Over the last two years, our team at the Harvard Kennedy School of Government’s Ash Center for Democratic Governance and Innovation has interviewed about 100 leading social entrepreneurs and thinkers from philanthropy and city government. We are hoping to discover better ways to make social change. Specifically, we want answers to two questions: How can social entrepreneurs catalyze transformative results in public systems such as education? And how can innovation enhance existing social programs and networks of families, neighbors, and peers so as to better people’s lives?
We studied these entrepreneurs’ past successes; public and social sectors have long intersected to good effect. Government delivers almost all of its social services for homelessness, domestic violence, and drug and alcohol counseling through nonprofit organizations; the Corporation for National and Community Service (CNCS), the government entity that operates AmeriCorps and VISTA, supports volunteer efforts every day; and throughout the country excellent charter schools turn public dollars into startling results.
We also looked at entrepreneurial public and social sector efforts that failed to deliver on their full promise. I knew that this was more the norm: During my nine years as chair of the CNCS, first under President George W. Bush and then under President Barack Obama, I saw hundreds of social entrepreneurs produce tangible results in their communities, yet struggle when they tried to grow in scale or help reform government-dominated public systems.
Our conclusions so far: Innovations that ignite change across broader social service delivery systems can disrupt entrenched interests and produce transformative results. Moreover, innovators will have the best results igniting that change by using the following seven levers. Although I use examples from education, social entrepreneurs have successfully used these levers to foster change in areas ranging from affordable housing to child welfare to poverty alleviation.
Create a Local Identity. After serving as a Teach for America (TFA) corps member, Michelle Rhee (who would later become Washington, D.C.’s chancellor of public schools) launched The New Teacher Project (TNTP), hoping to bring more high-quality teachers into public schools. She believed in TFA’s mission but wanted to grow her own organization in a way that would avoid the opposition TFA often faced.
Rhee considered each new program as an initiative of the district rather than as a national organization sweeping in and telling the locals what to do. “We did things purposefully so that every program we created had the identity of the city—Teach Baton Rouge or the New York City Teaching Fellows,” she recalls. National innovators bringing their idea to new communities will face local opposition and are likely to make their own missteps, such as ignoring the importance of local context. But they must continue to navigate these waters, as Rhee did, learning from past efforts.
Mobilize for Change. Social entrepreneurs can create room for change through public activism, enhanced awareness of results, and social media campaigns. Stand for Children founder Jonah Edelman, for example, trains and mentors citizens—especially the parents of schoolchildren—to hold their elected officials accountable for improving public education. In Portland, Ore., Stand for Children helped pass a property tax levy that has benefited more than 40,000 children through new pre-K and out-of-schooltime programs.
Community-based reporters and bloggers, meanwhile, can analyze government data and broadcast that information to inform the community. Civic leaders and entrepreneurs can also use social media to garner feedback directly from the community. Through sites such as RateMyProfessors.com and RateMyTeachers.com, students anonymously evaluate teachers and professors for other students’ benefit. Whatever the method, social entrepreneurs succeed in the political sphere by building an engaged public that will not tolerate an underperforming status quo.
Change the Frame and Cure the Expectation Gap. Service providers sometimes foster a culture of low expectations. But the most effective social entrepreneurs raise their own expectations about how much responsibility clients can take to improve their lot. These entrepreneurs design models that encourage people to act responsibly and that use the client’s own assets, including family and friend networks.
When New York City Department of Education Chancellor Joel Klein invited City Year into the city’s public schools, he had specific performance goals in mind. Yet it was the can-do enthusiasm of City Year members that contributed most to student performance by convincing many young adults that they could succeed.
Underwrite Political Risk. For all but the most entrepreneurial government officials, the benefits of hanging one’s reputation on a new idea usually do not outweigh the costs of failure: misspent tax dollars, damage to one’s professional reputation or career, or even harm to the very citizens one is charged with serving. But strong entrepreneurial leaders can absorb some of the risk for those who stand exposed to the public.
Take, for example, Blair Taylor, the president and CEO of the Los Angeles Urban League (LAUL). LAUL commands great respect in Los Angeles, where for almost a century it has championed equality for African-Americans and other minorities, helping them to secure economic self-reliance, parity, and civil rights. An alarming 2005 report from the United Way of Greater Los Angeles and LAUL, “The State of Black Los Angeles,” prompted Taylor and LAUL to launch a strategic effort designed to concentrate private and government assistance in the area surrounding Crenshaw High School—one of the worst-performing schools in the city. Taylor, in a very public way, claimed responsibility for the success or failure of the new effort, and thereby convinced the superintendent of schools and other city leaders to join LAUL in creating the Greater Crenshaw Educational Partnership. In just 18 months the school demonstrated to parents enough promise that enrollments have started to increase after a long period of contrary trends.
Make Space for Innovation. Before the arrival of Rhee and Mayor Adrian Fenty, most foundations saw Washington, D.C.’s schools as far too risky a place for their investments. Rhee worked hard to change that impression, mostly by creating space for innovation—by breaking down barriers to allow outside innovators to emerge as real partners. As a result she has garnered philanthropic interest and financial commitments, including support from the national Walton Family Foundation and the CityBridge Foundation. Welcome Proven Disruptors. Because Rhee views the district’s 78,000 students—not its buildings or bureaucracy—as her clients and her cause, she makes controversial decisions every day to bring in all possible resources, including charter school options and such proven organizations as TNTP, TFA, New Leaders for New Schools, and City Year.
In her work at TNTP, Rhee and her colleagues learned how hard it can be to change school bureaucracies. And as TNTP expanded into new cities, Rhee came to insist on a set of “non-negotiables.” She must have a champion from the high ranks of the school district, for example, whether superintendent, mayor, or school board president; and that champion “had to want us there, be willing to expend political capital to get us there, protect us once we were in, and assign a key point person tasked with making sure we got what we needed.”
With these experiences under her belt, Rhee recognized that as chancellor she had to bring in better talent and improve the skills of those who taught, led, and worked in the district schools. She needed to move aside recalcitrant central office staff and make sure her human resource team would welcome new hires from outside groups like TNTP, TFA, and New Leaders. “Smart HR directors conclude, ‘I’m going to bring these people in, and then everything they do is going to be my win,’” Rhee says. “The best ones set it up like that. But the not-so-savvy ones set it up as a competition, which always ends in disaster.”
Trade Good Deeds for Results. True social progress inherently requires more than layering innovative new programs on top of existing systems. It requires repurposing dollars away from existing social sector efforts that do not produce results, no matter how well-intentioned.
Rhee saw an urgent need to reevaluate the existing nonprofit providers then working in district schools. She knew of better organizations with proven track records, and wanted to shift resources—not only dollars but also time, energy, and management focus—to them. With confidence that Mayor Fenty would back her up, Rhee took on the difficult task of clearing out the ineffective nonprofits, many of which had long-standing relationships with the district and its schools. She forced change by requiring nonprofits, whether volunteer or paid, to sign an agreement requiring performance progress within two years. She needed to make room for nonprofits that did not require hand-holding and that understood that their continuing relationship depended on performance.
It’s important to acknowledge that even when nonprofits want to measure performance, doing so in the face of so many different programs and factors is incredibly difficult. Lisbeth Schorr, my colleague at Harvard University, suggests using a range of methods that combine research and theory, individual or collective experience, and evidence (including randomized trials) when appropriate. In my experience, a few other principles have proved helpful: Do not let the perfect be the enemy of the good; do not let a provider blame its poor results on someone else; and do not neglect to measure social or community effects.
And keep trying. Yes, the large, slow-moving world of government bureaucracy and funding inherently resists change. But over the last three decades, I have seen government produce broader and deeper innovation by considering social entrepreneurs as partners in community progress. For our part, we must have the courage to protect innovators whose efforts challenge the status quo, successfully or not.
Stephen Goldsmith, professor of government (on leave) at the Harvard Kennedy School, was chair of the Corporation for National and Community Service under Presidents George W. Bush and Barack Obama. He served as the mayor of Indianapolis from 1992 to 2000. Goldsmith is the coauthor of the recently published book The Power of Social Innovation: How Civic Entrepreneurs Ignite Community Networks for Good.
Read more stories by Stephen Goldsmith.