To Drive Systemic Change, Find the Root Cause
Treat the cause, not the symptoms If your phone turns off and you plug it into a charger, most likely, it turns back on. If it doesn’t, you now have to consider other potential issues in order to get it to work again. As human beings, we use linear, event-focused, cause-and-effect thinking as our go-to […]
Putting the “Social” in Social Change
You may sometimes feel like you’re one of the few – if not the only – advocates for the issue you care about. You’ve shown all your friends (and random acquaintances too) the data about the disparities in public education. You’ve met with elected officials and made public comments at school board meetings. No one […]
An Ecosystem Approach to Social Change
Recently, we’ve seen a growing weariness among those working on longstanding efforts to transform public education. But we don’t think it’s because those pushing for better schools have lost faith in the potential of children. Rather, the exasperation felt is around the question of how to achieve transformative change when a deep-rooted status quo seems […]
What is Forward-Thinking Philanthropy?
We sometimes find it helpful to think about philanthropy as a tool for social change in terms similar to how Winston Churchill famously described democracy: “Democracy is the worst form of government except for all those other forms that have been tried” There are (and always have been) valid critiques of philanthropy as a means for promoting social change […]
