Collectively Owned Strategies

(Illustration by Juan Bernabeu) 

It is common practice for major funders to shape agendas, set priorities, and determine how funding is allocated—in short, to “own” strategies for social impact. In competition for funds, would-be partners submit proposals tailored to reflect a prospective funder’s strategy, often conforming to donor expectations and requirements, rather than speaking from their own expertise. Our experience cocreating and stewarding systems-change initiatives at the nonprofit Dalberg Catalyst has led us to believe that funders’ domination over strategies may be limiting the field’s potential to address the world’s most significant challenges.

For strategies to generate transformative change—change in the way parts of a system operate and relate with one another, leading to dramatically different outcomes and impacts—they must be collectively owned. Co-owning a strategy for transformation requires a shared intention among partners and funders to rebalance power dynamics, transcend silos, and embrace messiness and experimentation. Co-ownership begins as a shared commitment, rooted in common understanding of a situation. It results in collaborative action that better drives transformation, since partners across the field have greater agency and shared responsibility, their individual strengths have greater value across multiple objectives at once, and their efforts are more agile.

Developing and advancing collectively owned (CO) strategies isn’t a simple process. It requires openness to questioning the status quo, talking about values, and committing to collaboration. True, involving an entire field of actors risks gridlock, and the solutions that emerge may not easily scale or replicate in different contexts. But without collective ownership, funders and their partners tend to advance strategies focused on solving narrowly defined problems and delivering measurable results, trading the advancement of systemic change for short-term progress, and neglecting the more complex and pressing predicaments of our time.

Drawing on our own experimentation, research, and learning, we aim to add nuance to recent calls for trust-based philanthropy and relational systems change. Funders must share with their partners a sense of co-ownership of strategies advancing transformation agendas. We describe ways in which a whole field of partners and their funders can extend their impact with CO strategies, with the help of strong facilitative leaders (i.e., system orchestrators). We have seen how CO strategies can generate deep learning, collaborative innovation, and profound shifts in mindsets, power, norms, policies, and the structures of financial and economic systems. We are excited by their potential to help shape and realize a more just, inclusive, and regenerative society for all.

Shortcomings of Funder-Owned Strategies

Funders are experimenting with alternative ways to address global issues. Some leaders across philanthropy and social innovation have described strategic philanthropy as a failure and called for approaches that are more community driven, while others maintain that strategic philanthropy is alive and continuing to adapt and improve. Much ink has been spilled on the remarkable pace and flexibility of MacKenzie Scott’s philanthropy, testing traditional norms about how and how much funders should give. Philanthropy Together, a global initiative to democratize and diversify charitable giving, has elevated the profile of philanthropic collaboratives in general, equity-focused and accountable philanthropic collaboratives in particular, and their unique potential to break traditional funding silos and strategically support whole movements, in addition to pooling funds and sharing costs and risks across funders. And recent examples of movement organizations for transformative change have underscored the importance of nonmonetary resources—including contextual intelligence, technical expertise and skills, networks and relationships, advocacy, and influence—possessed by the multitude of actors beyond philanthropists.

Nonetheless, research over the past several years has found funding to be relatively scarce and difficult to mobilize for long-term, transformative agendas and related systems-change work, such as advocacy and organizing.¹ Often, initiatives with the potential to be transformative don’t receive funding to realize that potential. Or, in the rare instances in which funds are disbursed, funders tend to stifle partners’ agility, creativity, entrepreneurship, and collaborative action with distortive incentives, restrictive time horizons, and other cumbersome requirements. Concerns that financial systems are not addressing (and in many ways fueling) global crises have generated interest among all kinds of funders to deploy their capital more systemically. Pioneers of impact investing and a cross-section of philanthropists, financial institutions, finance experts, academics, and social changemakers gathered at MIT last January to consider the potential of systemic investing, a methodology to weave systems thinking into investment logic and reimagine financial systems. Together, they acknowledged that most financial capital flows, even those aiming for socially beneficial outcomes, perpetuate prevailing mindsets and power dynamics rather than drive transformation in systems such as energy, land use, infrastructure, industry, transportation, and cities.

In 2023, we facilitated an experiment to better understand what prevents funders from supporting systems-change work. We cocreated a pilot program called Catalyst Hub with a working group of partners that included the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, Catalyst 2030, and representatives of Ashoka, Echoing Green, the Skoll Foundation, and the Schwab Foundation for Social Entrepreneurship. The objective was to present a cross-section of more than 30 funders with 10 initiatives from a vetted selection of seasoned systems-change leaders looking for investment. After conducting in-depth interviews with the leaders, we presented cases to fund their acceleration, including evidence of their track record and the funding they needed to extend their impact. We also aimed to produce insights into the funder-grantee matching process through a learning agenda, drawing from reactions and inputs we gathered from more than 100 people at different organizations—of which about half were funders and half were funder advisors or changemakers—to better understand funding partnerships.

Despite the robust evidence favoring the 10 initiatives, only 1 garnered interest and funding commitments. To better understand this disappointing outcome, we decided to make the learning agenda the hub’s primary focus. Amid the growing momentum for funding systems change and active critiques around the current quality and quantity of funding, why do funders still hesitate to fund actors doing transformational work?

Bringing together the field and facilitating dialogue is time-consuming to organize. Initially, invitees may find it difficult to see the purpose of spending time developing a mutual understanding. But this work builds a foundation of trust among partners.

Some funders we interviewed expressed frustration with systems change itself. Multiple funders complained of the messy and nonlinear nature of systems change, where numerous factors—many outside grantees’ control—affect success or failure. Donors often preferred to invest in achieving results that tied directly and concretely to their funding, even when it meant limiting their potential for large-scale transformational change. Others bristled at the language of systems change. We heard concerns about what one interviewee termed “systems washing,” when lofty jargon is applied to social-change work that is humbler and more limited in scope. Such reflections suggest that “systems change” has become a trendy phrase that has lost its connection to its original connotation, of significant transformation. The trend is exacerbated when potential grantees incorporate systems language into their pitches to better pander to the priorities of target funders without really understanding or tackling a system. This dynamic undermines the credibility and value of legitimate systems-change work.

The funders’ foremost reluctance sprang from their conviction that the initiatives were “off-strategy for now.” In other words, the funders had already developed strategies with preexisting priority areas or preferred approaches and were looking to fill their funding pipelines with grantees that conformed to them. The initiatives and leaders we had assembled did not “fit” funders’ view of strategic priorities. With preexisting strategies in hand, the funders we interviewed seemed to presume that they should determine what work should or should not move forward on agendas they cared about, and they were not receptive to absorbing perspectives or supporting partners that deviated from their priorities.

From these interviews, we realized that funder-driven development of funder-owned strategies undermines the discovery of effective, long-term solutions to complex challenges. To be sure, many funders consult stakeholders as they refresh their strategies. But a burst of stakeholder engagement during a timebound strategy process that concludes behind closed doors will inevitably tend to prioritize the perspectives, beliefs, and biases of those in the room. For a strategy to tackle root causes of complex societal and planetary challenges, it cannot be developed and stewarded by a single funder—let alone any individual or group of organizations with a uniform position or perspective, for that matter. Nor can a greater proliferation of disparate funding strategies across individual funders deliver the coordination necessary for transformative change.

In our view, the consequence of funder-owned strategies is that funders and their partners are:

• Too siloed | Funders talk past each other based on their different understandings of the situation and what matters. They tend to focus on narrow goals in specific sectors, advance discrete interventions that fail to develop integrated agendas, and neglect opportunities to support adjacent goals or sectors, even when the case for doing so is obvious.
• Too shallow | Funders prioritize short-term, measurable results that can be directly attributable to their investments, often making assumptions about how those results might eventually contribute to something larger. Funders and partners underutilize each other’s assets and capabilities, including their respective knowledge and social capital.
• Too rigid | Funders fail to adapt their objectives and approaches over time as circumstances change, focusing instead on solutions that they can identify in advance and implement with fidelity to their strategy or perspective, and with little space to build trust and jointly navigate unexpected challenges and opportunities.

Among the funders we interviewed for the Catalyst Hub, the majority recognized that systemic change requires more and better funding in general, and that too much giving has occurred in silos and has focused on short-term results. Indeed, most acknowledged that systems transformation—change that leads to mindset, norm, policy, and structural shifts—requires multiple funding streams to shift conditions for change. We concluded that many funders who are interested in systems-change work revert to conventional approaches for developing strategies in part because they do not see a clear alternative or have support to pursue it.

Features of CO Strategies

Conventional, funder-owned strategies may be entirely appropriate for complicated problems that require technical solutions and lend themselves to tailored calls for proposals. Not incidentally, however, they tend to reinforce existing power imbalances, often positioning the funder or groups of funders—rather than local communities and their partners—as final arbiters of what work should receive support. Realizing the possibilities of transformation requires strategies that whole fields of partners inform, codevelop, and advance, as opposed to strategies that reflect any single organization’s view of what a system needs.

Convening a whole field to jointly develop a narrative and co-own a strategy mitigates risks of bias and blind spots, because it incorporates a breadth of diverse perspectives by design, helping to engender a holistic view of the situation.

A field of partners and funders with a CO strategy is more effective because they share a sense of agency and shared responsibility—a sense that the strategy belongs to them, is theirs to improve or change, and is incumbent on them to take forward. Collective ownership necessarily involves a rebalancing of power between funders and those they fund. But we are not suggesting that funders be bystanders. Collective ownership means the concerns and priorities of a whole field are jointly determined—including by funders—and the whole field contributes to addressing and continuously evolving those priorities.

CO strategies help to ensure that whole fields of social innovators and their funders stay aligned, cohesive, and agile by exhibiting the following three features.

Convene representatives of the whole field and cocreate a holistic narrative. | Developing a CO strategy involves congregating actors who share a sense of urgency and responsibility and who bring relevant expertise, a firsthand view of the context, a direct stake in the consequences, and the authority and resources to act. This coming together typically requires a visionary catalyst to call others in—often a trusted voice in the field, a funder, or a neutral convener. This catalyst is particularly crucial for convening partners who would not otherwise do so, say, because they compete for funding. Bringing together the field and facilitating dialogue is time-consuming to organize. Initially, invitees may find it difficult to see the purpose of meeting and spending the time to develop a mutual understanding. But this work builds a foundation of trust among potential partners that then enables them to jointly articulate a narrative about their individual and collective realities, interconnected challenges and their root causes, and possible futures. The emerging shared narrative is the basis for the field to coalesce, and it often takes multiple conversations, and looping in additional actors, to be sure the whole field is represented.

 

The multisector coalition Preventing Pandemics at the Source (PPATS) offers a salient example of bringing together disparate parts of a field to cocreate a CO strategy. PPATS began to take shape in mid-2020, when the COVID-19 pandemic shut down countries’ borders and economies. Observing a critical but overlooked systemic challenge—the spillover of pathogens from animals to humans, the cause of almost every viral pandemic of the 20th and 21st centuries²—Dalberg Catalyst CEO (and this article’s coauthor) Sonila Cook and former Rainforest Alliance President Nigel Sizer convened a group of 40 prominent leaders from across the global health and conservation fields, representing a mix of both deep technical expertise and firsthand experience in diverse contexts. Informed by scientists and community-based health and conservation advocates, the group recognized the broad, practical, and multiplicative benefits of spillover prevention. At the same time, they knew that global health leaders remained largely unaware or skeptical of efforts to address viral spillover, perceived the problem to be inevitable, and tended to focus on surveilling and containing new diseases within the countries where outbreaks most often occur.

The group determined that a new narrative needed to emphasize why prevention at the source matters: Spillover prevention is both equitable and comprehensive because its strategies benefit everyone everywhere, compared with the tools of containment (e.g., medicines and vaccines) that are often inequitably distributed.³ Furthermore, spillover-prevention interventions such as reducing deforestation also help mitigate climate change and biodiversity loss, at a fraction of the cost of managing a pandemic.⁴ Efforts to comprehensively address pandemics should therefore include pandemic prevention (particularly spillover prevention), not merely pandemic preparedness and response. Grounded in the scientific knowledge base that establishes where pandemics come from, the viral-spillover narrative guided PPATS’ subsequent work, clarifying the coalition’s principles, shared values, and rationale for transformative change. But jointly shaping this narrative was a process. Spillover prevention was not commonly discussed across domains such as conservation or global health, and it took diverse stakeholders, including those working on the front lines of novel, emerging infectious-disease outbreaks, to contextualize the evidence and elevate community perspectives.

Coalition members proceeded to share the spillover-prevention narrative broadly, engaging multiple champions and channels to communicate their message as a critical touchstone within and beyond the coalition, including the US Congress, G20, World Health Organization, and World Bank. Conservation International’s senior advisor for One Health, Neil Vora, delivered a TED talk in July 2023 on upstream-pandemic prevention, elevating the issue beyond health actors. Analysis by one of PPATS’ funders revealed an uptick in media mentions of the drivers of viral spillover in relation to pandemics in 2023; almost all mentions were linked to PPATS coalition members.

Beyond narrative shifting, PPATS’ advocacy has led to several policy wins over the past three years, as spillover-prevention language has found its way into numerous legislative processes in the United States (e.g., the Preventing Future Pandemics Act of 2021, the International Pandemic Preparedness and COVID-19 Response Act of 2021, the Global Health Security Act of 2021, and the Global Pandemic Prevention and Biosecurity Act), as well as into various global mechanisms to address pandemics. PPATS also now cohosts a Commission on Prevention of Viral Spillover with The Lancet—one of the world’s leading medical journals—to elevate the science underpinning spillover prevention.

Convening a whole field to jointly develop a narrative and co-own a strategy mitigates risks of bias and blind spots, because it incorporates a breadth of diverse perspectives by design, helping to engender a holistic, rather than narrow, view of the situation. Had co-owners of the PPATS strategy failed to represent the whole field and neglected to actively engage in collective discourse about their visions and what achieving them would require, they might not have converged on a common, credible narrative about spillover as the root cause of pandemics. Their subsequent coalition-planning, decision-making, awareness-raising, and policy-advocacy efforts would have been hampered without a clear shared vision of the world they were working toward. The CO strategy—and the time and skilled facilitation spent cultivating and fostering it—made the difference by ensuring that partners were aligned around a common goal, with shared agency and responsibility for achieving it.

(Illustration by Juan Bernabeu) 

Sizer’s leadership as the coalition’s system orchestrator alongside Cook’s strategic counsel and stewardship advanced the field’s focus on a common narrative. Partners across the field had to transcend institutional mandates and put individual egos aside, and to make the most of an unprecedented opportunity to bring about transformative change across many important issue areas at once. PPATS succeeded in part because coalition partners knew that a neutral entity was facilitating their efforts, not competing with them for funding or seeking credit for the coalition’s success. Indeed, Sizer and Cook sought to model humility and generosity across the coalition and a sense of shared responsibility to take their strategy forward. PPATS members describe the effort as among the most collaborative and highest-performing coalitions they have participated in.

A whole field of co-owners must also include those with the authority and resources to act. In the case of PPATS, while funders were invited from the start, they chose not to engage at first. Thankfully, the coalition’s members were able to share nonfinancial assets (primarily volunteering their time) and make progress for nearly a year before the first financial support arrived. However, without funding to support their efforts, the coalition lost precious time fundraising, had to undertake certain priorities out of sequence, and couldn’t deploy adequate resources at opportune moments. The PPATS example highlights the disproportionate power currently held by funders. When philanthropists choose not to invest—despite a whole field coming together and requesting their support—the field has few options other than to cease its joint activities. PPATS was fortunate to have seven funders eventually join. Having just one anchor funding partner actively engaged from the outset would have enabled the field to act more efficiently and decisively.

Set goals based on the collective vision and combined strengths to attain them. | Like PPATS, GroundBreak Coalition, another CO transformation effort, emerged through an extended period of engagement and trust-building across an array of partners, who worked toward a shared narrative about their situation, challenges, and vision for the future. In contrast with PPATS, GroundBreak benefited from having a foundation’s financial support and spirit of co-ownership from the start. And in contrast with a funder-owned strategy, GroundBreak’s strategy adopted a broad view of the strengths of coalition members, including financial partners, recognizing their potential and responsibility to support multiple, interrelated goals at once.

In 2022, McKnight Foundation President Tonya Allen sought to address systemic racism and advance racial equity in the Minneapolis-St. Paul area with more than 170 individuals and 120 organizations. In working groups, they discussed systemic barriers to building climate-smart communities, including barriers to Black homeownership, rental housing, commercial development, entrepreneurship, and climate readiness—asking what financial tools and products, if scaled, could benefit Black home buyers, commercial developers, entrepreneurs, and renters.

From the outset, the McKnight Foundation sought to shift power through inclusive and facilitative leadership. With credibility as a local funding partner committed to the metropolitan area, the foundation advocated a cocreative process with diverse institutions and mobilized a small team of three orchestrators tasked with aligning the interests and contributions of diverse institutions through intentional and collaborative discussions. The foundation and the team recognized that the kind of transformation they sought could not be accomplished by any one entity, so they helped the field develop an interim governance structure that included 40 representatives of corporate, civic, and philanthropic organizations. These leaders continue to serve GroundBreak’s mission today as members of the coalition’s leadership council.

The premise for GroundBreak was rooted in local context. Through the design process, the field of partners developed a common understanding: The national crises of racial, economic, and climate injustices had been simmering long before the COVID-19 pandemic and George Floyd’s 2020 murder by a Minneapolis police officer brought them to a boil, and it would take more than incremental change to realize a racially equitable future in a worsening political climate. They committed to removing systemic barriers that stand between aspiring Black wealth builders and capital needed to buy a home, start or grow a business, and develop commercial property. They envisioned a financial system transformed to allow large amounts of capital to flow in service of Black communities.

In contrast with a funder-owned strategy, GroundBreak Coalition’s strategy adopted a broad view of the strengths of coalition members, including financial partners, given their potential and responsibility to support multiple, interrelated goals at once.

GroundBreak Coalition members translated their vision into goals that were not only specific, measurable, realistic, and timebound but also intersecting and interdependent. These aims included, for example, creating 45,000 new BIPOC homeowners (and 11,000 homes specifically for new Black homeowners), ensuring that 23,500 families were stably housed in affordable rental units, and completing 60 new Black-led and climate-ready commercial developments. They calculated that it would take approximately $5.3 billion in capital commitments in the coming years to fund and achieve their goals, and identified the necessary financial tools and products. With the orchestration team’s support, the group calibrated these goals in light of an integrated financial system, rather than a loose collection of disparate, wishful targets. Namely, by jointly taking into account the roles of grants, guarantees, low-cost capital, and special-purpose credit programs in a new regional system of financial instruments, GroundBreak estimated that $1.2 billion in flexible capital could unlock $4.1 billion in private-market capital over a decade.

GroundBreak’s goals gave coalition members a shared vantage point from which to view their strengths and needs. Coalition members were able to see themselves working together as being more capable than the sum of their individual parts. For example, financial partners realized that their respective strengths—their expertise, relationships, and convening power—could serve multiple objectives at once when they functioned as a group. Led by community need and ideas, and with a strong sense of accountability to the collective, the McKnight Foundation and other initial financial partners sought to crowd in support from additional financial partners. On behalf of the coalition, they challenged other philanthropists, banks, governments, corporations, and investors to make pledges for grants, guarantees, and low-cost capital, recognizing that the institutions that control the financial markets must play a critical role in transforming them. In October 2023, the coalition’s financial partners announced $926.75 million in capital commitments, an initial momentum-building milestone on the road to realizing GroundBreak’s vision.

Effective coalitions like GroundBreak have cohesive goals, and, with the help of trusted and credible orchestrators, their members encourage one another to value the full scope of strengths they bring. This heightened awareness of their advantages is similar to what MIT researcher Otto Scharmer and social innovator Eva Pomeroy describe as fourth-person knowing: an enhanced perception of both “the whole and the individual, making possible the freedom to align individual and collective attention, intention, and agency,” which “comes with a heightened sense of possibility in which a future that was previously experienced as out of reach moves inside the horizon of what feels doable and possible.”

Stay agile to ensure collective momentum. | Strategies for transformation are necessarily adaptive, because they have to adjust to systems that are complex and dynamic. CO strategies are especially adaptive because partners are continuously learning and sharing new information with each other. With a strong sense of co-ownership, partners take initiative and proactively disclose data on opportunities and threats, exchange knowledge and lessons, engage partners in adjacent domains, and stay coordinated.

During the COVID-19 pandemic, PPATS coalition members regularly convened to exchange and review emerging information and sharpen their strategy in response to rapidly changing circumstances. Agile, action-oriented working groups gathered for weekly virtual calls to take stock of their collective knowledge, relevant assets and capabilities, resources they needed, and effectiveness of interventions. They were also empowered to make decisions; they coordinated and deployed their resources to advocate for policy change and influence public discourse on pandemic prevention.

Regular communication across the PPATS coalition reinforced members’ agility, as well as their sense of collective ownership and mutual accountability. Equipped with regular updates, including monthly coalition convenings and regular newsletters, coalition members were empowered to adapt their respective efforts, raise questions or concerns, and proactively engage and collaborate with one another. Through regular coalition-wide communications, Sizer and Cook reinforced the coalition’s common narrative, ensured that members were aware of the collective’s recent wins, and highlighted instances when coalition members took initiative on behalf of the group’s objectives. Regular communication also offered a clear view of the contributions of individual members, in turn reinforcing mutual accountability and inspiring members to action.

To collectively own a strategy, we as social innovators and funders must let go of some features of conventional strategies that we have held dear: single-issue, reductionist, and glossy plans that treat global challenges as though they are easily solvable.

GroundBreak similarly made certain that its strategy evolved over time and its members stayed informed and engaged. When GroundBreak pivoted from its design stage to implementation, it prioritized agility and continued co-ownership as it formed implementation teams. These included community-based organizations alongside technical experts, all of whom bring prior experience working in proximity to GroundBreak’s focus areas. Critically, they are empowered to make decisions—to select the nonprofits, community development financial institutions, and private-sector financial institutions that can access and deploy the intended billions in capital for local wealth builders—based on the belief that those closest to the issues are best positioned to make decisions. Furthermore, GroundBreak’s project team generated ongoing, audience-specific content and invited coalition members’ input and feedback from the beginning of the effort. As one of the coalition project team’s directors reflected, “There was hardly a limit to how much we could have invested in communications.” As with PPATS, the regular communications of GroundBreak’s project team also fostered transparency and mutual accountability among group members.

Skilled orchestration was essential to ensuring the momentum of both the PPATS and GroundBreak coalitions. Within PPATS, Sizer and Cook’s facilitation catalyzed movement toward the agreed-upon goals and helped cultivate a continued sense of co-ownership. Their role included managing relational dynamics behind the scenes, helping resolve potential conflicts, and engaging in active trust-building. It also involved modeling humility, setting aside egos, intentionally sharing power, and engaging in thoughtful stewardship. Sizer, upon deciding to step down from the executive director role earlier this year, carefully selected his successor, Neil Vora, to promote continued momentum.

In both PPATS and GroundBreak, agility and collective momentum were facilitated by an individual or small team of system orchestrators who created spaces for ongoing dialogue (online or in person), for partners to identify and weigh strategic choices, and for coordinated action and learning. Coalition members had the option and encouragement, but not the obligation, to utilize their respective strengths to serve the collective’s shared priorities.

Unleashing Transformative Philanthropy

Our primary recommendation raised by the Catalyst Hub’s changemakers and funders was to create more spaces where fields could come together and jointly shape their respective strategies. They described these spaces as safe havens that neutralized power imbalances and encouraged participants to communicate, confront hard truths, build trust, and develop common understanding. The participants also described them as “action labs,” where would-be partners translated possibilities into coordinated efforts to realize them. Whatever their form, these spaces cultivated agency and instilled a sense of shared responsibility, leading these potential partners to stay together after convening, rather than return to their respective silos and patterns of work.

To collectively own a strategy, we as social innovators and funders must let go of some features of conventional strategies that we have held dear: single-issue, reductionist, and glossy plans that treat global challenges as though they are less complex or more easily solvable than they are. Collectively, we must revisit and scrutinize our objectives and priorities more often than every three or five years. Difficult as it may be for many to accept, we must also relinquish a narrow focus on solutions that most easily scale or replicate. A CO strategy involves a whole field of partners who invest time up front in jointly understanding their shared context and aligning their objectives (for both GroundBreak and PPATS, doing so required a almost year or more). The partnerships and solutions that emerge from a CO strategy are designed to deliver results that are equitable and sustainable in that context.

To advance CO strategies, we need facilitators—namely, system orchestrators—who have the credibility and skill to lead this type of collaboration. Today, this facilitative leadership role is not widely and consistently understood, nor do we have a sufficient level of regard for people who can hold a conversation, help others develop a common understanding about systems, and cultivate high-trust and productive relationships. In our experience, the most suitable candidates often appear after social innovators and their funders come together and assess their situation. Then, as the field starts to consider alternative futures, the case for an orchestrator and the relevance of specific qualifications (relevant technical acumen and relationships, in addition to table-stakes qualifications such as exceptional communication skills and high integrity) comes into focus. Partners across the field should encourage potential orchestrators to step up, because the best ones may not respond to an open call for this role and certainly would not actively seek to play it.

Social innovators also need a foundation of flexible and multiyear financial support across the field, including support for system orchestrators. Because of the nature of their work, many system orchestrators operate at the intersections of conventional fields without an institutional home. Few orchestrators have the means or the risk-taking capacity to coalesce a whole field of partner organizations prior to securing at least one anchor funding partner, which is essential to facilitate collaboration. “It’s hard for an orchestrator of systems change to do their job if they’re perceived as competing for funding with partners across the field they’re orchestrating,” says Tim Hanstad, vice chair of Chandler Foundation and cofounder of Landesa. What if that were not the case, and orchestrators did have a stable base from which to operate? For that matter, what if whole fields had a neutral institution tasked with creating space for dialogue, providing a home for the field’s system orchestrator(s), facilitating field-wide activities (such as strategy support and strategic communications), and ensuring long-term stewardship of the field’s agenda? We think social innovators should advocate for this, and funders looking to support transformative change should be open to it.

Most important, we as social innovators and funders must evolve the ways in which we collectively think and plan, with an openness to working outside our usual silos. This includes a willingness to yield power and to rise above incentives to compete. This also includes a mindset that asks questions such as “How are my strengths valuable from the perspective of the whole system?” and “With whom can I combine strengths and have multiplicative effects?” The cascading crises that engulf our world—from pandemics to rising inequality to the climate emergency—are rooted in systemic issues that require us to ask these questions. These crises will persist and worsen as long as we pretend that individual strategies to address them are the solution.

Read more stories by Jordan Fabyanske, Sonila Cook & Mariah Levin.