(Illustration by John Hersey)
A vast network of waterways descends from the glaciers in the Andes into Ecuador and Peru, feeding the Amazon River and providing the primary water source for the Amazon region. These headwaters extend over 86 million acres of dense forests, nourishing the “living forests” (selvas vivientes) that regulate weather and rainfall patterns around the globe. The region also supports one of the world’s most diverse ecosystems and is home to more than 30 Indigenous nations—a population of 700,000 people who have stewarded the land for more than 10,000 years.
In the 1970s, Indigenous nations in the region formed alliances in their respective countries to fight increasing encroachment from extractive industries and gain territorial autonomy. Corporations and governments used divide-and-conquer tactics to weaken these collaborations, fomenting internal conflicts between communities to push through their projects. In one well-publicized case from the early 2000s, the Kichwa people of Sarayaku sued the Ecuadorian government and won the suit over lack of consultation for an oil concession to an Argentine oil company, but other Indigenous communities in the region, persuaded by promises of economic benefits, jobs, and infrastructure development, opposed them.
In 2017, as environmental destruction endangered their communities, a group of Indigenous organizers decided that rather than fight each battle as individual groups, they would work together. This collective approach required them to surmount the challenge of finding alignment across different nations—each with its own history, cultural traditions, and aspirations—to unite behind a common vision to sustain their way of life.
“Each of the Indigenous organizations or nations was walking alone, doing their own work, but these isolated efforts didn’t sum up to addressing the main issues,” explains Uyunkar Domingo Peas Nampichkai, a leader of the Amazon Sacred Headwaters Alliance (ASHA). “Wherever there was division, we had to go and unite. Whenever there were power struggles, I would go and speak to each one separately and find out why. Then, having this information, everyone was convinced that we needed this now.”
A delegation of Indigenous leaders from several Amazonian nationalities presented their concept at the 2019 United Nations Climate Summit in Madrid. Building on this momentum, representatives from 30 Indigenous nations met repeatedly over three and a half years to ensure the inclusion of voices from all nations, organizations, and allies. The process of creating a unified regional vision included 10 workshops assembling the initiative’s partners, technical teams, and territorial groups. As a result of this process, the alliance published a bioregional plan outlining nine pathways to stop the activities of environmentally destructive industries and provide a viable alternative to these extractive forms of economic development.
These pathways include both immediate goals, such as sustainability jobs for Indigenous youth, and long-term goals, like transitioning toward a regenerative economy by working with climate investors and technology partners. ASHA is now the world’s largest Indigenous-led conservation alliance, with several policy and legal wins under its belt, including a global petition that resulted in the blockage of a bill to strip populations living in voluntary isolation in Peru of their rights, and advocacy support for a historic referendum in Ecuador to stop oil extraction in Yasuní National Park. ASHA’s collective vision has allowed Indigenous communities to claim leadership on the global stage, rather than sitting in the crosshairs of corporate and political interests.
As ASHA shows, the isolated work of individual organizations is inadequate to respond to rapid and simultaneous economic, technological, geopolitical, environmental, and social changes. Solutions are more likely to be found at the intersections of sectors, disciplines, and communities, while their effectiveness and durability require the participation of those who are closest to the problems. Yet collaborating across such a diversity of people, organizations, and sectors presents a set of challenges that our conventional ways of working—from discrete programmatic interventions to short-term project grants and outputs-based impact measurement—do not fully support.
We have studied ASHA and many other initiatives that represent what we call collective social innovation—collaborative efforts among multiple organizations aimed at tackling systemic social issues that are too complex to solve by working separately. In what follows, we analyze the ways in which such collective social innovators organize their work, including the architectures, pathways, and activities that bring stakeholders together repeatedly over time to advance large-scale change, as well as the infrastructure that sustains the work logistically. Our purpose is to offer readers insights and lessons from our analysis to apply to collective action in their own areas of interest.
The Power of Collective Approaches
Collective approaches are not new. In fact, collective action is arguably humanity’s greatest superpower. Collective processes have taken various forms throughout history, from community-based rituals passed through generations to mutual community-assistance efforts to social movements that have overturned oppressive regimes. Through these methods, communities have long harnessed unifying practices to create change and develop resilience.
Today’s world is more populous and pluralistic than previous eras and increasingly paralyzed by polarization. At the same time, new technologies promise expanded platforms for collaboration while also amplifying individual voices and siloing the information and experiences that people have.
“Collaboration across differences is becoming both increasingly necessary and increasingly difficult,” says Adam Kahane, director of Reos Partners and author of Collaborating with the Enemy: How to Work with People You Don’t Agree with or Like or Trust. “To address the challenges we face, we need to work with ‘unlike others,’ from diverse organizations, sectors, and backgrounds, whether from down the street or across the globe. But our tendency … to categorize others as right or wrong, good or bad, friends or enemies is making it harder for us to do what we need to do.”
Collective social innovation both reinforces social cohesion and allows innovators, funders, businesses, and policy makers to pursue pragmatic goals.
In the last 15 years, social sector leaders and scholars have paid increased attention to the ways in which civil society, governments, and businesses can work together to drive positive social change.
Indeed, this conversation has evolved here, in the Stanford Social Innovation Review, in response to observable changes in practice. In 2011, John Kania and Mark Kramer highlighted the need for multisectoral collaborative approaches in their widely cited article “Collective Impact.” Johanna Mair and Thomas Gegenhuber took the concept even further in “Open Social Innovation,” stressing the need for innovation in both processes and impact: “We believe that social innovation needs a makeover. It is time to move beyond thinking of heroic individuals … as singular agents of social change. Rather, we need to experiment with social innovation based on collective action.” Signaling the emerging importance of this work in the field of social innovation, terminology for collective activity has grown in the form of new terms for these approaches, including “systems orchestration,” “field catalyzing,” and “collectively owned strategies.”
Despite this abundant critical attention, the myriad strategies that innovators use to organize their work remain far less understood than their programmatic work, and these strategies’ impact and effectiveness are largely undocumented. In response, two of this article’s coauthors, Cynthia Rayner and François Bonnici, researched and described principles and practices involved in doing systemic work in The Systems Work of Social Change. We received a surge of responses from organizations who valued the framing and articulation of their collective approaches. Recognizing the relative lack of visibility for this work, in 2022, the board of the Schwab Foundation created the Collective Social Innovators award to bring global attention to those who explicitly define and organize collective work as their core function. We define collective social innovators as cross-sector leaders who lead, orchestrate, or facilitate groups or networks of organizations tackling challenges that are too large for individual organizations. Importantly, these innovators use approaches that are distinct from scaling programmatic interventions and are well suited to achieving large-scale systemic change.
Since the book and the advent of the award, we have been interested in the wide spectrum of collective approaches and impressed by the methods and the outcomes of these innovators. We have learned that collective social innovation defies simple frameworks, checklists, or formulas; instead, it is a broad tent with significant variation across geographies, cultures, and issues. Collective social innovation both reinforces social cohesion and allows innovators, funders, businesses, and policy makers to pursue pragmatic goals. When large constituencies work together, they can use resources more efficiently, assemble population-level datasets, share evidence-based practices, and promote and implement policies that are both effective and financially feasible.
We have documented learnings from such approaches in a new report, The Future Is Collective, that includes the insights shared by approximately 40 select organizations at the Schwab Foundation’s Collective Action Convening, held in Geneva, Switzerland, in October 2024. These insights were supplemented with 17 in-depth interviews conducted in the preparation of 10 case studies of collective social innovation. The report showcases the values and impact of these innovators, as well as the collective architectures, pathways, and activities foundational to collective social innovation. It also details the infrastructure that enables collective work and offers ideas for how stakeholders can better position themselves to engage with collective social innovation.
Not surprisingly, given the heterogeneity of the issues, the geographies, and even the innovators themselves, these strategies look very different across the range of organizations we studied. However, when we assessed their work from a broad angle, we found common patterns and themes that helped us understand the work better. This group of innovators organizes around values first and only then begins to develop approaches and solutions. So, following their lead, we start with the shared values that they bring to their work.
Collective Values
Collective social innovators—like all social innovators—develop and implement innovative organizational models to tackle societal challenges. However, what distinguishes collective social innovators is their commitment to a distinct set of operating values that emphasize the inclusion of diverse stakeholders, perspectives, and solutions in addressing social issues. In the cases we examined, these values stem from innovators’ long-term experience working to address large-scale, complex challenges, such as poverty, climate change, and education, followed by a realization that single programs and organizations have limited capacity to address these challenges on their own. These operating values inform both process and outcome. When applied by innovators to a geography or issue area, these values ensure that multiple voices—including those with firsthand or personal experience—are actively engaged in cocreating solutions. This focus on representation and participation is both principled and practical: Solutions are more durable and effective when they involve the very people whom the results will affect.
In our research, we identified five operating values that underpin the work of collective social innovators. We return to the ASHA case to flesh them out.
1. Bringing together a wide range of stakeholders to cocreate solutions. | Collective social innovators ensure that a wide range of stakeholders are involved from the start, creating structures for ongoing participation. By bringing together communities, NGOs, businesses, and governments, they develop collaborative processes that lead to more practical and lasting solutions. ASHA is uniting Indigenous communities around a shared vision for their region, rather than competing for resources under the influence of extractive industries. But ASHA does not simply play an adversarial role. Its members are committed to forging constructive partnerships with private-sector players and government policy makers—for example, by creating sustainable business models for ecotourism and developing stronger environmental protection policies. These partnerships forge constructive relationships and pave the way for more enduring solutions, rather than singular actions that confront but do not shift how actors work together.
2. A commitment to ambitious, systemic impact over short-term fixes. | Collective social innovators aim for large-scale, lasting change by staying focused on a shared purpose while navigating diverse perspectives. Rather than seeking full consensus, they emphasize deep listening and meaningful consultation, ensuring that impact, rather than bureaucracy, drives action. For example, ASHA’s three-and-a-half-year consultation process to develop its bioregional plan drew upon conversations with nearly two dozen Indigenous nations, as well as international experts in economics, the environment, and regional planning. ASHA encouraged Indigenous nations to share their aspirations to sustain their way of life while transitioning to a just future. While time-consuming and complex, this approach targeted root causes, instead of surface-level symptoms, ensuring that the resulting plans were ambitious but actionable.
3. Maintaining flexibility by anticipating emergence and learning from failure. | Collective social innovators value adaptability and learning from failure, allowing strategies to evolve based on local experience and needs. They remain open to change, adjusting their approaches as situations develop, rather than relying on rigid plans. This flexibility encourages creativity and enables communities to enact their own ideas within a shared purpose. In the case of ASHA, Indigenous nations are now united by the bioregional plan, with a strong commitment to working together to identify policies, partnerships, and financing to carry it out. At the same time, individual groups are developing and experimenting with different approaches that are suitable for their own communities. By staying connected, they will be able to refine solutions and respond effectively to unexpected challenges and opportunities.
4. Restoring the agency of those directly affected by the issues. | Collective social innovators ensure that the people most affected by an issue play a central role in creating solutions. At ASHA, the commitment to ensuring the direct participation of Indigenous people recently led to the creation of a new legal entity, based in Ecuador, with Indigenous governance. (Previously, ASHA operated through sponsorship from an Ecuador-based NGO.) To support this transition and to build Indigenous leadership for other initiatives and organizations, ASHA established the Living School of the Amazon, which trains young leaders in leadership development, governance, and legal rights. This effort will ultimately lead to more relevant and sustainable leadership for the region while restoring a sense of agency, dignity, and resilience within communities.
5. Ensuring respect and balance in relationships between people and nature. | Collective social innovators understand that human well-being is connected to both society and the environment. Rather than focusing solely on technical fixes, they seek holistic approaches that strengthen communities and protect natural resources. ASHA’s leaders believe that Indigenous communities can bring a wealth of expertise to global conversations around climate change and environmental protection. They promote blending traditional knowledge and modern science, with a focus on the Amazonian philosophy of buen vivir (collective well-being). Ultimately, they seek to develop solutions that ensure permanent protection of ecosystems and a shift to a regenerative economy.
Collective Architectures
In line with their values, collective social innovators organize themselves differently from conventional organizations. We call these ways of organizing collective architectures because they create a scaffolding upon which other initiatives, projects, and organizations can scale their own impact. These architectures allow collective social innovators to mobilize vast constituencies and channel different stakeholders’ activities to maximize their contributions and expertise while still taking advantage of local expertise and contextual needs.
For example, MapBiomas is an open collaborative network using technology and data to monitor land use and cover changes in tropical countries worldwide. Since 2015, MapBiomas has assembled a network of more than 100 local organizations in 14 countries. Its platform enables its members to produce maps that reveal land-use transformations from the last four decades, with levels of precision, agility, and quality deemed impossible in the past. Today, its data are accessed by more than 600,000 users annually, including governments, financial institutions, agricultural companies, and NGOs. All data and codes are open source and available for free to all users.
Collective social innovators organize themselves by creating a scaffolding upon which other initiatives, projects, and organizations can scale their own impact.
Despite this impressive amount of activity, MapBiomas does not have a legal entity or a single employee. Rather, the initiative operates through more than 500 cocreators, employed by other institutions and connected in a vast global network, who commit significant time and energy to MapBiomas. Within this open-collaborative example, “people in each country and region are actually applying the same logic and learnings to solving other problems and developing other projects beyond MapBiomas, responding to local demands with the same technology,” explains MapBiomas founder Tasso Azevedo.
While the cases that we studied each address different social issues and assemble diverse constituencies—some operating with a legal entity, others not—the construction of these architectures is similar. Each architecture constitutes a multilayered structure designed to enable the representation and participation of hundreds of thousands—and sometimes millions—of people. Typically, the architecture is composed of three distinct layers. The action layer consists of grassroots groups that engage directly with constituents to carry out activities on the ground. The network layer is the connective tissue, linking these groups across different geographies to create cohesion and shared purpose. Finally, the supporting layer provides administrative support, ensuring continuity by managing resources, coordinating efforts, and enabling long-term sustainability. Together, these layers form a dynamic and scalable system for collective action.
MapBiomas’ action layer consists of more than 20 initiatives organized across 20 geographies, including 14 tropical countries and territories, and thematic areas, such as fire, water, soil, and land cover. It does not produce maps centrally; rather, local and thematic initiatives do so in response to local needs. To launch MapBiomas in a new geography, members of the MapBiomas network support a group of local champions, always including a cross-section of academia, technology startups, and civil-society organizations. When an initiative is launched, the member organizations become part of MapBiomas in that geography. Together, the geographies form the network layer, which currently includes more than 100 organizations committed to supporting the initiatives collectively. These organizations then work together to develop and apply the MapBiomas methodology and support every initiative in successfully producing land-use maps for their regions and themes. All MapBiomas cocreators use the same cloud-based infrastructure to process maps and data. The network is then assisted by MapBiomas’ supporting layer, which is composed of a four-person coordination team, three fiscal sponsors, and central teams of cocreators who work on the platform’s technology infrastructure.
As MapBiomas exemplifies, the purpose of the architectures is threefold. First is representation, ensuring that stakeholders from multiple sectors are included and a wide range of constituents with different areas of expertise can find their place in the effort. Second is learning: Individuals and organizations connect into the architecture to see what others are doing and find those with lessons and expertise to support their own work. Third, the architectures enable collaboration, in which groups find those who can augment and enable more than they would be able to on their own.
Collective Pathways
The collective social innovators we studied have each taken different paths to reach a shared understanding of collective action with their stakeholders. While each journey is unique and inspiring, we see common patterns in how these efforts succeed in bringing groups together. Every initiative relies on critical elements that help guide collaboration, which we call collective pathways: a broad vision, guiding principles, a set of methods, and a collection of practices. Like a map of the terrain, these elements keep groups traveling together, even when the specific goals, agendas, and motivations are different.
Identifying shared and divergent interests and crafting these into a broad vision for the future is the first step in this work. This process often requires deep dialogue, where groups repeatedly convene and listen to each other. ASHA’s multi-year commitment to convening 30 Indigenous nations across the Amazon headwaters to discuss their visions of the future, exemplifies this approach.
Collective social innovators typically spend significant efforts developing their vision through participatory processes that facilitate contributions from groups, organizations, and people represented by the collective. They favor compromise and respectful accommodation, ultimately arriving at a broad vision that can be tailored to specific contexts. In other words, the strategic vision serves as a north star, rather than a prescriptive plan. In these efforts, the means are as important as the ends, since the process creates the relational glue that allows the collective to stay together through the more difficult implementation efforts to come.
Every initiative relies on critical elements that help guide collaboration: a broad vision, guiding principles, a set of methods, and a collection of practices.
Beyond the broad vision, collective social innovators also develop a set of principles that provide a guiding framework for how to accomplish the vision. In some cases, these directional concepts are developed through intentional efforts, while in others they emerge organically as the groups work together. One example of an intentional effort was conducted by StreetNet International, a global alliance for street vendors conceptualized at a 1995 meeting at the Bellagio Conference Center in Italy.
As with ASHA, the founders of StreetNet crafted their broad vision for the alliance through a series of regional consultations. They then drafted the StreetNet Constitution, the founding document laying out the principles for the organization. One of the primary principles in the constitution is that at least 50 percent of the positions must be occupied by women. This principle was the noteworthy result of intentional effort by the founders to ensure that a quota system would be included and enforced in the organization’s founding document.
Today, StreetNet has grown into an autonomous and democratic alliance comprising 62 membership-based affiliate organizations representing 916,015 street vendors, market vendors, hawkers, and cross-border traders in 55 countries around the world. The principle of women’s leadership has remained strong throughout its history; in 2016, the alliance elected its first woman president, Lorraine Sibanda Ndlovu, who continues to serve in the role today.
Collective social innovators also curate a portfolio of methods that provides a shared approach for groups to use in their work. These methods are often pulled from the extensive expertise of the constituent base, and in many cases are supported by strong evidence that groups have compiled over the years. In other instances, they are cocreated by members coming together to pool their knowledge and developing new approaches that build on successes and failures of the past. These methods offer clear direction but remain flexible, allowing for contextual variation and iteration as learnings emerge.
Strong attention to methods is evident at ProjectTogether, a German nonprofit organization founded with the idea that society needs a new “how” to solve its most pressing challenges. In 2020, ProjectTogether co-organized a virtual hackathon dubbed #WirVsVirus to address challenges arising from the COVID-19 pandemic. It brought together 28,361 citizens and generated 1,498 solutions in just 48 hours. Since this event, ProjectTogether has repeatedly modified and applied its set of methods (called its “operating model”) to 10 issue areas, including the shortage of skilled workers and green jobs, arrival processes for refugees and migrants, the circular economy, and regenerative agriculture and food systems.
Being clear about its operating model is critical, since ProjectTogether employees do not develop or implement mission work but instead act as facilitators, ensuring that community members are supported to run several collective action projects (CAPs). This well-documented set of methods offers support guidelines for projects from inception to implementation, and the operating model is updated frequently to incorporate continuous learning. “Every quarter we get together with the entire team and do cross-learning across the missions,” managing director Henrike Schlottmann says. “Then, once a year, during one of those meetings, we present an update to the operating model. … Some years it’s a small update, while other years it might be a revamp.” To date, ProjectTogether has supported 100,000 people in 3,000 organizations in designing and implementing more than 75 CAPs ranging from technology initiatives, such as running a platform to match thousands of refugees with accommodations, to education projects, including a career orientation program connecting job seekers with sustainability-focused industries.
The fourth and final element of the collective pathway is assembling a collection of practices to drive change. In contrast with vision, principles, and methods, these practices are more like a menu of options than they are a recipe—they provide ideas and experiments that groups can use to drive their own agendas, which are focused on local needs.
(Illustration by John Hersey)
A compelling example of this practice-based approach is Shikshagraha, a nationwide movement in India to improve public education. The movement originated with the collective work of four nonprofit organizations in Punjab to improve educational outcomes across the state. These organizations chose to work within the government education system to build upon preexisting strengths. Shikshagraha focuses on a set of practices that it calls microimprovements. These practices aim to restore agency and build leadership by inviting parents, teachers, school leaders, and district administrators to identify local challenges and cocreate improvement projects that can be implemented with minimal effort and few additional resources. Shikshagraha has a growing list of microimprovements cocreated with district leaders, including parent-teacher meetings, reading hours during the school day, redesigning morning assemblies, and setting up learning spaces at home.
Microimprovements are designed to be quite simple to implement, so that district officials can choose improvements that are feasible in their own locality. Because of the simplicity and use of preexisting staffing and infrastructure, the scale and impact such microimprovements have reached are staggering.
In the initial collective, the Punjab Education Collective, microimprovements were implemented in 19,000 schools educating two million students. In four years, microimprovements helped to lift Punjab’s state results from the lower half of all 28 states to first in both the Performance Grading Index and the National Achievement Survey for the entire country. The movement is well on its way to achieving its goal of improving education outcomes for 40 million children across 100 districts by 2027.
The fact that these collective pathways take time to forge can feel counterintuitive in the face of urgent challenges, but they “cannot be forced or rushed,” says Khushboo Awasthi, evangelist and designer of Shikshagraha. “True alignment on problems and purpose requires patience, and spaces for dialogue and trust building. This means we need to compromise speed in the short term—slowing down at the start to go faster in the long run—to build something truly effective and sustainable for tomorrow.”
Amplifying Activities
Collective social innovators also undertake a diverse array of joint activities to amplify the work of groups, ensuring their effectiveness and sustaining momentum for change. In our research, we categorized these activities into five areas, each prioritized differently depending on the needs of the initiative. For example, some innovators put a significant amount of work into strengthening data systems, whereas others did not. In some cases, learning communities were the primary activity, while other activities pursued knowledge building and shared learning. The list of activities is not a checklist but rather a range of possibilities that collective social innovators pursue when the time and conditions serve the benefit of the system, rather than one organization.
Building movements | Movement building is the capacity to sustain and expand a constituency base while consolidating power and momentum toward change. The fuel for movement building is a shared story for change that binds groups. Many collective social innovators spend a significant amount of time creating shared narratives to expand their stakeholder base and bridge historical divides between groups. Interestingly, these shared narratives frequently counter the prevailing narrative—often keeping groups apart—while the new narrative creates a new opportunity to bring groups together.
For example, StreetNet actively confronted the dominant narrative that informal workers were not part of the worldwide labor movement. Traditional trade unionists believed that workers first needed to formalize before they could participate alongside unions. Therefore, street vendors were prevented from participating in policy dialogues to protect workers’ rights, particularly those at the level of the International Trade Union Confederation and the United Nations’ International Labour Organization (ILO). By building international solidarity across membership-based organizations and working with other informal economy alliances, StreetNet pushed for greater recognition of the informal economy, gradually shifting the narrative to one in which street vendors were a legitimate constituency. This work contributed to the 2015 passage of ILO’s Recommendation 204, which provides guidelines for governments to support informal workers and integrate them into social protection and labor rights frameworks.
Many collective social innovators spend a significant amount of time creating shared narratives to expand their stakeholder base and bridge historical divides.
Strengthening data systems | Collective social innovators also use their extensive reach to assemble vast datasets that internally allow groups to work together with a common understanding of the issues and externally support other organizations and governments to do their work more efficiently. Often, a lack of clear terms hinders large-scale data collection, but collective social innovators are not afraid to help craft terms and metrics that enable agreement. Once shared definitions and associated metrics are established, new relationships and technologies can be harnessed to collect datasets that may have previously seemed implausible.
For example, MapBiomas’ platform enables users to gather publicly available satellite imagery from around the world and apply various machine-learning and deep-learning algorithms to analyze land-cover and land-use changes, as well as generate thematic maps concerning water, fire, and soil. Prior to MapBiomas, even the most seasoned experts considered creating maps of this precision and frequency to be impossible. Now, using the platform, more than 500 cocreators from research institutions, civil society, and technology startups collaborate globally to categorize these images and create detailed maps. Once the maps are available, a wide user base—including governments, public prosecutors, businesses, banks, scientists, and media—freely accesses the maps to pursue independent initiatives. MapBiomas data has enhanced governments’ ability to monitor their own public policies. A recent evaluation revealed that 43 percent of MapBiomas users are from government departments and agencies, and that government agencies’ actions against illegal deforestation, which targeted only 5 percent of deforested areas in 2019, the year the alert system started, grew to over 50 percent by 2024.
Influencing institutions | Collective social innovators also influence public institutions by advocating for supportive policies and partnering with them. Collective social innovators differ significantly from other types of innovators, since their legitimacy derives from representing large constituencies, rather than from delivering single or proprietary programs. In some cases, collective social innovators will influence from the outside, by conducting advocacy campaigns, offering legal literacy training, and organizing legal action. In other cases, they partner closely with government agencies, working inside public institutions to apply collective knowledge and expertise to policies and implementation.
Shikshagraha, for instance, is working within the public school system in India to support national, state, and district schools. The collective’s partners approach state governments with curiosity and a willingness to learn. They work alongside school leaders and teachers to pursue microimprovements, instead of adding layers of bureaucracy and administration. In this way, all levels of public-school systems are involved, from parents and community members to teachers and school principals, district administrators, and state officials.
Hosting learning communities | One significant way in which collective social innovators support change is by creating spaces for learning and cross-sharing for their large and diverse constituencies. The purpose of these spaces is to create conditions for collaboration and amplification of the collective. This work involves capturing learnings, hosting resource libraries, conducting research, delivering training, and connecting communities of practice.
ProjectTogether is an exemplar in this area, hosting numerous spaces and opportunities for community members to share learnings across missions and collective action projects. The organization has a physical space in central Berlin that hosts hybrid events, including fireside chats, panel discussions, and peer learning sessions. ProjectTogether’s team also recognizes that learning together is a precursor to a sense of shared culture and trust.
Investing in systemic solutions | Finally, collective social innovators are acutely aware that financial resources are critical for sustaining the momentum for member groups. In several cases, they are creating pooled funds and new financial instruments that ensure more sustainable funding sources for grassroots groups.
ASHA’s leadership is particularly conscious that a lack of direct investment in Indigenous communities has allowed extractive industries and politicians to divide their interests with promises of investment and funding. Therefore, ASHA’s bioregional plan outlines opportunities to pursue two approaches to financing. First, it is instituting a Sacred Headwaters Fund, which will pool resources and directly support Indigenous-led initiatives for food security, livelihood alternatives, forest monitoring, intercultural health and education, and renewable energy. At the same time, ASHA is actively developing several innovative financing solutions to incentivize forest protection and halt deforestation, such as intact forest income, ecosystems services payments, and investments in bioeconomy hubs.
Supportive Infrastructures
Collective social innovators also build supportive infrastructures that strike a balance between adaptability and stability, which is essential for maintaining long-term engagement among diverse stakeholders. Important aspects of supportive infrastructures include governance and participation structures, team culture, staff competencies, and enabling technologies. Because much of this work happens behind the scenes and evolves over time, fully grasping or appreciating its significance is challenging for some partners, funders, and policy makers. Overcoming this obstacle requires different approaches for stakeholders engaging with collective social innovators.
Innovators were quick to note that the competencies that contribute to collective success are different from the skills that lead to individual achievement.
Governance | In most of the cases we studied, collective social innovators are intentionally creating governance structures that ensure fair, open, and flexible decision-making while maintaining strong intergroup connections. For example, StreetNet follows a democratic, participatory governance model that ensures equal representation from its 62 membership organizations. Every four years, delegates from each organization attend the International Congress to set priorities and elect its 15-member International Council, which oversees policies and programs. A smaller, executive committee manages daily operations, ensuring alignment with StreetNet’s mission.
Team culture and competencies | Collective social innovators also emphasized that collective approaches require team culture and competencies that prioritize flexibility and continuous learning, ensuring a well-balanced mix of subject knowledge and facilitation skills. Innovators were quick to note that the competencies that contribute to collective success are different from the skills that lead to individual achievement. School environments and professional training typically prize skills that lead to defined outcomes, such as keeping a project on deadline or minimizing deviations from well-codified standard operating procedures. Collective approaches, instead, require sustained listening to stakeholder perspectives and flexible adaptation as learnings emerge. “Dialogue is the most important [skill],” says ASHA’s governing board president Uyunkar Domingo Peas Nampichkai. “Not [dialogue] with anger, screaming and attacks, [but dialogue] with calm arguments, information, and clarity of intention.”
Enabling technology | These organizations are also tapping into new technologies that facilitate communication, data sharing, and project management, often with enabling features for coordination and learning across groups and regions. Technology is central to some collective social innovators’ work, such as MapBiomas’ use of Google Earth Engine and cloud computing tools and Shikshagraha’s knowledge sharing through DIKSHA. In other cases, technology is a powerful conduit, allowing rapid and often inexpensive ways to connect across geographies that would have been virtually impossible a decade ago.
Supportive stakeholders | Finally, collective social innovation needs support and different types of engagement from stakeholders outside the collective structure, such as private-sector partners, funders, and government stakeholders and policy makers. Private-sector partners are often strong partners in collective efforts, reducing fragmentation and participating in collective problem-solving. For example, MapBiomas’ technological capabilities rely upon its relationship with Google Earth, while ProjectTogether works closely with Wunderflats, a Berlin-based lodging marketplace, to identify willing hosts with available housing for refugee arrivals. Funders are also a critical stakeholder, providing sustainable financing and building critical ecosystems that allow collective social innovators to flourish.
While philanthropic support is crucial, financial investors are also supporting collective social innovators. For example, by designing ecosystems services and biocultural stewardship payment mechanisms, ASHA is enabling the development of new financing instruments that contribute to maintaining biodiversity and delicate ecosystems. Supportive funders also experience amplified gains by investing in the institutional capacity of collective social innovators, who deliver learning, data, and solidarity across vast networks, despite often working with small teams and lean budgets. Finally, government and policy makers can work closely with collective social innovators to align interests, access critical data, and achieve population-level coverage. Shikshagraha is a prime example: Each of its collectives works with district school systems to integrate microimprovements directly through school leadership.
Impacts and Challenges
Collective social innovation produces impacts that reverberate beyond a single issue or organization. Yet these impacts are often difficult to quantify because they aren’t easily captured in numbers of beneficiaries or quantities of products and services delivered, much less the rigorous attribution analyses that are the gold standard of social impact measurement.
For example, MapBiomas’ maps enable hundreds of thousands of users to deliver upon myriad initiatives to reduce deforestation around the world. Yet MapBiomas purposely downplays its contribution to these efforts because remaining neutral in a politically charged environment is critical to its strategy. StreetNet’s capacity building and leadership training are pivotal to informal worker movements mobilizing nearly one million workers in 55 countries, but it is most successful when well-trained workers elevate themselves into leadership positions beyond the network. And Shikshagraha is currently developing a shared dashboard to track collective progress toward education outcomes, but the flexible nature of its work means that these metrics will never fully capture the impact of millions of microimprovements that contribute to student success.
Critics might be tempted to say that these are not true impacts, since these successes are not impacts “on the ground.” However, we would argue that they are, in fact, the structural elements that drive systems change. In truth, they aren’t flashy or even particularly exciting; rather, they create the wiring and plumbing of the social innovation sector—the work that makes everything else function well.
These structural impacts include:
Shared terminology | Groups come to a collective effort with different perspectives and priorities—an approach that can make problem-solving challenging. Collective social innovators describe an important impact of their work as shared terminology to bridge these differences, helping groups coordinate their efforts and maintain long-term collaboration. These terms lead to shared action plans and metrics to create common ground among stakeholders while allowing room for diverse goals and flexible approaches.
Conduits for grassroots knowledge | A major challenge for effective social innovation is that many organizations providing services and solutions are disconnected, both geographically and culturally, from the communities they aim to support. As a result, they often ignore or underuse valuable insights from local grassroots actors. In contrast, collective social innovators create structures that harness the direct participation and knowledge of grassroots communities, actively involving local leaders in the change process and ensuring that their knowledge and perspectives shape solutions.
Pooled resources | Collective social innovators also identify new ways to manage shared resources—an urgent need as natural and social resources face growing threats. Traditionally, development experts and policy makers have leaned on markets or government regulations to distribute common goods. However, communities have successfully managed resources collectively for centuries. By reviving these traditional practices and developing new ones, collective innovators can expand the range of sustainable solutions.
Expansive datasets | Social and economic policymaking are often hindered by a lack of reliable data, which makes driving informed decision-making and implementing evidence-based policies difficult. Collective social innovators are tackling this challenge by using their broad reach to overcome data-collection barriers, compile vast datasets, and ensure that this information is used to create meaningful and lasting impact.
Large-scale funding deployment | Finally, collective social innovators play a crucial role in assembling and allocating financial resources effectively to address societal challenges. In most instances, single organizations simply cannot grow to the size and scale necessary to deploy large amounts of funding across populations. While the international aid system relies upon an unwieldy and inefficient network of professional intermediaries, collective social innovators offer alternative structures to rapidly deploy large amounts of funding to grassroots groups without the costly intermediation.
Despite the powerful role they can play, collective innovation structures can seem intricate and hard to grasp, as they are designed to engage large, diverse groups. Elevating collective approaches is often hampered by the complexity of the work itself. Some of these challenges include:
Funding | The dominant development paradigm incentivizes a competitive environment for social innovators, forcing organizations to compete for grants and contracts at the expense of their peers. As this year’s international funding crisis has revealed, this system is reliant on a few powerful funders, as well as fragile relationships. To encourage collective social innovation, this competitive landscape should rather evolve into a collaborative field where organizations and groups are motivated to work together, and where each stakeholder finds the right role based on expertise and context. Our examples highlight initiatives where organizations have set aside isolated agendas to share learnings, compile data, develop mutual policy positions, and work toward a common vision, signaling a culture shift in social innovation. To build sustainable ecosystems, funders can support collective social innovators with trust-based funding practices, greater flexibility, and longer time horizons, as well as funding the supporting infrastructure of collectives so that they are able to share learnings and strengthen the capacity of groups within their networks.
Collective social innovation is a necessary response to this threat, countering such divides by innovating with the very process of collaboration itself.
Legal structures | The fact that legal and financial systems are typically structured for individual entities often leads to considerable bureaucratic duplication for collective social innovators. At the same time, government stakeholders still anticipate traditional governance structures when engaging with collectives. To better support collective efforts, governments and policy makers should better understand the unique governance structures of collectives and create policies and funding mechanisms that leverage their distributed nature. They could also create novel legal structures that distribute decision-making across multiple groups, rather than centralizing governance, and partner with collective social innovators to link multistakeholder initiatives with public-sector services, providing training, capacity building, and continuous improvement tied directly to community outcomes.
Measurement | Because of the distributed nature of collective work, attributing impact is challenging and, as we have seen in the examples above, can even hinder the work’s impact. However, stakeholders are still accustomed to seeing impact linked to individual organizations and traditional programs, rather than through collaborative efforts. To overcome this hurdle, funders and partners should anticipate moving beyond transactional relationships, deepening their partnerships to involve experimentation, feedback, and adaptation. By learning alongside innovators, private-sector partners, funders, and policy makers stand to gain significant insights into the on-the-ground realities of and solutions to society’s greatest challenges.
Creating the Future Together
Addressing societal challenges is growing more demanding as political transitions, economic uncertainty, and the breakdown of social cohesion reveal deep divisions among us. These chasms are costly, since the ingredients for innovation—creativity, expertise, and resources—are most often found at the crossroads of diverse stakeholders.
Collective social innovation is a necessary response to this threat, countering such divides by innovating with the very process of collaboration itself. By bringing together vast constituencies that would otherwise remain separate, these innovators are building new vehicles and narratives that bring people together. They are also bringing lesser-heard voices and their capabilities into the conversation, overcoming some of the critical innovation and implementation challenges that have plagued the public and private sectors. Finally, they are pooling resources, data, and funding and channeling them efficiently and expeditiously to attain a level of scale that single organizations simply cannot achieve on their own. Most importantly, collective social innovation is a broad tent, encompassing a wide range of activities. They may have similarities, but ultimately their work is rooted in the lived realities of their diverse constituents and suited to the context in which they operate.
The lone innovator is a durable archetype in the stories we tell about innovation, but it is a false one for our time. Global challenges—such as climate change, economic inequality, escalating conflict, and the privacy and security of new technologies—are collective action problems. They depend on our ability to come together, not on silver-bullet solutions designed by individual heroes. Collective social innovators are reviving approaches that have worked in the past while also building new ones for the path ahead. To design a future in which we not only survive but thrive, we need to create it together.
Read more stories by Cynthia Rayner, Sophia Otoo & François Bonnici.