African-American father and daughter planting potted plant at community garden (Photo by FangXiaNuo)

The list of serious problems that our world faces is long and growing: soaring inequality, climate change, the enduring negative impacts of structural racism and colonialism, and, of course, global health pandemics like the COVID-19 crisis. As these forces increasingly shape our lives, they have created more demand for new, effective approaches to positive social change than ever before.

This is the work of social innovators. And both supporters and skeptics alike are asking if social innovation can rise to meet the moment. But the stakes are too high to stop there. We must ask ourselves an even more difficult question: what if social innovation cannot?

At Echoing Green, we have long believed in the transformative potential of social innovation to drive positive social change. There are many reasons why we’ve seen social innovation as a critical part of our path forward (and why I’ve dedicated my professional life to the sector for the last 30 years.)

  • Social innovation is alliance-based. While those in power often perceive social change work to be a zero-sum, win-lose proposition, social innovation creates new and shared public value, fundamentally demonstrating that social change work can be a win-win proposition for a broad set of allies.
  • Social innovation isCreative Destruction.” Social innovators seek to break down systems that work for far too few of us and create new more just, equitable, and sustainable ones.
  • Social innovation leapfrogs current constraints, where small and incremental changes simply allow the status quo and dominant culture to stay ahead.
  • Social innovation creates a new narrative ecosystem. Entrepreneurship is such a powerful and enticing trope that it helps to normalize transformational change efforts and provides a counterweight to conservative forces.
  • Social innovation activates young people because they are passionate about its promise for driving positive social change, learn about themselves and the world through the work, and come into their own as change agents.
  • Social innovation is dynamic and propulsive. Entrepreneurship and innovation are all about finding new ways to address tough problems, creating value, defying constraints, and identifying opportunities, exactly the transformational work required to dismantle inequitable systems like structural racism.

This is what we all know. But as committed social innovation practitioners, we risk missing the forest for the trees if we don’t both place our work in a broader historical context: Today’s world is increasingly shaped by the twin advances of populism and authoritarianism.

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In a sense, there is a relationship between the rise of populism and social innovation. Both are predicated on the failure of the establishment to deal with society’s troubles, the flip side of the same coin. However, the remedies they offer diverge wildly, along with the impulses that animate them. If social innovation offers a critique of the status quo, it also offers solutions bolstered by a communitarian value set that centers the common good. But a nihilistic streak runs through populism, untethering “creative” from “destruction,” because destruction is the point.

If democracy is at a crossroads, then its practice sits in the crosshairs of populism and social innovation. For the first time, the Global State of Democracy added the United States to a list of “backsliding” democracies and calculated that more than a quarter of the world’s population now lives in democratically backsliding countries:

“For the fifth consecutive year, the number of countries moving in an authoritarian direction exceeds the number of countries moving in a democratic direction. In fact, the number moving in the direction of authoritarianism is three times the number moving towards democracy.”

This threat to global democracy raises the stakes on the utility and efficacy of social innovation and should create a new sense of urgency around the work ahead of us. A functioning pluralistic, increasingly diverse and multi-racial society and world depend on being able to solve our problems—to meet the moment together. When that proves elusive, the democratic ties that hold us together increasingly fray and fall away.

I am reminded of a pronouncement of the iconoclastic writer and artist William Blake, one of whose works gives Echoing Green our name: “I must create a system… I will not reason and compare: my business is to create.”

At a tactical level, Blake’s righteous exuberance evokes why entrepreneurship and innovation are so exciting. But at an even higher level, they remind us that all things are possible. At its best, social innovation is both a bridge and an invitation. It offers hope for repair and redress by working to dismantle oppressive systems that perpetuate deep injustices while reimagining new systems that allow all of us to heal and thrive. And it offers up a muscular civic invitation—a civic moonshot—to come together in new ways and forge a path to a more equitable, just, and sustainable world. As we navigate this difficult moment, it is an invitation that we simply must accept.

Adapted from remarks delivered at SSIR’s “Frontiers of Social Innovation” conference in 2021.

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Read more stories by Cheryl Dorsey.