Locally Driven, Network-Supported Systems Change

(Image courtesy of Nora Carol Photography/Getty Images)

Traditionally, there have been two ways of leading a social organization: either a handful of powerful individuals, groups, or organizations dictate an organization’s course, or those who have proximity to the social problem and its solution lead the way.  

The former—top-down leadership—was once the most widely practiced approach. Now, many view it as largely obsolete. There are exceptions, for example in military command-and-control structures, regulatory systems where rules designed to ensure public health and safety need enforcing, and organizations that are in serious need of a turnaround. But particularly when it comes to generating broad-based social progress, the model has proved inadequate. Time and again—at the national, state, regional, local, and community levels—a top-down approach has failed to deliver effective solutions to social problems, because it doesn’t consider feedback, input, or buy-in from those most affected by the issues at hand.

By contrast, bottom-up leadership strives to incorporate the insights of those who know what will and won’t work for their communities; it seeks to reflect the democratic evolution of institutions brought forth by the people. But while the “let a thousand flowers bloom” philosophy underlying this approach typically encourages innovation, it also tends to consume more time and resources, and often struggles to identify and scale the most powerful solutions.

Blending the Best of Both

Neither of these leadership models lends itself to the kind of multi-dimensional approach needed for true collaboration, or the cyclical process of ideation and information sharing that can solve complex social problems. To meet these needs, we recommend a different, third approach we call “locally driven, network supported,” or LDNS. This model—which numerous successful organizations already use—marries the best elements of the top-down and bottom-up models, and encourages an ego-less, fluid, intentional approach to systems-level social change.

One early example of a locally driven movement that benefited from network-supported coordination was the Southern Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC), founded in 1957 by Martin Luther King, Jr. During the early years of the US Civil Rights movement, local action groups affiliated with the SCLC operated independently, experimenting with various strategies and tactics to advance the cause. The SCLC did not control these groups, but it provided organizing support, training, communications strategy, and fundraising help. For example, SCLC staff members like Andrew Young and Dorothy Cotton visited churches and community groups throughout the South, teaching classes in “Christian nonviolence.” They also helped their local partners create “citizenship schools” that prepared Black Americans to pass the literacy and civics tests, then widely used as a barrier to voting rights. When SCLC affiliates in towns like Selma, Alabama; Albany, Georgia; and St. Augustine, Florida, launched voter registration campaigns, the national group helped coordinate funding, publicity, and tactical advice between them. Thus, the Civil Rights movement benefited from both the creativity generated by local efforts and the coordination provided by the network.

More recent examples of locally driven movements that probably could have benefited from adopting the LDNS model include the Occupy Wall Street protests of 2011, the global climate protests of 2015, and the Women’s March of 2017. These movements generated enormously popular energy and engagement, but they largely petered out because of a lack of coordination. If small, permanent, leadership organizations had helped them organize, message, train, fundraise, and share best practices, they might have had a more lasting impact.

An essential element of the LDNS model is an organization that serves as a systems catalyst. First described under the rubric of “orchestrators” by Julie Battilana and Marissa Kimsey in a 2017 article titled, “Should You Agitate, Innovate, or Orchestrate?,” these catalysts operate differently than traditional organizational leaders. They serve as “idea holders” and “knowledge-exchange agents”; they hold collaborations and initiatives together to continuously move the entire body of “system changers” forward. They also seek to empower their various partners rather than exercising control themselves. Systems catalysts are built around individuals who:

• Understand the LDNS model and are committed to implementing it
• Focus on driving systems change—not through direct action but by helping create an environment where change can happen
• Have managed egos that don’t need the adrenaline jolt of power or prestige to remain energized; they’re comfortable working behind the scenes and letting partners enjoy the spotlight
• Promote change using tools such as policy advocacy, persuading others to act, convening problem-solving gatherings, cataloging best practices, and developing tools that make it easy to act
• Help the movement build and maintain forward momentum by tracking progress, holding people and groups accountable, celebrating successes, and keeping people focused on achieving the desired change

To show how LDNS leadership works, here are four examples of organizations that have used this model with significant success. Each of these organizations drives change through an open, empowering approach that attracts partners and encourages them to coalesce around a shared plan with the potential to produce genuine social progress.

Increasing Generosity: GivingTuesday

GivingTuesday was created in 2012 around the simple idea of establishing a day every November that encourages people to do good. Since then, the initiative has grown into a global movement. (Jeff Walker, a co-author of this piece, is on the board.) Led by CEO Asha Curran and organized in partnership with a global network of formally affiliated leaders in 75 countries and hundreds of regions, as well as loosely or completely unaffiliated organizations, communities, and generous individuals in every corner of the globe, GivingTuesday raised some $3 billion in a single 24-hour period in the United States alone in 2020, and its network collaborates year-round to inspire generosity around the world.

The impact of GivingTuesday depends on its use of the LDNS model. A central nonprofit, the nucleus of the global effort, serves as the systems catalyst, providing local groups with resources, guides, and toolkits they can use as they see fit. The initiative also incorporates ongoing measurement and learning via its online GivingTuesday Data Commons platform, which brings together contributions from 60 partner organizations and 40 data labs to glean detailed information about changing trends in charitable giving, the most effective approaches to fundraising, and ways to measure and influence donor behavior. Understanding what works and what doesn’t enables groups in hundreds of different regional and cultural contexts to replicate good ideas and make the most of their resources. For example, GivingTuesday helped spread the concept of the Little Free Pantry, created in 2009 by Jessica McClard of Fayetteville, Arkansas. McClard mounted a wooden box on a post and filled it with food, paper, and personal care items for those in need to take and for others to replenish. Promoted by GivingTuesday, hundreds of Little Free Pantries in a vast array of designs have popped up throughout the United States and overseas. In this way, GivingTuesday is highly structured but features distributed leadership. Co-ownership is a guiding principle; local leaders are unified by an overarching vision but control how the initiative manifests in their own communities.

Improving Educational Leadership: Teach For All

Led by Wendy Kopp, previously CEO and founder of Teach For America, Teach For All is developing collective leadership training to improve education and expand opportunities for all children. It defines itself as a “locally rooted, globally informed network” comprised of 60 independent partner organizations and a supporting global organization that works to catalyze the network’s progress. Teach for All partners have drawn 65,000 individuals into teaching careers and generated measurable improvements in learning outcomes for more than six million underserved students on five continents.

Teach For All’s use of the LDGS model is reflected in several specific practices. For example, the network doesn’t initiate expansion into any given country. Rather, local social entrepreneurs decide to pursue the idea, often inspired by other network organizations in their region. Teach For All’s global team follows their lead, helping them learn about the approach and develop contextualized plans to adapt it to their countries. Furthermore, while Teach For All’s network partners are united around a shared purpose, a theory of change, a set of unifying principles, and several programmatic and organizational commitments, there’s no prescribed approach to exercising these commitments. Rather, network partners make their own choices, informed by their context, culture, and opportunities. As founder Wendy Kopp explained:

We've seen that differences in culture, experience, and circumstance generate new ideas and novel approaches. We never could have imagined the innovations that staff members, teachers, alumni, students, community partners, and others across our network have pioneered in a single decade, and how network partners inspire and enable each other to meet higher and higher bars.

Teach For All’s systems catalyst team uses its resources to accelerate progress in many ways—building awareness of the network’s approach, generating global relationships, providing coaching and consulting to network partners, enabling network connectivity, and providing access to learning experiences and tools. For example, Teach For All organizes regional and global conferences and learning trips that allow leaders, staff members, and alumni from partner organizations to learn from their counterparts in other countries, as when new staffers charged with creating teacher training programs gathered in India to observe the country’s successful summer institute for new teachers.

In response, partner organizations, and the teachers and alumni affiliated with them, use the network to share ideas across borders. For example, Folawe Ominkunle, the CEO of Teach for Nigeria, gleaned one of her most effective strategies from her counterpart in Armenia—namely, to seek financial support from the national government from the very start of the program, thereby gaining crucial buy-in and support for the long haul. Another came from a partner in Haiti: the idea of recruiting not just brand-new teachers but also veteran educators, creating a powerful cross-fertilization of expertise and enthusiasm that benefits both groups.

Eliminating Homelessness: Community Solutions

In 2015, led by Rosanne Haggerty, the nonprofit Community Solutions—a recent winner of the McArthur Foundation’s 100&Change competition—launched Built For Zero, a network of cities and counties committed to ending homelessness, beginning with chronic and veteran homelessness. Since then, it has grown to include more than 80 US communities. So far, 14 of the communities partnering with Community Solutions have effectively ended veteran or chronic homelessness, and more than half have seen statistically significant reductions.

Like the other initiatives discussed here, Community Solutions does not impose a one-size-fits-all model on the communities it works with. Instead, it works with leaders from a range of organizations in participating cities, counties, or regions to form a single, community-wide team whose goal is to achieve a “functional zero” homelessness rate —a state where homelessness is rare overall and, when it occurs, quickly resolved. Local team members typically include homeless services providers, government agencies, and Veterans’ Affairs offices, as well as church and civic groups. Community Solutions coaches these teams on adopting the shared, measurable goal and on organizing their efforts through a collaborative, data-driven process. The teams create and maintain a complete, person-specific, real-time record of homelessness and use this data to: meet the needs of individuals experiencing homelessness; streamline the process of moving people into stable homes; constantly assess what strategies are most successful in reducing homelessness; and track how homelessness itself is shifting, and where efforts and investments can have the greatest impact.

As communities devise and test various tactics, Community Solutions’ systems catalyst team shares insights to facilitate learning and growth. For example, two local government officials on the Community Solutions team in Rockford, Illinois, realized that a stumbling block to housing homeless vets was the reluctance of landlords to rent to higher-risk clients. Learning from another Community Solutions team that faced the same challenge, and with the help of a local foundation, they launched a fund dedicated to reducing the financial risk for landlords.

Increasing Peer-Based Health and Civic Activism: GirlTrek

Led by T. Morgan Dixon and Vanessa Garrison, GirlTrek is the largest public health nonprofit for African-American women and girls in the United States. The organization advocates for a civil rights-inspired health movement, and its one million members support local and national policies to increase physical activity through walking, improve access to safe places to walk, protect and reclaim green spaces, and improve the walkability and built environments of 50 high-need US communities. Today, it has an energized base that includes nearly 10 percent of all Black women in America.

 

GirlTrek has a relatively small central support team; local community organizers do most of the work. But in the spirit of LDNS leadership, the central, coordinating organization uses technology and new media to connect members and train organizers, sponsors research around health improvements, gathers and shares stories around community-wide changes, and conducts national awareness campaigns that inspire members to form and sustain life-saving habits.

GirlTrek is now using its LDNS model to advance a health justice agenda; it aims to eliminate systemic barriers to health and advocate for policy change, both locally and nationally. In advance of the 2020 presidential election, local chapters of the organization’s Black Girl Justice League initiative mobilized tens of thousands of volunteers to lead get-out-the-vote activities in every battleground state. Using training materials from the systems catalysts at headquarters, they set up voter registration tables outside churches and beauty parlors, answered questions about state and local rules concerning early voting, and gave out flyers inviting new voters to join a “walk to the polls” event on Election Day itself. By the time November 3 rolled around, Black Girl Justice League had become the nation’s largest voter mobilization effort led by and focused on Black women.

A Leadership Model Whose Time Has Come

Other organizations that have used the LDNS model to drive social change include EducationSuperHighway (ESH), founded by Evan Marwell in 2012 with the mission of upgrading Internet access for every public-school US classroom. ESH helped connect 43 million students to high-speed Internet by building partnerships with nonprofits, state and federal agencies, foundations, and community school systems—driving progress from the top and bottom—and having achieved its mission, ceased operations in 2020. Similarly, the nonprofit Organize is working to improve the efficiency of the organ transplant system in the United States, which currently fails to recover and use up to 28,000 available organs every year. The systems catalyst at Organize coordinates with patient advocates to raise the profile of this issue and communicate the urgency of the ongoing organ shortage, while also working closely with government agencies able to implement solutions.

All these examples illustrate the LDNS model’s cyclical approach to knowledge creation, knowledge sharing, collaboration, and systems change. Innovation occurs through a continuous circle of energy, egoless collaboration, and orchestration, not just at the ends of the spectrum. In Julie Battilana’s words, systems catalysts must “harness the power of others by finding and cultivating leadership among them—strengthening their skills, values, and sense of responsibility to act and coordinate with each other in the pursuit of social change.”

While some nonprofits are already using the LDNS model to create systems-level change, we believe the same model could be effective in other arenas, including in government-led collaborations. In these environments, innovation and best practices can unify action by nonprofits, corporations, foundations, religious institutions, academic researchers, individuals, and other government partners, all guided by the voices of people who are proximate to the problems at hand.

We hope that all kinds of organizations interested in promoting social change will consider shifting to this model—beginning with seeking out or developing potential systems catalysts among their leaders or supporters.

Read more stories by English Sall & Jeffrey C. Walker.