
struggling to make ends meet. Illiterate
and relying on her family for financial matters, Kumari was familiar with cash only to
the extent of recognizing denominations
by their color. She had never used a phone
for anything beyond making calls to her
family. In her world, where three meals a
day are difficult to obtain, owning a phone
and affording its recharge are luxuries—let
alone navigating the complexities of using
it for digital payments.
Emil Nystrom (41), Stockholm, Sweden |
Emil Nystrom is an entrepreneur from
Sweden fully used to a digital world. He
was invited to speak at a prestigious design conference in Singapore in July 2023.
Though he was recovering from a knee injury and had been advised to take it slow,
he jumped at the opportunity. He had
barely a couple of days to plan his trip and
had no time to get currency converted.
Used to a cash-free lifestyle in Sweden and
knowing that he was traveling from one
developed economy to another, Nystrom
did not worry too much about it.
On reaching Singapore, he encountered the exclusion of a cashless world
for the first time when he tried to buy an
EZ-Link card to use the MRT, Singapore’s
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mass rapid transit system. His international Visa card was declined by the system. Since it was close to midnight, he
had to take a taxi to his hotel, the Novotel
on Stevens Road, which cost him 40 Singapore dollars ($30).
To compound his dismay, he discovered that there was no ATM at the MRT
station near the hotel nor at the 7-Eleven
down the road. The nearest ATM was on
Orchard Road, 21 minutes away by foot. He
right and freedom to control and use their
money independently. In November 2023,
The New York Times reported an increase in
banks closing down customer accounts without warning, leaving hundreds of individual
customers and small businesses in the lurch.
While the banks cite suspicion of fraudulent activity flagged by algorithms, those
affected are often left bewildered. “There
is no humanization to any of this, and it’s
all just numbers on a screen,” a program-
Given these limitations, we should strive
for a less-cash economy, not a cashless
economy. Central banks play a crucial role
in determining the direction that individual economies take, and they must strike
the right balance. The shift to digitization
must go hand in hand with literacy, both
basic and financial. The gap between physical and digital natives needs to be bridged
through human-centric, empathetic financial systems.
When economies push for 100 percent
digital transactions, they take away people’s right and freedom
to control and use their money independently.
might have enjoyed such a walk, if not for
his knee. He hurriedly exchanged a few euros he had for Singapore dollars at the hotel, incurring significant currency conversion charges. What’s more, the terminals
available for topping up his EZ card using
cash as a mode were far and few. He had to
walk quite a bit within the station to access
a mode of recharge that allowed cash.
DIGITAL IS NOT INCLUSIVE
Kumari and Nystrom represent diverse
demographics with distinct needs, experiences, and levels of familiarity with financial systems. However, their cases
highlight the challenges of a fully cashless society. As governments converge toward a digital future, they must approach
the task with empathy, recognizing the
continued existence of the poor, the unbanked, the elderly, and the illiterate, and
the potential for emergencies.
For people like Nystrom, the costs extend beyond monetary considerations to
include accessibility and convenience. For
those like Kumari, it is about literacy and
cost. Cash for her is free. Digital is not.
Every single transaction requires connectivity and access to data. It also demands
a certain level of literacy, tech-savviness,
and financial awareness that not everyone
possesses or can access.
More generally, digital increases dependency on institutions, such as banks,
fintechs, and cell-phone service providers. When economies push for 100 percent
digital transactions, they take away people’s
067-074_viewpoint_12_sum24_proofedDA.indd 74
mer who used to code such algorithms told
The Times. “It’s not ‘No, that is a single
mom running a babysitting business.’ It’s
‘Hey, you’ve checked these boxes for a red
flag—you’re out.’”
Moreover, digital networks often end
up being inaccessible during times of crisis. During the war in Ukraine, many countries have imposed sanctions on Russia,
and Visa, Mastercard, and other payment
companies suspended operations in the
country. As a result, Russian citizens could
no longer make global digital payments,
and it led to a panic-stricken rush for the
ATMs to withdraw cash.
In another potent example, Nigeria in
early 2023 attempted to fight inflation and
counterfeiting by replacing old currency
in a bid to promote digital payments. But
the country’s banks simply did not have
the infrastructure necessary to support
the demand for new currency and chaos
reigned, with enormous lines at the banks
and ordinary people unable to buy food or
get to work.
Climate disruptions provide further
examples. For instance, during the 2019
floods in Kerala, India, electricity was out
for days, and ATMs were inaccessible to
most. With mobile phones not functioning, people used their cash reserves for
essential supplies. The same problem repeated when Cyclone Michaung hit Chennai, India, in December last year and disrupted digital payments, leaving people
unable to purchase essential items like
milk and groceries.
In India today, cash worth $397 billion
is in circulation. Some of the most economically advanced nations, including the
United States, Singapore, Japan, and Germany, are still cash-based in many aspects.
Yes, cash transactions are dropping globally, and digital payments are on the rise—
and that is the right direction to take. Just
as airplanes replaced slower and more
cumbersome travel options, and Zoom
replaced face-to-face meetings requiring
travel, digital transactions have become a
modern and efficient alternative, offering
convenience, security, and speed.
However, true progress lies not in rendering traditional and perceived backward
methods obsolete; it lies in acknowledging
the need for a coexistence between the various modes. Factors such as a growing shift
globally toward authoritarian governance,
climatic disruptions, rising inequality, and
the increasing demand for privacy and cybersecurity also warrant significant consideration while moving to a digital world.
In the end, cash must not be eradicated completely. It gives people liquidity,
control, resilience, privacy, and protection
from authoritarian regimes. These benefits are too vital to ignore. Governments
and central banks need to advocate for less
cash, rather than aim for a fully cashless society. Otherwise, they threaten to put vulnerable people in desperate circumstances.
Seema Prem is CEO and cofounder of
FIA Global, a social impact fintech serving
the rural poor in South Asia.
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75
RESEARCH
Highlights from scholarly journals
MEASUREMENT &
E VA L U AT I O N
How
Nudges Get
Adopted
BY DA N I E L A B L E I
A historian, writer, and editor of
scholarly books. Her writing can be seen
at daniela-blei.com/writing. She tweets
sporadically: @tothelastpage.
randomized controlled trials
(RCTs) to determine whether
a nudge will effectively boost
vaccination rates, for example,
or encourage drivers to pay
parking fines. A new paper by
Stefano DellaVigna, a professor
of economics at the University
of California, Berkeley; Woojin
Kim, a doctoral candidate in
economics at the University
of California, Berkeley; and
the findings after Nudge Units
help cities test interventions?
Does the gathering of evidence
guarantee better outcomes, or
are there “bottlenecks” in how
cities adopt the findings?
The researchers discovered that many potentially
impactful nudges were never
implemented and set out
to understand why. They
found that organizational
Elizabeth Linos, an associate
professor of public policy and
management and a behavioral
scientist at the Harvard Kennedy School, asks an important
question: What happens to
inertia played a critical role:
Government agencies were
more likely to incorporate
the results of RCTs if they
applied to activities they were
already doing.
I L L U S T R AT I O N S B Y K U M É PAT H E R
I
n 2008, Cass Sunstein, a
professor at Harvard Law
School, and Richard
Thaler, an economist at the
University of Chicago, introduced the concept of “nudges,” light-touch interventions
that government officials,
policy makers, and public
planners could use to steer
people to make better decisions, such as saving for retirement or practicing healthier
habits. Building on research by
behavioral scientists and economists, Sunstein and Thaler
argued that “choice architecture,” or how information is
framed and how choices are
presented, can be constructed
in ways that encourage people
to move in a particular direction while maintaining their
freedom of choice.
Their ideas inspired
the UK-based Behavioural
Insights Team, which has
some 200 “Nudge Units” or
research affiliates around
the world. Many of these
teams work with government agencies, conducting
075_078_research_7_sum24_proofedDA.indd 75
The Behavioural Insights Team opened a North
America office five years after
its founding to assist local
and federal agencies with
improving the delivery of
government services. “These
Nudge Units ran experiments
with government agencies to
find what was effective for
their context,” Kim says, “but
then what did they do with the
nudge? That was the natural
question that brought forth
this paper.”
The researchers contacted
30 North American cities
that ran 73 RCTs with a
Nudge Unit across 67 city
departments. Describing their
outreach to city officials, Kim
says, “We approached them
and asked, ‘Remember the
experiment you ran to test
whether this nudge communication would work in your city?
Well, what do you do with it
now?’” Cities adopted a nudge
in only 27 percent of cases. The
researchers wondered what
factors were to blame.
Following interviews with
personnel in several cities,
the researchers developed
three models to explain
nudge adoption (or lack
thereof). First, they tracked
whether staff that had carried out an experiment with
a Nudge Unit remained in
the same role. Second, the
researchers assessed city
infrastructure such as staffing numbers and resources.
Finally, they examined how
officials communicated
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the nudge. Was the nudge
delivered in a new letter to
taxpayers urging compliance,
for example, or in a preexisting form of communication?
Testing these three models,
the researchers ascertained
that the last was most predictive of adoption.
“Our bottom-line finding
was that nothing was conclusively predictive, except for
whether the communications
that delivered the nudge
were preexisting or not,” Kim
says. When the behavioral
insights team collaborated
with city officials on building behavioral science into a
letter that residents already
received each year, the rate of
adoption shot up more than
50 percentage points. But if
the city opted to send a new
letter introducing residents
to the nudge, the rate of
adoption hovered around
10 percent. In other words,
adding an intervention to an
existing process made adoption much more likely.
For many cities, investing up front to ensure
that adoption takes place
remains far from obvious,
Kim says. When an experiment produces promising
evidence, researchers assume
that adoption will take place
organically. Instead, the
researchers’ findings demonstrate that implementation—incorporating evidence
into policymaking and
practice—requires deliberate thinking about routines
and structures. In recent
years, more governments
have spent more time and
money running experiments
to help officials evaluate what
interventions work. Alongside the creation of evidence,
investigating how adoption
will take place now seems just
as important.
075_078_research_7_sum24_proofedDA_crx.indd 76
The researchers “remind
us that local government
agencies are organizations,”
says Jonas Hjort, a professor
of economics at University
College London. “In doing so,
they uncover overlooked barriers to evidence adoption and
important new questions we
now need to investigate.” O
Stefano DellaVigna, Woojin Kim, and
Elizabeth Linos, “Bottlenecks for
Evidence Adoption,” Journal of Political
Economy, forthcoming.
SOCIAL
ENTREPRENEURSHIP
Prisoner to
Entrepreneur
BY CHANA R . S CHOENBERGER
A journalist based in New York City.
She writes about business, finance,
and academic research. You can
find her on Twitter: @cschoenberger.
T
hose who are released
from prison often
face difficulty finding
a job. This problem, in turn,
generates further difficulties
for policy makers: If people
exiting the criminal justice
system can’t support themselves through work, they will
have a hard time regaining a
place in society and may be
more likely to recidivate.
Applicants who have a
criminal record are often unable to land a position due to
persistent employer discrimination, research shows, and
those who can’t find work are
often reincarcerated within
a few years. This problem
especially affects Black former
prisoners, who already face discrimination from employers.
A new paper looks at an
option some people who leave
prison take to avoid employer
discrimination: entrepreneurship. The authors—Kylie
Hwang, an assistant professor
of management and organizations at Northwestern
University’s Kellogg School of
Management, and Damon
Phillips, a professor of management at the University
of Pennsylvania’s Wharton
School—found that formerly
incarcerated Black individuals are more likely to “pursue
entrepreneurship due to the
discrimination they face from
employers” and that those
who do so tend to have better
outcomes. Going into business
for themselves may seem a
riskier path, but on average
they earn more than their
peers who are employees and
are less likely to reoffend.
To examine the work
status of former prisoners,
Hwang and Phillips used data
from the 1997 US National
Longitudinal Survey of Youth,
which went on for 15 years.
The researchers also analyzed data from the National
Employment Law Project on
ban-the-box laws in states
across the country. Such laws
forbid employers from asking
job applicants questions about
past felony convictions during
early rounds of interviews.
Since such laws were gradually passed and implemented
over the 15-year period, the
legislative expansion enabled
the researchers to use it as
a natural experiment to see
how those leaving prison fared
depending on whether the
place where they lived did or
didn’t have this antidiscrimination law in place at the time
of release.
Hwang and Phillips found
that the march of ban-the-box
laws across states and cities
correlated with a lower rate
of entrepreneurship for Black
individuals who had been
incarcerated, indicating that
they were not experiencing as
much employment discrimination and were able to get hired
into jobs with less trouble
once such laws passed. (The
researchers found this effect
only when looking at Black
individuals, not other demographic groups.) This finding
indicated that entrepreneurship is the preferred choice
of those who experience
discrimination in hiring, not
necessarily because they prefer
to be self-employed or feel
motivated to start a business.
“We’re able to disentangle
how much of the labor market
discrimination pushes these
people into entrepreneurship,” Hwang says.
Being an entrepreneur
is rarely easy, with access
to funding a major issue
for anyone who starts a
business. Entrepreneurs in
this post-prison group face
significantly greater barriers
than others as they battle for
limited amounts of seed capital available to low-growth,
small-scale businesses that
don’t require specialized
skills, Hwang says. But the
data show that these obstacles aren’t as great as the
employment discrimination
these individuals face after
they leave prison.
The sorts of new businesses that the study examines
are not typically VC-funded
tech start-ups or even companies that qualify for bank
loans, said Howard Aldrich, a
professor of sociology at the
University of North CarolinaChapel Hill who studies entrepreneurship. Instead, newly
released individuals often
start what he calls “mundane,
ordinary, everyday business
opportunities that have low
barriers to entry, often are
done as solo endeavors, and
allow people to capitalize on
whatever business experiences
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and social connections they
might have,” even if they
do not have a college degree
or perhaps even a high
school diploma.
These businesses get
their funding from savings,
credit cards, or small loans
from family and friends,
outside the formal system of
business credit. They are in
many ways the prototypical
American business, since only
20 percent of the hundreds
of thousands of businesses
founded each year have any
employees, he said.
“I was delighted to see
that Kylie Hwang and Damon
Phillips have called attention
to the social and economic
significance of such businesses in enabling formerly
incarcerated individuals to get
a second chance in the labor
market,” Aldrich says. O
Kylie Hwang and Damon Phillips,
“Entrepreneurship as a Response to
Labor Market Discrimination
for Formerly Incarcerated People,”
American Journal of Sociology,
forthcoming.
COLLABORATION
The Limits of
Public-Private
Partnership
BY CHANA R . S CHOENBERGER
D
ifferent companies,
organizations, and
institutions often
decide to work together to
address society’s biggest problems, such as climate change,
inequality, and pandemics.
While such partnerships seek
to weave the strengths of each
party together, they inevitably
face the challenge of harmonizing different missions,
075_078_research_7_sum24_proofedDA_crx.indd 77
cultures, priorities, and
revenue models to achieve a
shared goal.
A new paper looks at how
public and private organizations handle projects together
by specifically examining the
development of antimicrobial
drugs over the last 25 years. A
growing problem for doctors
around the world, drugresistant bacterial strains
spur public demand for new
antibiotics. But for-profit
private companies do not
have a strong incentive to
invest research and development dollars on these agents,
because they are unlikely to
profit from such investment.
Consequently, institutions oriented to the public good, such
as universities, government,
philanthropies, and nonprofits, are increasingly involved
in funding the research.
The study’s authors—
Birgul Arslan, assistant professor of innovation strategy
at Erasmus University’s
Rotterdam School of Management; Gurneeta Vasudeva, associate professor of strategic
management and entrepreneurship at the University of
Minnesota’s Carlson School
of Management; and Elizabeth
B. Hirsch, associate professor
of experimental and clinical
pharmacology at the University of Minnesota’s College
of Pharmacy—specifically
looked at how governments,
universities, nonprofits, and
companies worked together
on antimicrobial drug development between 1995 and
2019, as a way to examine how
the organizations collaborated
and where some of the partnerships foundered.
The three researchers
came together to study this
question after Vasudeva
visited the World Health
Organization in 2019 with a
delegation from her university
sent to explore partnerships
with international NGOs on
issues of social importance.
Antimicrobial resistance, she
learned, was a problem the
WHO was watching closely; it
represented a “silent pandemic, an issue which affected
millions of people around
the world, but there was a
problem of market failure,”
Vasudeva says. Doctors were
reluctant to prescribe new
antimicrobial drugs out of
fear that overuse would lead
to more drug resistance; as a
effective medicines, the
authors analyzed all the
antimicrobial drug projects
moving through the discovery, preclinical, and clinical
trial phases during the study
period. For each drug, they
broke the development into
individual tasks to see how
long it took for each to be
completed and whether the
drug moved on to the next
step in the process. They
also conducted extensive
interviews with three experts
on the roadblocks involved
in developing this kind of
result, companies did not see
the drugs as profitable. In response to this market-driven
reluctance, public institutions
and companies were working together on many of the
drugs in the pharmaceutical
development pipeline.
To test their theories
about how well these partnerships worked and how
efficiently they produced
drug and analyzed 176 drugdevelopment contracts from
a biomedical database to see
how terms differed when
public and private organizations worked together.
The researchers found
that private companies and
public institutions struggle
to get as much done together
as private companies working
together in groups.
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The study did find that the
initial stages of the drug
discovery process, where
scientists are analyzing a vast
number of organic compounds
to see what works against
a specific disease, agent, or
condition, are better suited to
a public-private partnership.
However, later in the process,
the diverging incentives and
goals of companies and public
institutions make it more difficult for them to collaborate
as the drug gets closer to commercialization.
In a world where public
funding is often the only
money available for the
development of drugs that are
vital to society but have little
chance of becoming blockbuster profit-drivers for companies, organizations need to
be careful about how they set
up partnerships. When public
and private entities work on
the same projects, they should
import some governance and
conflict-resolution ideas that
are more common in privateprivate contracts, including
joint steering committees,
development milestones, and
joint patent provisions, the
authors write.
“The findings provide
valuable insights and practical
implications for fostering
effective collaborations in
addressing grand challenges,”
says Fabrice Lumineau, a
professor of strategic management at the University of
Hong Kong’s Business School.
He calls the paper “an exciting
contribution to the field of innovation management.” O
Birgul Arslan, Gurneeta Vasudeva, and
Elizabeth B. Hirsch, “Public–Private
and Private–Private Collaboration
as Pathways for Socially Beneficial
Innovation: Evidence from Antimicrobial Drug-Development Tasks,” Academy
of Management Journal, 2023.
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ECONOMIC
DEVELOPMENT
Skepticism
About UBI
BY DA N I E L A B L E I
T
he idea of universal
basic income (UBI) is
to provide a regular
cash payment to all members
of a community without
any work requirements or
other preconditions. Andrew
Yang, a candidate in the 2020
Democratic presidential primary, popularized UBI on the
campaign trail, turning it into
his signature policy. A flood
of commentary and analysis
followed as voters wondered
whether UBI could reduce
economic inequality and
provide security for millions
of Americans living under
precarity and facing the threat
of automation.
Among economists studying UBI at the time were
Diego Daruich, a professor of
finance and business economics at the University of
Southern California’s Marshall
School of Business, and one
of his former advisors, Raquel
Fernández, a professor of
economics at New York University. Watching mounting
evidence of the beneficial
effects of short-term cash
transfers in small-scale settings, the researchers realized
that studying larger-scale UBI,
which promises payments in
the long term, even forever,
called for a new, dynamic
model. How could economists
capture the macroeconomic
effects of the US government
giving money to all Americans
in perpetuity?
The researchers constructed a macroeconomic life-cycle
model to account for many
individuals of differing ages,
the investments that parents make in their children’s
education, how much people
work, how much they save, tax
payments, consumption patterns, and the interactive effects of all these factors. Using
a UBI policy financed by labor
income taxation that provided
each adult with $8,000 annually, drawing on US data that
follows households over time,
and incorporating many of the
costs and benefits associated
with UBI to carry out several
exercises, the researchers
found that the policy decreased overall welfare.
“We asked why our findings turned out that way,
while others have found the
opposite,” Daruich says.
“That’s when we began playing with our model, turning
on some features and turning
off others. We saw that when
UBI is introduced, taxes
must be increased to finance
it, and those taxes are large,
which lowers the return to
investments because taxes are
higher, leading to lower capital
accumulation. In addition,
since individuals know they
will always have some money
from the government, they
don’t need rainy-day savings.
These two forces lead to lower
capital in the economy, which
leads to lower wages. If there
are no firms, and there are no
jobs, wages go down.”
Less capital also shrinks
tax revenues from businesses,
necessitating additional
increases in other taxes to
foot the bill for UBI. “All these
dynamic, long-run effects take
time to appear,” Daruich says.
Sharp tax increases, economists have shown, influence
the decisions that parents
make, such as educational
investments. When spending
on education diminishes, the
result is lower skills in the
economy, and declining skills
spell welfare losses.
To understand behavioral
changes following cash transfers, the researchers looked
to empirical studies that track
the work norms and spending
habits of lottery winners. Since
2020, commentators have expressed concern that UBI will
cause Americans to work less.
One analysis of lottery winners
in the United States, for example, charted a drop in their
average annual labor earnings
during the five years following
the reward. The researchers
tested labor market responses
to lottery winnings using their
life-cycle model and found
that cash windfalls led to lower
labor earnings and a decline in
overall labor supply.
And yet the researchers’
findings do not preclude
progressive taxation, Daruich
insists. Instead, the evidence
suggests that there are better
ways to mitigate inequality
than UBI, a blunt instrument
that gives money to everyone,
whether rich or poor. More
directed transfers to finance
high-quality early childhood
education, for example, or
even cash distributed in
targeted ways, are much more
likely to be effective.
“This excellent paper provides an analysis of the effects
of UBI programs by concentrating on the dynamic effects
of skill formation across
generations,” says Gustavo
Ventura, professor of economics at Arizona State University.
“It complements recent work
that shows, in macroeconomic
settings, that UBI is generically a bad idea.” O
Dario Daruich and Raquel Fernández,
“Universal Basic Income: A Dynamic
Assessment,” American Economic
Review, vol. 114, no. 1, 2024.
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79
BOOKS
Reviews of new and notable titles
Lessons
on Effective
Connection
In Supercommunicators, Charles Duhigg
presents an actionable guide to better
communication, albeit one without
groundbreaking insight.
R E V I E W B Y AY E S H A A N N A N I N A N
I
n Supercommunicators: How to Unlock
the Secret Language of Connection,
Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist
Charles Duhigg offers readers simple
communication strategies to more effectively connect with friends, family, coworkers,
and our communities. By harnessing commonly known conversation tools, Duhigg
argues, everyone has the potential to become a “supercommunicator”: someone
who “seem[s] to synchronize effortlessly
with just about anyone” by making others
feel at ease, sharing experiences without
monopolizing the spotlight, and navigating
thorny subjects with sensitivity.
Duhigg is the author of the 2012 New
York Times bestseller The Power of Habit,
about how we can change our habits by
understanding the science of habit formation, and 2016’s Smarter Faster Better,
which unpacks the science of productivity
to offer tools to enhance self-optimization. In his latest work, Duhigg employs
a similar methodology of combining research with feel-good case studies to devise a part self-help, part how-to guide to
better communication.
Supercommunicators was inspired by
Duhigg’s own budding awareness of his
failure to connect authentically with his
employees, friends, and family. Recognizing his shortcomings, he sets out to deepen
his understanding of how people communicate with one another so that we can
079_083_books_proofedDA_sum24.indd 79
“learn how the people around us see the
world and help them understand our perspectives in turn,” he writes. Perhaps this
is why his prescription for connection is
rather obvious: listen deeply, ask penetrating questions to reveal your interlocutor’s
values, and be vulnerable and authentic in
your engagement. “We need to genuinely
understand what someone is feeling, what
they want, and who they are,” he asserts.
“And then, to match them, we need to know
how to share ourselves in return.”
Duhigg’s framework for improved communication is most constructive at an interpersonal level and as a starting point for
organizations committed to fostering open
dialogue. It is arguably less successful when
the framework is applied as a solution to our
society’s worsening political polarization.
Supercommunicators, he observes, are
not the most charismatic individuals, nor are
they likely to be self-designated leaders in a
group. They are, in fact, the ones who blend
in, who ask significantly more questions
than others, and who do not hesitate to admit when they don’t have all the answers.
Supercommunicators: How to Unlock the
Secret Language of Connection
BY CHARLES DUHIGG
320 pages, Random House, 2024
In his analysis of how supercommunicators
operate, Duhigg leans on neuroscience research showing that different types of discussion ignite distinct parts of the brain:
Practical matters engage the frontal lobe;
discussions about the self (identity and
relationships) activate the brain’s default
mode network of the cortex and paralimbic
regions; and discussions that elicit emotion engage the amygdala, the nucleus accumbens, and the hippocampus. He categorizes these three types of conversation
as mindsets: the decision-making mindset
(“What is this conversation about?”), the
social mindset (“Who are we in this conversation?”), and the emotional mindset (“How
do we feel in this conversation?”).
While different, these mindsets do not
function independently of each other. Rather, Duhigg says, they can shift “as a conversation unfolds.” For example, he proffers, “a
discussion might begin when a friend asks
for help thinking through a work problem
(What’s This Really About?) and then proceeds to admit he’s feeling stressed (How
Do We Feel?) before finally focusing on how
other people will react when they learn
about this issue (Who Are We?).” In this
case, he advises matching, or mirroring,
emotions to create an empathic connection with your interlocutor: “If someone
seems emotional, allow yourself to become
emotional as well. If someone is intent
on decision-making, match that focus. If
they are preoccupied by social implications, reflect their fixation back to them.”
A supercommunicator, therefore, can skillfully assess their interlocutor’s mindset
and then match it by steering the conversation in a way that reflects both of their
needs. “Within every conversation there
is a quiet negotiation, where the prize
is not winning, but rather determining
what everyone wants,” Duhigg contends.
However, in several of his case studies, Duhigg’s benchmark for successful
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communication shifts from mutual understanding to persuasion—the latter implied as the real motivation for wanting to
become a supercommunicator. “How do
we nudge someone, through a conversation, to take a risk, embrace an adventure,
accept a job, or go on a date?”
For example, Duhigg examines how doctors have persuaded their anti-vaccination
patients to get the COVID-19 vaccine.
He discusses a physician named Rima
Chamie, who convinced her deeply religious patient, who had rejected all vaccines
practice is a notable oversight. Emotion is,
after all, the fuel for authoritarian populist
leaders’ divisive identity politics.
Consequently, the book’s argument
seems siloed from the political reality of
our lives. If simply listening, connecting,
and reframing conversations could sufficiently bridge divisions, then wouldn’t
controversial matters like gun control and
abortion have been resolved by now? Here,
instead of diving in, Duhigg reverts to his
earlier goal of supercommunication: “not
winning but understanding,” which is the
Duhigg proves that transformative
communication is possible when interlocutors
seek common ground.
because he believed that God would protect him, to get vaccinated by establishing trust through bonding over a shared
identity. Instead of imposing her medical
expertise on her patient, Chamie disclosed
to him that she, too, valued faith and family. Using his language, she reflected that
she also cared deeply about the health of
her children and grandchildren. She then
expressed her gratitude that God gave humans the ability to make vaccines through
a gentle (and rhetorical) question, “Maybe
[God] gave us vaccines to keep us safe?”
The question put the answer—and the
decision-making power about getting the
vaccine—in her patient’s hands as a sign
of trust. By establishing common ground
in their values, and particularly in their desire to protect their families, Chamie made
room for the patient to shift his mindset.
He decided to get vaccinated.
Duhigg’s stories predominantly showcase outcomes favoring the public good,
such as the doctor persuading her patient
to get vaccinated against a communicable
virus that created a deadly, global pandemic. Yet he ignores alternative scenarios, in
which social harm results from a supercommunicator’s powers of persuasion.
Sidestepping such cases allows Duhigg to
avoid having to delve into ethical discussions about a supercommunicator’s accountability to their interlocutors. But at a
time when populism is on the rise globally,
the failure to interrogate the ethics of this
079_083_books_proofedDA_sum24.indd 80
critical first step in humanizing all parties
in a conflict. Despite admitting that agreement is not always possible, he does offer
insight about how the book’s tools can
bring people together when perspectives
diverge too much.
F
or example, the media company Advance Local organized a workshop
in 2018 that brought together guncontrol activists and gun-rights advocates
to “get everyone to start sharing personal
stories about guns and gun control, the
emotions and values underlying their beliefs, [and] then see if that might change the
tenor of the debate.” The attendees listened
to each other’s stories, understood divergent perspectives, and found some common ground—and the organizers deemed
the event a success. However, when the
conversation moved online and included
people who had not attended the training,
the conversation rapidly deteriorated. “Not
everyone rose above their animosities,”
Duhigg reports. “Some people were ejected
by moderators, others opted out.”
His only advice for navigating online
discourse—be extra polite, refrain from
criticism, and frequently express gratitude—is overly simplistic and overlooks
the harsh reality of online harassment and
particularly its impact on marginalized
communities. Misogyny and racism are
exacerbated by a mob mentality prevalent in online spaces, and the absence of
face-to-face interactions shields perpetrators from accountability. Training in
communication techniques yields results
in controlled environments but encounters limitations when applied to largescale settings that lack accountability
structures, especially those with anonymous interlocutors.
While Duhigg’s guide is less successful in the realm of political discourse, it
does capture how sustained interventions
in organizations can achieve long-term
solutions. He points to Netflix as a case
in point. After its communications chief
officer said “the n-word” in a 2018 meeting, Netflix implemented protocols to address that incident and the systemic racism that the incident revealed. It hired a
diversity manager to lead company-wide
discussions and training sessions, Duhigg
explains, “to foster dialogues, confront biases, and make Netflix a shining example
of inclusivity.” By 2021, most employees
had received diversity training, and Netflix
was prepared for another transgression, if
and when it arose. Employees were able
to voice concerns directly to each other
and company executives in structured,
empathetic ways that made everyone feel
heard. Duhigg concedes that “real change
requires shifts in not only how Netflix
hires, promotes, and supports employees,
but society at large.” But the company has,
he adds, “outpaced nearly every other big
firm in Silicon Valley, as well as Hollywood,
in hiring from underrepresented groups.”
Organizations cannot foster growth and
inclusivity in meaningful ways unless they
are willing to confront their blind spots
and engage in difficult conversations.
In Supercommunicators, Duhigg proves
that transformative communication is
possible when interlocutors seek common ground and “acknowledg[e] social
differences, rather than preten[d] they
don’t exist.” While commonly known, the
communication tools he offers can help
navigate interpersonal interactions with
greater understanding and benefit. We
can’t always get what we want from a conversation, but we can be more intentional
in the way we connect with others—and
that, in itself, is a worthy pursuit. O
AYE S H A A NNA NI NA N is a film editor
and screenwriting consultant in Mumbai, India.
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Making Sense
of Wicked
Problems
In Long Problems, Thomas Hale
contends that effective political solutions
to climate change are vexed by
the issue of coordinating policies over
protracted time horizons.
REVIEW BY ANDREW J. HOFFMAN
W
hile reading Oxford University professor Thomas
Hale’s Long Problems:
Climate Change and
the Challenge of Governing Across Time,
I kept thinking of evolutionary biologist
Stephen Jay Gould’s observation that “we
have become, by the power of a glorious
evolutionary accident called intelligence,
the stewards of life’s continuity on Earth.
We did not ask for this role, but we cannot
abjure it. We may not be suited to such responsibility, but here we are.”
Countless scientists have referred to
climate change as part of a class of issues
called “wicked problems,” a term used to
describe issues that do not neatly fit the
conventional models of analysis. While
we may not be suited to solve the wicked
problem of climate change and may despair that we will never be, Hale offers an
analysis of how we might better understand and therefore address it.
Hale predicates Long Problems on the
general observation that some political issues span not only national borders but
also time horizons. His central claim is
that climate change is a “long problem,” a
challenge that “spans more than one human lifetime.” He acknowledges that while
“length is not the only meaningful way to
understand climate change, … a focus on
this one characteristic can fundamentally
reshape our understanding of politics” by
challenging us to establish policies on longer time horizons and to account for the
future in ways we have not previously done.
Reenvisioning policy is important because
long problems are becoming more prevalent, he argues, for three reasons: our growing technological ability to bump against
limits within the environment, our growing
understanding of those distant effects, and
079_083_books_proofedDA_sum24.indd 81
our increasing willingness to address the
needs of the future in the present.
Long problems, Hale asserts, challenge us to “govern across time,” rather
than in the short terms of election cycles
and quarterly returns. He warns that such
challenges become more difficult to address the longer we ignore long-term governance. Indeed, as long problems become
more urgent, we become more immediate
and short term in our political orientation.
Put differently, when we are drowning, we
are less concerned with fixing the cause of
the flood than we are with surviving. Hale
calls this a paradox that “is another of the
various cruel ironies of climate change [because] it threatens precisely the political
support for longer term governance functions that can best address it.”
The book offers a valuable discussion
of long problems and their importance for
solving climate change in both academic
research and government policy.
At times, however, discerning the thrust
of his arguments requires the reader to
connect disparate pieces. For example, his
definition of long problems is presented
piecemeal over the course of several pages. The result is a fragmented definition
that makes comprehension unnecessarily
difficult: Long problems are “amalgamations of different problems,” involving an
extended chain of cause and effect with
an increasing “number of intervening factors” and “a multiplicity of processes to
shape outcomes,” and are often (but not
Long Problems: Climate Change and the Challenge
of Governing Across Time
BY THOMAS HALE
256 pages, Princeton University Press, 2024
81
always) irreversible. Hale’s penchant for
lists—I count at least eight in the first
chapter—also impedes the reader’s ability
to understand the logical flow of his argument because the lists feel like stoppages
in the narrative. Lastly, there are places
where the writing devolves into minutiae that will leave readers outside the
discipline confused and places where the
writing makes obvious observations that
will frustrate experts in the discipline—a
tension of any author trying to straddle
audiences.
Regardless of these issues, the book is
an enlightening read that adds depth to our
approach to climate change. Hale claims
that long problems present society with
three daunting political and governance
challenges. First, they require actions well
in advance of outcomes. But the costs of
present action are known, while the future
benefits are uncertain. He calls this “the
early action paradox” that leads to obstructionism, particularly from those who will
bear the larger brunt of present costs. We
have certainly seen this dynamic at play
with oil companies spending vast amounts
of money to confuse and stymie debate on
climate change because addressing it represents an existential threat to the fossil fuel
industry. The second challenge is that people in the future who will reap the benefits
of today’s actions do not have a voice in our
present-day deliberations—a concern he
terms “shadow interests.” Third, any political response enacted today may suffer what
he calls “institutional lag”—it may remain
in place but no longer be useful later as the
long problem evolves.
To overcome these challenges, Hale
proposes that scholars define climate
change not as a distribution or cost problem but as a transition problem, focusing on “rates of change rather than final
outcomes” and applying “empirical techniques that allow us to develop probabilistic knowledge about the future.” This
reclassification will be an especially great
challenge since social science research is
often conducted using existing models
and theories and has been historically reluctant or unwilling to look forward and
make predictions, preferring instead to
study past patterns. But Hale’s recommendation for scholars indicates how long
problems pose a new type of challenge,
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requiring new types of approaches—not
just for research but for governance as well.
Hale states at the outset that he will
not offer any new policy solutions to climate change but will instead assess the
tools that already exist to examine how
well they attend to the three main challenges. But he does not stick to that initial
promise, offering some welcome and necessary provocations for new forms of governance. Hale proposes that governments
should develop something akin to sci-fi
writer Kim Stanley Robinson’s idea of a
“ministry for the future,” an organization
that would be mandated to consider longterm interests insulated from short-term
pressures. This organization could help
governments adopt informational tools
to better understand the future and make
it salient in the present for shifting society’s preferences over time, yielding policies that must remain fluid for the long
term, maintaining robust goals based on
forward planning processes while also being subject to constant updating.
Bringing the future into our shortterm mindset to make long-term policies
is ambitious, and Hale is honest about the
tensions and trade-offs this would create.
He points out that his proposals could, at
times, unwisely privilege long-term interests over those in the present and that
some attempts to understand the future
will inevitably get things wrong. Further,
resources might run out over the duration
of a long problem, and, importantly, the
ministry for the future would at times—
like all institutions—work to maintain its
own interests and the status quo, resisting the need to evolve over time.
Y
et I believe that Hale’s ideas raise
other interesting questions for
debate. For example, could it be
that the core challenge of anticipating the
future consequences of our actions and
ameliorating them may always be beyond
our reach, not just temporally but also
politically? Our growing understanding of
our distant effects on the natural world
relies on the “vast machine”—climatologist Paul N. Edwards’ term that Hale employs to refer to the complex models and
big data sets we need to understand issues
as complex as climate change. As these
models and data become more complex,
079_083_books_proofedDA_sum24.indd 82
they become increasingly inaccessible to
novice observers. Believing requires
trust, which is in short supply these days,
and the result is suspicion and denial.
Some—particularly those who lean more
conservative—see climate science as an
excuse for government to tamper in the
market and diminish our freedom. This
kind of political resistance becomes even
more pronounced if we consider policy
debates about non-human life.
While Hale does not discuss the challenge of considering the interests of nonhuman life in his notion of “shadow interests,” others have. For example, Ecuador
natural and manufactured capital are not
substitutable, and that the natural environment is far more complex than we
understand. Although he doesn’t say it,
my sense is that Hale falls into this camp,
since he observes that burdening the future with depleted natural resources or
an excessive pollution load may inadvertently cross environmental tipping points,
leading to irreversible damage that future
generations cannot fix. Certainly, scientists’ warnings that if we don’t reverse
our current trajectory of atmospheric
greenhouse gas increases by 2030, damage
to the global climate will be irreversible.
Long Problems brings needed
attention to all the aspects of the temporal
dimensions of climate change.
amended its constitution in 2008 to grant
nature legally enforceable rights. Bolivia,
Uganda, the United States, Canada, Brazil, New Zealand, Mexico, and Northern Ireland have also granted some legal
recognition for the rights of nature. An
effort is even underway to draft laws for
the legally enforceable crime of “ecocide”
and criminalizing the destruction of the
world’s ecosystems.
These questions conjure deeper ones
about the precise obligations we owe to
future generations. For example, proponents of weak sustainability, such as economists Robert Solow and John Hartwick,
argue that we do not necessarily have an
obligation to fix the problems of future
generations as long as we provide them
with the resources to fix such problems
themselves. This perspective assumes that
natural capital and manufactured capital are substitutes and that no difference
exists between the kinds of well-being
they generate, as long as we leave future
generations with an aggregate improvement. So, it does not matter whether the
current generation depletes nonrenewable
resources or emits greenhouse gases into
the atmosphere as long as future generations have a greater source of wealth and
technology to fix these problems.
Proponents of strong sustainability,
of course, disagree. They contend that
Some scholars agree—including, ironically, Solow, who in 1992 asserted that “no
generation ‘should’ be favored over any
other” and that the common use of discount rates to measure the value of money
is “a concession to human weakness or
as a technical assumption of convenience
(which it is).”
In the end, climate change is an existential threat to life on the planet, one that
challenges our institutions in new and unprecedented ways. Can we rise to the challenge that Gould presents to us and solve
it? To answer this question, I turn to systems scientist Sir Geoffrey Vickers, whom
Hale quotes: If human civilization is to survive, “it will have to be controlled—that is,
governed—on a scale and to a depth which
we have as yet neither the political institutions to achieve nor the cultural attitudes
to accept.” Long Problems brings needed attention to all the aspects of the temporal
dimensions of the issue, helping us move
in the direction of creating new political
structures for solving it. O
A ND R E W J . H O F F M A N is the Holcim (US) Professor
of Sustainable Enterprise at the Stephen M. Ross
School of Business and the School for Environment
& Sustainability at the University of Michigan.
He is a 2023-24 climate fellow at the
Harvard Business School’s Institute for the Study
of Business in Global Society.
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83
D I G I TA L B O O K S H E L F
Four new books that push the boundaries of social innovation were
recently excerpted on our website, ssir.org.
Environmental, social,
and governance (ESG)
has become a dominant framework for
incentivizing responsible business behavior
toward the existential
challenges our world
faces. But has ESG
spawned a culture of
compliance, characterized by mere boxchecking rather than a
culture of innovation
to salvage our planet?
In Sustainable
Sustainability: Why
ESG Is Not Enough,
Rajeev Peshawaria
argues that the planet
needs “steward leaders,” those who value
interdependence, the
long-term view, an
ownership mentality,
and creative resilience.
Most of all, steward
leaders understand
that the better
future must be a
collective one.
079_083_books_proofedDA_sum24.indd 83
The world’s great
urban tech hubs—from
Silicon Valley to Shenzhen—are often riven
with inequality and the
benefits of innovation
not always shared.
In Innovation for the
Masses: How to Share
the Benefits of the
High-Tech Economy,
Neil Lee looks at four
case studies of tech
hubs that bring ordinary workers along for
the ride: Switzerland’s
diffusion, Austria’s
industrial policy,
Taiwan’s education
system, and Sweden’s
large state. As Lee
warns, failure to share
the benefits across
society puts at risk the
pro-innovation policies
on which shared prosperity depends.
While the digital revolution affects nearly
every sphere of activity, its impact across
the world has been far
from uniform. In The
Digital Double Bind:
Change and Stasis in
the Middle East,
Mohamed Zayani and
Joe F. Khalil explore
the Middle East’s
digital turn, arguing
that the same conditions that drive digital
immersion in government, the private
market, and the public
sphere also inhibit
the region’s drive to
change. Moving beyond familiar trajectories of the network
society, the authors
provide a road map for
a critical engagement
with digitality in the
Global South.
Despite the many
innovations the social
sector has crafted, the
developmental challenges the world still
confronts are daunting. Why do so few solutions reach the scale
necessary to make a
global difference?
In Scaling Up Development Impact, Isabel
Guerrero, Siddhant
Gokhale, and Jossie
Fahsbender ask what
prevents successful
pilot projects from
growing to match
the full magnitude of
our problems. While
scaling up is a dynamic
process of transformation—such that
“best practices” don’t
always apply—they
argue that the way
forward is to put the
people closest to the
problem at the center
of work to solve it.
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Stanford Social Innovation Review / Summer 2024
last look
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Fish Food
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around a fishing pond. — M A R C I E B I A N C O
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