(Illustration by iStock/akinbostanci)
It’s conventional on an organization’s major birthday to harken back to its birth—in this case Stanford Social Innovation Review’s origin as a publication of the Center for Social Innovation at Stanford University’s Graduate School of Business. But there’s another important date in SSIR’s youth: the year 2010. It was then that the Business School determined that a publication focused on social innovation no longer fit with its strategic plan and, in effect, left it on the church steps for adoption—in this case, on the steps of Stanford’s president’s office.
SSIR had already made a name for itself nationally, and the university president was not enthusiastic about the prospect of it becoming, say, The Harvard or Yale Social Innovation Review. But where to rehome the publication? The Stanford Center on Philanthropy and Civil Society (PACS) had been founded only a few years earlier and showed great promise of promoting research and teaching in those fields. With support from the William and Flora Hewlett Foundation, SSIR was acquired by PACS and has been an integral part of that center and a proud part of Stanford ever since.
Who reads SSIR? The staff and board members of nonprofit organizations account for about half of its readership, with the remainder divided among philanthropies, businesses, consulting firms, academia, and government. SSIR’s print circulation is about 11,000 copies; online, close to a quarter-million people visit its website monthly, and it has more than 90,000 subscribers to its weekly e-newsletter.
In its early years, the large majority of SSIR’s readers came from the United States. Today, it is one of the few publications in the social innovation field that is truly global. Almost half of the people who read SSIR online come from outside the United States. And in recent years it has launched six local-language editions, produced by partners in Japan, South Korea, China, Mexico (for Spanish-speaking Central and Latin America), Brazil, and the United Arab Emirates (for the Arabic-speaking world).
In addition to publishing the print and online journal, SSIR produces three annual conferences, with a total attendance of more than 3,000 people. This past year, its three-day-long Nonprofit Management Institute addressed the key question—How do we encourage greater cooperation and collaboration in an increasingly divisive world?—with a particular focus on the role of civil society institutions in finding common ground. Its upcoming Frontiers of Social Innovation conference focuses on the role of social innovation in helping to sustain democracy at a time when democratic political institutions are under threat in many parts of the world, including the United States. And last year’s Data on Purpose conference focused on the emerging field of public interest technology, which advocates that technology should be designed, deployed, and regulated in ways that are responsible and equitable.
Let me turn to the content of SSIR, which is what ultimately matters the most. SSIR aspires to be a global forum for new ideas, practices, and solutions in social innovation across all sectors and to bridge theory, research, and practice. One sign of SSIR’s success in achieving that mission is the number of important and lasting ideas and practices to which it has given birth. Let me mention three.
The article “The Nonprofit Starvation Cycle,” published in 2009, argued that philanthropic donors’ tendency to fund particular projects with minimal provision of overhead expenses, rather than provide unrestricted support, creates a vicious cycle that deprives nonprofits of the necessary infrastructure to survive and serve their beneficiaries. The article spawned deeper analysis of the problem and has had a discernible effect on philanthropic practice.
“Collective Impact,” published in 2011, argued that large-scale social change requires broad cross-sector coordination rather than the isolated intervention of individual organizations. It highlights a coordinated effort by private and corporate foundations, city government officials, school district representatives, universities and community colleges, and education-related nonprofit and advocacy groups to improve education in Cincinnati. “Collective Impact, 10 Years Later,” a series of articles published in 2021, describes the success of the movement it launched.
SSIR is one of the few publications in the social innovation field that is truly global. Almost half of the people who read SSIR online come from outside the United States. And in recent years it has launched six local language editions.
“Listening to Those Who Matter Most, the Beneficiaries,” published in 2013, emphasizes the importance of listening to the experiences of the people who benefit from social programs. Although the value of the perspectives of these “lived experts” may seem obvious in retrospect, many nonprofit organizations and philanthropies paid them little attention. The article catalyzed a movement and provided the basis for today’s emerging practices of trust-based and participatory philanthropy.
SSIR not only introduces new ideas and practices, but the publication also takes a critical eye to established ones. The article “Microfinance Misses Its Mark,” which examined the shortcomings of microfinance, was published in 2007, just one year after Grameen Bank and its founder Muhammad Yunus had received the Nobel Peace Prize for helping popularize microfinance. More recently, SSIR has published articles that take a critical look at socially responsible practices in business, such as “Sustainability Assurance as Greenwashing,” published in 2022.
I could add many more examples of articles that have had an impact on the field of social innovation, but I’ll conclude with a personal note. As an academic who prides himself on his writing, I have always submitted articles to SSIR that were as close to finished as I could get them. They were inevitably returned to me with editorial suggestions that made them much better, and especially that made them more accessible to the journal’s many different audiences.
The unusual care and craft that SSIR’s editors put into every article is only one of the reasons for the journal’s preeminence. And as a reader, I look forward to the publication of each new issue of SSIR with excitement, knowing that I will deepen my knowledge of areas that I have studied and inform me about ideas and even fields that were totally unknown to me. Over the next 20 years SSIR will continue to grow and expand in ways that I can’t predict. But I am confident that as it does so it will remain true to its mission of being a place where people engaged in social innovation from around the world and across all parts of society come to exchange new ideas, practices, and lessons learned.
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Read more stories by Paul Brest.