6-6+Draft+Introduction

=INTRODUCTION= Over a hundred funders and activists have been coordinating efforts to reduce global warning emissions in the U.S. upper Midwest. The results: energy efficiency policies passed in six states, construction of 28 new coal plants halted, and strong relationships and capacity developed to continue the fight.

Residents from tough neighborhoods in Louisville, Kentucky have been building relationships through a local movement for community change. By building social webs, they’re accessing opportunities like employment, housing benefits and health care. The results: over 1,200 new jobs and $9 million saved from avoided housing foreclosures, to name just a few quantifiable outcomes.

Program officers at one of the nation’s largest foundations are transparently sharing their learning about capacity building and inviting the public to join in through a wiki open for all to see and comment on. They’re posting helpful tools and articles, sharing insights from across their grantmaking, and requesting input on research. The results: a higher level of public accountability, increased trust from the capacity building community and a growing network to activate when needed.

These are all stories of funders cultivating and tapping networks to scale their impact.

Funders and social change makers of all kinds care about tangible progress on tough problems—a policy win, more under-privileged youth graduating, less homeless, cleaner air. Softer measures are also critical—less social isolation, better access to information, opportunities for citizens to make their voices heard. Catalyzing networks can help social change makers build new capacity for making progress on tough social and environmental problems and achieve significant measurable results.

Why do funders need to understand networks now?
Throughout history, social change has been possible only through the contributions and dedication of many people and organizations connected together in tight and loose groups. Developments as wide ranging as Indian Independence, civil rights, women’s suffrage, and freedom of speech couldn’t have happened with solitary or isolated leaders. Citizens, philanthropists and groups of all kinds were linking ideas and actions through constantly changing constellations of relationships.

Today the complexity and scale of tough social and environmental problems is only growing—from climate change to failing education systems to childhood malnutrition. Yet our ability to manage the complexity and reverse these problems is not keeping pace with their growth.

Leaders are stuck at the crossroads of increasing fragmentation and interdependence. On the one hand, we’re living in a world where perspectives, practices and action are increasingly fragmented as people and organizations become more specialized in their interests and siloed in their actions. On the other hand, we’re living in a world that is becoming more and more interdependent as ideas, money, things and people move across boundaries of all kinds.

It’s hard to know where to start. Do you go deep and identify a focused concern where you can (relatively) quickly gain traction, like a targeted policy win or increasing access to a medical treatment? Do you go broad and embrace a broad reaching issue, like childhood obesity or rural poverty, that will require many years and many actors to tackle? Regardless of where you put your stake, you’ll be dealing with complex dynamic problems that no one actor can make progress on alone, regardless of their size and influence. Funders will need to broker relationships and build bridges across once fragmented people and perspectives. They will need to operate with an awareness of the interdependence in which we now live by working to understand the complexity and by acting in concert with others. They will need to participate in and catalyze networks for good.

What can activating networks help funders do?
While grantmakers have been investing in networks for decades, new social media tools and advances in knowledge about complex systems are creating greater opportunities for funders to scale their impact. In recent years, we’ve experienced the advent and adoption of digital tools that are exponentially extending our ability to share information, connect with new and old colleagues and coordinate action. At the same time there have been significant advances in our ability to visualize and understand complex webs of relationships. We can now visualize the networks that we’re embedded in inside, outside and between our organizational lives and channel that knowledge toward positive social returns.

The new tools and knowledge are amplifying the ways in which networks can help with complex social problem solving. As a result, funders and activists are experimenting with innovative approaches to scaling impact and a new network-centric ecology of social problem solving is emerging.

Below we discuss five ways that grantmakers and social change makers of all kinds are harnessing the power of networks for positive social benefits: weaving social ties, accessing diverse perspectives, openly building and sharing knowledge, catalyzing widespread action and ownership, and coordinating diverse resources and action. Most efforts to activate networks are resulting in multiple of these benefits. And, in the end, all of these are about pathways to acting bigger and scaling impact.


 * ** Challenge ** || ** Traditional Approach ** || ** Network Approach ** ||
 * Build community assets || Administer social services || Weave social ties ||
 * Develop better designs and inform decisions || Gather input from people you know || Access new and diverse perspectives ||
 * Spread what works || Disseminate white papers || Openly share and build knowledge ||
 * Mobilize action || Organize tightly coordinated campaigns || Catalyze widespread action and ownership ||
 * Overcome fragmentation || Bring players and programs under a single umbrella || Coordinate diverse resources and action ||

Weave social ties
Building community and strengthening social capital have long been at the core of neighborhood revitalization and organizing efforts. Now, an understanding of network dynamics is helping community organizers and grantmakers amplify their place-based efforts and work with communities that span geographies by weaving stronger social ties. For example, the Annie E. Casey Foundation’s decade-long “Making Connections” initiative has been deliberately weaving community as a core strategy for improving the lives of children and families in many of America's toughest neighborhoods. Built on the belief that a person can get the strongest form of support through family and friends, the initiative seeks to strengthen that web of relationships and use them as a springboard for long-term community growth. One of the neighborhoods where Annie E. Casey has invested, Louisville, Kentucky, has created a broad-based community network with over 3400 members that is linking residents from across four tough Louisville neighborhoods with one another and with opportunities, like jobs and childcare. The results are impressive: over $ 4 million generated in neighborhood salaries from job placements through the network; elementary school performance gap closed and 20% higher enrollment at the local community college; and the numbers can’t begin to capture the power of relationships developed through the network.

While many efforts to build community assets are focused on weaving place-based communities, the Reboot network is connecting leaders and cultural influentials from across geographies who are “re-booting” Jewish culture and traditions. Reboot members are deepening conversations about how Jewish identity can resonate with the next generation and taking action based on insights from these conversations. For instance, every summer, “Rebooters” gather in person for open participant led conversations about Jewish identity. There are no predesigned outcomes. It’s a space for participants to connect ideas and interests, typically resulting in collaboration on projects that help reinvigorate traditional forms of communal belonging. One such project was an initiative to help people slow down their lives in the spirit of the Sabbath which included a “National Day of Unplugging” on March 4, 2011 when thousands of people unplugged and reconnected with friends, family, the community and themselves.

Access new and diverse perspectives
Funders are often hired for their connections in a given field, which they can tap to access potential grantees, advice and inspiration. However, there will always be smart people and important perspectives that you’re not connected to, as well as gaps in worldview between funders, social change leaders and the constituents your grantees serve. Social media tools are dramatically increasing our ability to tap into the ideas and expertise of many individuals and stakeholders, rather than relying on an elite few, to develop innovative designs and decisions.

For example, the Peery Foundation opened up their internal strategic dialogue to the public, by asking for input through Twitter. Through the Twitter conversation, Peery was rewarded with links, resources and tips from philanthropy practitioners and social entrepreneurs. The experience strengthened the young foundation’s dedication to experimentation and maintaining a high standard for openness and trust with the social entrepreneurs it supports.

In a more ambitious effort, the Wikimedia Foundation engaged their worldwide community of Wikipedians in a year-long process to develop a strategic direction for the Wikimedia movement. All who wanted to help were invited to participate, in the belief that an open process engaging a broad base would result in smarter, more effective strategy, while activating the community around agreed-on goals. In the end, more than a 1,000 people worldwide contributed to the Wikimedia Strategy Project in more than 50 languages, and over 900 proposals were submitted by participants to address a wide variety of challenges and opportunities. Furthermore, Wikimedians around the world are aligned around the new strategy, giving the Foundation a community-backed mandate for action.

Openly build and share knowledge
Nonprofits that use a federated or affiliate model have long known the benefits of sharing best practices across their networks. Now people not part of the same organizational structure are learning to do the same through communities of practice and other collective mechanisms.

For example, the Lumpkin Family Foundation, a small foundation dedicated to work in East Central Illinois wanted to expand access to nonprofit professional and organizational development services in the region. They recognized that intermediaries throughout the area were making services available, but they weren’t building off of each others’ good work. So, they created “goodWorksconnect.org”—a virtual space for the nonprofit capacity building community to connect, share information and learn from one another. The network has grown to 1,000 members in less than 18 months, quickly expanding beyond East Central Illinois to the nonprofit community statewide, and the interest continues to grow.

The Hawaii Community Foundation (HCF) is supporting a more tightly-knit “Community of Learners” as part of their Schools of the Future initiative. The initiative is helping educators in Hawaii bridge the gap between curricula focused on standardized tests and helping youth develop 21st century skills. During the proposal review process, the Foundation noticed that educators from different schools were struggling with similar issues related to implementing new curricula and teaching methods, and they were addressing these issues in isolation. HCF saw an opportunity to create a learning network through which these educators could make accelerated progress on their issues collectively. Through the Community of Learners, grantees take part in quarterly gatherings to address shared problems of practice. They also have an online space for communicating among themselves and a broader community of educators interested in developing 21st century skills.

Catalyze widespread action and ownership
Network connections can be channeled towards motivating people to act and mobilizing collective action. Investment in social platforms and network weaving is catalyzing public action on a large scale because activity can spread quickly without being routed through a central authority.

For instance, in its efforts to ignite greater civic engagement, the Knight Foundation is investing in a number of platforms for connecting people with each other, with ideas and with actions they can take to make a difference in their communities. DoSomething.org is one such space that’s connecting teens online so they can do “good stuff offline,” like assisting seniors, teaching cooking classes, and donating clothes. Another Knight Foundation supported platform, Localocracy is creating online town halls where citizens living in the same community can gather for civil public deliberation.

The Robert Wood Johnson Foundation was looking for ways to reverse the childhood obesity epidemic by 2015 and move from the hundred communities or so that RWJF can directly support to engaging thousands of communities. So they created PreventObesity.net, a strategy and online infrastructure to grow and connect a national network of activists working on obesity prevention. PreventObesity.net connects activists with one another, helps them share and aggregate information, and offers services to support their individual advocacy efforts. The experiment is still in its early days so it’s difficult to quantify results. However, the site’s “map the movement” feature, which charts user information, recently hit 1000 organizations and 1000 individuals signed up.

Coordinate diverse resources and action
Once groups of people are connected together there’s opportunity to coordinate resources and action. This might happen through an intentional process with a central backbone or it can be a less structured and more opportunistic approach.

On the more formal end of the spectrum, the RE-AMP Energy Network, a group of 125 funders and activists, is coordinating efforts across eight states in the U.S.’s upper Midwest to reduce global warning emissions by 80 percent by 2050. They’ve been intentional about creating a network with collective infrastructure, rather than a centrally controlled organization. In just the past few years, the network has helped legislators pass energy efficiency policies in six states; promoted one of the most rigorous cap-and-trade programs in the nation; and, halted the development of 28 new coal plants. The network has also built the capacity of regional activists, increased funding for its cause, created a number of shared resources, and developed stronger relationships between funders and nonprofits.

On the less formal end of the spectrum, strong ties among community based environmental organizations working along the Mystic River in the Boston area are making it possible to coordinate and strengthen advocacy efforts. The Barr Foundation had been receiving funding requests from several different organizations working along the Mystic River. The requests made it apparent that although the groups were aware of each other they weren’t acting on that awareness. So the foundation invested in helping them develop deeper more trusting relationships with on another and coordinate their effort through a joint funding proposal. So when one of the participants heard that a $4.6 million settlement for the 2006 Exxon-Mobil spill in the Mystic was not going to benefit any of the groups and the issues they cared about, the network was activated. Within six weeks they were able to coordinate action and win $1 million of the $4.5 million settlement.









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