Social Movement Innovation

Social Movement Innovation

Posted on 10. Mar, 2009 in Social Innovation

I am sitting in a conference held by the Public Interest Projects, titled “Advancing Alliance Building Across Movements.” Over 75 people are in attendance and I know only three. Those present include the Leadership Conference on Civil Rights, the Center for Community Change, and Miami Workers Center. Despite my working on the same issues as many of the people in this room − education equality, access to healthcare, and racial discrimination, to name a few − we have not crossed paths before. Yet I am starting to see a difference between our work, which uses an organization-building lens, and the work of others in the room, who use a movement-building lens.

Consider this: over the past 10 years we have seen tremendous growth in the number of nonprofit organizations throughout the country − at a growth rate of about 80% during that decade. One reference I’ve seen states that about 115 nonprofits were started per day before the economic downturn! Yet despite all this growth, how many nonprofits truly work together toward a common purpose?

In the private sector, a company generally wants to hold onto a monopoly for as long as it can. By contrast, in the nonprofit sector, no one organization can solve the social problem it is working on.

With this in mind, what are the unique roles of a direct service organization, an advocacy organization, a coalition, or the government? How do they all fit together to ensure lasting social impact?  What are the connections in education, for example, among Teach for America, Alliance for Excellent Education, the National Alliance for Public Charter Schools, and the U.S. Department of Education?  Each organization is  concerned with its own sustainability and impact, but shouldn’t they also consider their role in a collective purpose: better education?

I am starting to see small examples of these worlds coming together.  Perhaps this will be the next great social innovation of the coming decade − social movement innovation.  For those organizations that cannot see themselves through this lens, they may be left outside of the next great advancement in social impact.

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4 Responses to “Social Movement Innovation”

  1. AndrewKStein

    10. Mar, 2009

    Good points. I'm wondering, where are the experts in social sector collaboration? Does Root Cause have an M&A department? …

    I've always liked the story of GE (at least as I've heard it), how the company began acquiring so many other companies that it could analyze its acquisitions for M&A best practices. Soon one of GE's advantages was that it could acquire companies more efficiently than its competitors. As a result, it could bid higher and more often, knowing that it could squeeze that much more out of the acquisition — or abstain, knowing that the acquisition was less attractive than CW would say. …

    The idea, then, is that perhaps a social organization's theory of impact needs to include how well it works with others — and its plan for continuously getting better at collaboration….

    Assuming this hasn't been done yet, I'd like to think that if we surveyed the social sector and looked for organizations demonstratively better at collaboration, we could prove a correlation between excellent collaborative skills and social impact.

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  2. Gayle Thorsen

    11. Mar, 2009

    Right on! The new sustainability paradigm is going to merge economics and ecology–we're all going to have to realize we're related and interdependent and can get much farther joining forces than competing. This goes for foundations too–not just nonprofits. Without the possibility of past growth patterns–we're actually going to have to redesign how we work and reorganize our relationships. This can be a good thing! We can all get more generous as we get more effective.

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  3. Philanthropy Daily Digest | Tactical Philanthropy

    11. Mar, 2009

    [...] Social Movement Innovation: Andrew Wolk Like me, Andrew Wolk thinks growing great organizations is the key to impact. But in this post he lays out why he thinks NGOs must work together and why Social Movement Innovation might be the next big thing. (tags: philanthropy) This entry was written by Sean Stannard-Stockton and posted on March 11, 2009 at 6:00 pm. Bookmark the permalink. Follow any comments here with the RSS feed for this post. Trackbacks are closed, but you can post a comment. [...]

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  4. Tanya Lacy

    24. Mar, 2009

    Yes to the above. And what works is that we are moving away from hierachy and into cluster thinking. Franchising is a classic example of this. Now the solution is:

    Social Entrepreneurship + Micro-Franchising (Social Impact Enterprise) = Intercept Poverty

    Let's teach economic self reliance via teaching franchise thinking in the 3rd world/ underdeveloped economies.

    Let's engage /fund the Franchis(or) Sector. How about they look at some annexe brands that add value? Harness the problem solving savvy of their teams as a C.S.R. Strategy and hey presto we have the IP machine, pumping out solutions.
    We're onto it at Intercept with our 'eternal enterprise' centre concept in Ethiopia.
    (they don't understand micro-franchise, they do understand
    eternal enterprise': Just posted an article on this for those who are interested.

    Also http://www.microfranchising.blogspot.com is a great reference to these specific models.
    Have been publishing some articles on this in mainstream to get some engagement.

    Tanya Lacy
    Intercept Poverty.org
    Intercept Experience.com

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