When 10 social change leaders gather in a room to discuss big bet giving, you might hear 15 different opinions. One fact, however, will be shared by everyone: We have entered a big bet bull market.

When it was originally defined by Bridgespan as social change gifts of more than $25M, only 18 “big bets” were identified in 2000, growing to 125 in 2020. That year, the sector’s big-bet bigwig, Mackenzie Scott, began her journey of unparalleled generosity resulting in 78 such gifts—or 430 if you lower the giving threshold to Bridgespan's current definition of $10M+—with no end in sight (especially considering Scott’s net worth remains still north of $35 billion). By 2048, $18 trillion is predicted to land in the laps of charities from the intergenerational wealth transfers of US high-net-worth families (the dominant funding source for big bets).

Much has been written in these pages about the “before” of Big Bets—how doers can become big-bettable and why donors should give big bets—as well as the “during,” how doers decide to deploy big bets and how donors can shape those decisions. But vanishingly little has been said about the “after.” How can doers, with their donors, sustain their impact post-big-bet?

With the acceleration of big bet philanthropy in the past decade, the sector now has a rich dataset of “sunsets” to learn from. Our analysis of post-big bet funding models shows four dominant funding pathways that doers pursue to sustain the resource levels they deem necessary.

1. Extending the big bet with the original funder. Spurred by tantalizing, post-big-bet impact opportunities that doers are raring to seize, some big bet donors are realizing that they can generate superior social return on investment simply by staying the course.

For instance, the Audacious Project, responsible for mobilizing $4.6 billion over the past eight years in support of 70 bold projects, recently launched a first-ever “reinvestment pilot program,” providing a secondary funding round to three grantees to continue to scale their work and sustain their impact. This initiative is meant to demonstrate the value of “providing a longer runway for organizations creating transformational change.” One such recipient, Last Mile Health, advocated hard for its “unfinished business” of demonstrating effective community-based primary care at the local level, scaling these interventions through government, and shaping the future of community health financing programs continent-wide through Africa Frontline First. This was particularly timely in light of last year’s 21 percent drop in development assistance for global health. With Audacious Project’s renewed financing of $20M over three years, Last Mile Health will improve healthcare access for more than 56 million people, a reach six times beyond what they had planned in their first Audacious proposal.

2. Attracting the next philanthropic big bet. Some big bet recipients have focused on leveraging the increased external visibility and impact built during their initial big bet to pursue a second big bet from a different funder.

For instance, VisionSpring, which tackles vision impairment in LMICs, credits its 2022 MacKenzie Scott gift with building the operational and absorptive capacity, the confidence, and the reputation to attract significant follow-on philanthropic investment from new funders, including as one of the anchor partners in the recently announced $75 million Bloomberg Philanthropies Vision Initiative. VisionSpring used the unrestricted funds from its Scott gift to build out implementation capacity that’s hard to fund—e.g., supportive supervision, training, and monitoring and evaluation—and made investments in technology, people management, and financial systems. As a result, they could effectively ramp up program delivery, increasing vision screening and eyeglasses dispensing by 40 percent in the past 18 months and laying the groundwork for further rapid scale-up under the Vision Initiative.

Audacious and Bloomberg aren’t the only big bet funders who have seen the value in doubling down on a winning horse: recognizing certain funders may be inclined to invest after an initial de-risking big bet period, efforts such as Lever for Change’s Bold Solutions Network and Gates Philanthropy Partners are designed to connect philanthropists with leading solutions from their portfolios.

3. Launching a university-style capital campaign. Social change organizations can learn a thing or two from their not-for-profit brethren in higher education, who are responsible for all ten of the largest recorded capital campaigns in US history. Universities raise exorbitant amounts by articulating a bold vision, sizing the resources required to achieve it, creating giving tiers and shovel-ready donation opportunities that push wealthy alumni to give bigger by giving together, and leveraging quiet period “early commits” to bring those top supporters’ peers to the table.

Some big bet doers are catching onto the idea that campaigns like these are a powerful way to retain some of their initial big bet donors and attract new ones to help fund a next strategic vision. For instance, at our organization One Acre Fund, one year before the expiry of our largest big bet in 2025, we launched a fundraising campaign to support 10 million smallholder farm families to generate $1 billion of new profits and assets by 2030, while improving systems outcomes across our markets. We sought to fill five “seats” each at three different funding levels, which would collectively raise the unrestricted funds that backstopped the required restricted fundraising and earned revenue to fund our five-year plan. As of this writing, we have raised about 80 percent of our ambitious goal.

Another example of a successful university-style campaign comes from Lambda Legal, the oldest and largest national NGO in America dedicated to LGBTQ civil and legal rights. Lambda Legal used the largest grant in its history–from none other than MacKenzie Scott—as the lynchpin of its multi-year “Unstoppable Future” campaign. The initial big bet served as a validator to other prospective funders, marking Lambda Legal as an organization capable of absorbing transformative funding investments. The campaign ultimately secured 17 gifts at the seven- and eight-figure levels. In addition to these principal gifts, Lambda Legal was able to build on what felt like “lightning in a bottle” momentum from the campaign to secure $200M+ in legacy pledges.

All told, Unstoppable Future clocked in as the largest comprehensive fundraising campaign in American LGBTQ history, and allowed Lambda Legal to amplify its impact by deepening its bench of portfolio-specific staff and litigators, establishing a robust pro bono attorney clearinghouse, increasing its litigation docket capacity, and investing in education and community outreach.

4. Shifting to government as the primary payer. A final funding pathway we have observed involves leaning on the proof-points developed and philanthropic leverage generated during the big bet period to entice government to fund outcomes during and after the big bet.

For instance, Youth Villages, one of the largest child welfare organizations in America, used growth capital from big bet investments made over the last decade by Blue Meridian Partners to achieve the “white whale” of spurring state government to adopt and permanently finance transition programming for young people who have recently graduated from foster care. They used the big bet funds to hire specialized new teams to research state-level policy priorities; identify and pursue new government funding opportunities; and partner directly with state governments on innovations to address their individual needs. Youth Villages’ innovation here was launching their own Requests for Applications for government agencies interested in adopting their evidence-based LifeSet program; by offering initial co-financing that tiers down over time, Youth Villages is leveraging their Blue Meridian funds to crowd in sustainable government payers who will take on financial responsibility for project delivery in the long term. And, the technical assistance they provide government applicants during the competitive RFA process, as well as ongoing support to their network of selected implementing agencies, has ensured LifeSet’s program outcomes remain strong.

The result? Nearly all of these grants have since converted to full public funding, and many have unlocked additional program expansion fully financed by government dollars. Over the last nine years, Youth Villages has granted over $35M in 15 states, which have successfully catalyzed over $120M in government funding commitments.

Many Paths to Sustaining Impact

These represent the dominant pathways we have seen, though big bet doers have spoken about others, such as results-based finance, and some choose strategic directions outside of programmatic or organizational growth post big bet. Moreover, notably the doers we spoke with haven’t necessarily confined themselves to pursuing just one pathway. Many hedge their bets by pursuing two at the same time.

For instance, the aforementioned VisionSpring credits its initial big bet with also developing the conditions in India—which bears the largest burden of uncorrected vision globally—for the government to step in as a payer at scale. VisionSpring deployed unrestricted MacKenzie Scott funds to conduct large-scale vision screening in communities with vision-intensive occupations like tea, coffee, rug making, and weaving. These targeted programs demonstrated operational feasibility and made the income and livelihoods impact case to government counterparts. Subsequently, state agencies have increased their tender-backed programs for vision correction with eyeglasses–leveraging underdeployed federal funds–and some states have signed onto the global WHO SPECS 2030 strategy.

Similarly, as noted above, Last Mile Health is co-leading Africa Frontline First, an initiative to integrate community health workers into national payrolls and health systems alongside well-capitalized, primarily donor government-funded multilaterals, such as GAVI and The Global Fund, demonstrating successful pursuit of the fourth funding pathway. Finally, Youth Villages has successfully pursued the first in addition to the fourth funding pathway, having received two additional big bets from Blue Meridian, which they are using to continue their investment in government co-funding described above.

Important lessons for doers and donors as they plan for life after the big bet.

1. Most importantly, big bet funding gets already high-performing, ambitious organizations to dream and achieve bigger. It is wise to assume they will not be interested in anything other than continuing their breakneck pace of impact growth (even as they are becoming more efficient at service delivery, requiring less philanthropic investment per impact achieved, and less inclined to solving the problem on their own).
2. The post-big bet period offers follow-on funders an opportunity for low-risk and high-impact return per dollar invested. This should appeal greatly to high-net-worth individuals who are happy to crowd into and stick with winning companies in their private investing, and who may be time-starved in their philanthropy. The philanthropic sector would do well to create vehicles that appeal to these funders.
3. Big bet doers and their donors should “begin with the end in mind,” ideally planning well before the expiry of the initial big bet for the pathways to be pursued to sustain impact thereafter. Design choices can undoubtedly be made to programming, infrastructure, and fundraising to increase the odds of a successful post-big bet period. And it is vital for donors to see themselves as true partners, providing the transparency for their own likelihood of re-upping, ideally along with advice and connections for the work to carry forward.

As a sector, we would be wise to remember that the most successful social change initiatives took decades, not years, to achieve their ultimate goal. Hopefully, with a roadmap in hand—with four pathways already blazed by some early movers—the way ahead can become a little clearer for us all.

Many funders agree that now is the time to give boldly. Nonprofits are reporting increased demand for services while experiencing reduced revenue from all sources, including more than $60 billion in cuts to overseas development aid. For nonprofits deemed “high risk” before the polycrisis of recent years, it was already difficult to obtain funding; now it is next to impossible. At the same time, the number of organizations and regions in which cross-border philanthropy can flow without facing substantial hurdles decreases daily. Widespread sanctions regimes and new regulations restricting the receipt of foreign funds are effectively cutting off resources to critical causes, and bans in countries that target or criminalize interventions that protect homosexuality, reproductive rights, or refugee status are proliferating. In some countries, unfettered government access to citizen data in the name of national security puts vulnerable communities at risk of persecution.

Nonprofits working under these circumstances face multilayered obstacles, making them either invisible (unable to fundraise openly) or unfundable (unable to meet donor requirements), or both, and the stakes are high. Funders often think of risk in terms of the legal and financial consequences of making a grant—whether it will lead to a fine or penalty, affect their reputation, or fail to meet the requirements of a qualifying distribution. However, as legitimate as compliance risk considerations are for donors, they stand in crass disproportion to the threats confronting grantees in countries with conflict and closing civil spaces. As one funder we spoke with expressed, “All we’re doing is legal compliance—that’s a totally different risk than the risk undertaken by our partners, whose lives are often on the line. Our partners have been jailed and killed.”

We recently interviewed seven private foundations and three public charities that provide funding in obstructive regulatory contexts and that, for the purposes of this article, we anonymize to avoid bringing unwanted scrutiny to them or their grantees. Several give globally to diverse causes, while others focus on specific issues and/or regions. Each funder spoke to the urgency of understanding risk, rather than letting fear drive decision-making. “Foundations have a lot of money, but compared to government funds, it’s actually quite minuscule,” said one large foundation executive. “The money is not the most important value; what’s important is the ability to take risk. Governments don’t have that ability. We can fail in ways that governments can’t.” Another mid-size public charity funder told us, “In this moment, it feels [like] there is a greater risk in not funding. … It’s incumbent upon philanthropy to move resources. That is our job. If we’re not doing that, then what are we doing and why? How can we expect our partners to be efficient and impactful if we can’t ourselves?”

From these conversations came 10 practical recommendations for funders looking to make informed, risk-related decisions that support increasingly invisible causes and partners. While they are meaningful in any context, they are particularly important for funders working in complex environments, as they take into account the heightened need for a deep, contextualized understanding of risk and the ability to respond appropriately in uncompromising circumstances.

1. Understand the challenges and power of anonymity. According to Human Rights Watch, “At least 67 countries have national laws criminalizing same-sex relations between consenting adults.” Many LGBTQ+ communities can no longer safely publicize their work, and therefore do not appear on crowdfunding sites, public databases, or eligible intermediary lists. So is the case with many human rights groups, journalists, women’s health advocates, migrant networks, and anti-authoritarian activists with global scope. Several funders emphasized the importance of employing local people to identify groups like these and verify their legitimacy. One intermediary funder that works in more than 70 countries across the Global South shared that its “staff are deeply rooted in these places, and are familiar with the risks and know how to navigate them.”

At the same time, anonymity may protect against the appearance of foreign influence that some governments use to shut down nonprofits. As Human Rights Watch recently described, “By stigmatizing independent civil society, media and other dissenting voices as ‘trojan horses,’ ‘foreign agent’ laws have offered a convenient framing to delegitimize and isolate them.” After witnessing shifting government sentiments toward human rights defenders in the Global South, another funder that focuses on grassroots organizations recently made the decision to stop highlighting grantees on its website entirely. Meanwhile, to prevent the possibility of unintentional exposure, a mid-size foundation that does not have its own website only allows staff directly working on a grant to access sensitive program data. As one large foundation told us, “We see transparency as an important value in philanthropy, but not if it’s going to be weaponized against us or our grantees.”

In situations where total anonymity is not possible (such as via Form 990 reporting), funders should be clear with their partners of the potential risks of engagement, for example, explicitly informing all grantees that even data securely maintained within the foundation is subject to subpoena.

2. Standardize, but contextualize, due diligence. Most funders recognize the importance of due diligence, but many exercise it in ways that grantees find confusing, overwhelming, and inconsistent. Creating clear processes and articulating them in plain language to grantee partners makes risk management less burdensome on grantees and more efficient for funders. This is especially so in places where limiting information sharing helps protect grantees from unwanted exposure or where grantees need a clear avenue to escalate risks to the funder.

An intermediary funder we spoke with who has been working in high-risk places for 40 years described its practice of fully systematically sharing its diligence processes with grantees: “When [we] put in place the systems, then we can be transparent about our requirements with our partners, which means being transparent about what we’re asking for, why, and how we do it. We can then also have the conversation with them … to determine whether there is anything that could put them at risk.” Though the specifics may change as new requirements emerge, this approach still provides consistency for grantees.

That said, context matters. Funders may need to adopt expedited processes for high-risk and urgent grants, or otherwise plan for longer timelines in countries where registration or banking delays are inevitable. In some countries, such as Egypt and Bangladesh, government approval to receive foreign funds can take months, and countries like Vietnam and Pakistan require government approval of grant agreements. Many of these approvals also require that grant agreements specify project deliverables, which the government can approve or reject individually. For funders that prefer to provide general support, it may be counter-intuitive but necessary to restrict a grant in this way. Funders may also need to release grants in smaller tranches or on specific timelines. A large private foundation that gives frequently in Mexico, for example, explained that its grantees sometimes request that it push end-of-year grants to the new year to reduce reporting thresholds.

Grantees, which can explain the impact within their own contexts, typically drive these decisions. But in all situations, funders should use due diligence exercises to openly discuss the risk that each party brings and to mutually strengthen compliance in ways that benefit grantees beyond the grant in question. Funders can also use diligence exercises to identify gaps in grantee practices that may be preventing them from accessing larger grants.

3. Lean on formal and informal donor networks. Attesting to a nonprofit’s good work in one issue area or region can help other funders complement and build on existing work and diversify funding streams for less visible organizations. A smaller human rights foundation we spoke with explained that another funder’s support of schools and medical care directly reinforces local human rights protection and the overall health and safety in the region where it works: “Network, network, network. We are constantly talking with people who are navigating the same risks we are and sharing responses. We get advice on good lawyers to consult with, where things are in the court system, and where to identify other good networks.”

Leveraging networks of donors and advisors in this way is also a proactive method of defeating authoritarian tactics. As another, larger foundation expressed, “It’s so important that a number of funders and organizations work together, because keeping us apart is the goal of those who want to shut down civil society.”

4. Engage mission-aligned counsel with specific expertise. Several funders spoke to the importance of finding the right kind of counsel. The same funder who mentioned using donor networks for legal advice said, “Your in-house counsel won’t be an expert on all things. When you have a group of lawyers with diverse expertise talking to each other on all of these issues, keeping each other informed, then you’re getting all of the issues covered.” Funders should also select counsel based on mission-alignment and find someone who understands that the goal is not to avoid all risk, but to identify and balance competing risks.

Other strategies we heard included connecting grantee partners to trusted counsel so that they also benefit from their expertise and asking attorneys to reuse advice they prepare in other circumstances in cases where it can benefit the larger ecosystem. This kind of information sharing among expert counsel, donors, and grantees, can help standardize how all parties understand their obligations, strengthening the sector’s response to evolving regulatory standards.

5. Build and maintain trust between boards and staff. Despite differences in organizational size and culture, one common approach emerged from our conversations with funders: Build operational trust between board and staff. The funder that gives globally to grassroots movements described its practice this way: “We start from a fundamental commitment (with the board) to moving resources into places that need it. That orients us in the right direction in terms of what we mean by risk. … Trust is built by the consistent practice of doing the analysis, identifying the risk, building the systems, and bringing that to the board.”

A smaller foundation emphasized how “oversharing” enables its board to respond holistically to each event, saying it takes “board engagement to the next level so that nothing comes as a surprise to them and they are fully aware of the … risks.”

Nurturing trust includes openly discussing “what didn’t work,” whether or not it is a time of crisis. As a larger foundation shared, “During the times of non-crisis is when you build the muscle memory for crisis times, when you earn that trust and goodwill. … Then, if things are going badly, we’ve already invested in that exercise, it’s not just a reaction to crisis. The board knows that leadership and staff are being honest and thorough, and can have confidence in each other.”

6. Learn from your grantees. Regarding the do-no-harm principle, all interviewees fully defer to their grantees. As one of the mid-size foundations we interviewed put it: “Trust your grantees and partners, and rely on their guidance. It starts with frank and open conversations. We must be aware that [the foundation is] not the front line of defense; it’s the partner. We ask [partners] questions about how their receipt of funds might be perceived. Not every recipient is the same.”

While this advice holds for all grants, regardless of complexity, it is especially true in places where foreign funds carry risk to grantees. Only organizations on the ground in these regions can speak to the practical risks and implications of a foreign grant. A public charity intermediary we spoke to cautioned, “Don’t assume you know the level of risk that they are or are not willing to take. You may be surprised by their position on this. It starts with that conversation, and then you build a process around that. Don’t let fear be your guide. A lot of boards want to have impact, have legacy, and be strategic, and this is one of the ways that you can do that.”

Grantee partners can also help explore appropriate, secure, and accessible communication methods. These are inevitably questions of context, not preference. For partners facing persecution risks, avoiding digital communication altogether and relying on site visits can offer safer, trust‑building exchanges. Conversely, one intermediary funder working in China told us that using highly secure digital platforms enables safe communication with both donors and grantees while minimizing potential backlash for local partners.

7. Understand the intermediary landscape. The landscape of local and regional intermediaries is growing, and many funders rely on them to help diversify their giving at scale while supporting local ecosystems. The fact that most intermediaries are public charities that do not face the same stringent rules as foundations also gives them more options.

Using an intermediary does not relinquish funders from the responsibility of conducting due diligence on intermediaries or final grantees, and it’s important that funders and intermediaries have the same communication style and risk management approach. One funder who has for many years given in regions with active conflict noted that sometimes intermediaries’ compliance practices are less robust and can “water down” funders’ own compliance systems: “[Using intermediaries] is a nice way to reduce operational burdens, but it can become too risky because their actions will ultimately be tied back to us and thus could amplify the risk.”

8. Be flexible and responsive. The call for more flexible grantmaking was prevalent in our interviews, though funders defined and exercised it in different ways. Importantly, flexible grantmaking does not imply a trade-off of compliance practices; it allows grantees to pivot in volatile surroundings, enabling agility within their strategic setting. This is another practice that benefits grantmaking in all contexts, however, in regions with political instability or natural disasters, flexibility is the only way to meet changing demands.

One of the smaller foundations we spoke to explained that having a strong theory of change in place enables it to shift operations nimbly since doing so fits into a larger strategic framework. “Make sure you know what you’re doing and why. Maybe the ‘what’ evolves, but the ‘why’ doesn’t.”

The funder that supports grassroots movements in the Global South provides long-term, core, unrestricted support. However, it starts most of its grantee relationships with a one-year “catalyst grant.” This typically includes a site visit by local staff, enabling both parties to learn from each other and deepen the funder’s understanding of local realities. In this way, grant expenditures are flexible, but the relationship and risk management practices remain strong components of the partnership.

9. Fund infrastructure and ecosystems. An effective tool to tackle new sanctions, conflict, or simply the outcome of a measured risk analysis is to fund, as one intermediary funder described it, “ecosystems of change, not just individual entities or single issues … [including support for] the safety and protection of movements on the ground. Such groups often don’t have the capacity to access legal resources. How do we contribute to creating an enabling environment in their countries?”

Similar tactics that most of the funders we interviewed use include funding local intermediaries or pro bono networks, or supporting research entities that shed light on particular issues and help solve problems. Several funders mentioned the International Center for Not-for-Profit Law (ICNL) and the Charity & Security Network as examples.

Philanthropic infrastructure and ecosystems are equally valuable. Multiple funders talked about working with other funders on systems change, and using formal and informal donor networks to shift practices and advocate for a better understanding of risk allocation and compliance.

10. Pursue your mission with courage. Funders exist to fill gaps and meet urgent needs. Relinquishing this mission when they face risk can mean relinquishing their raison d’être. One of the foundations we interviewed, which primarily gives in a high-conflict region, spoke to what it means to be courageous: “We don’t actually have a choice—we have to be courageous because this is our only lane. What other funders are now learning is that they’re coming for all of us. Don’t think that you can just put your head down and it will pass. … The point is that we need to be able to look ourselves in the mirror and know that we did everything right. What helps you sleep at night is that you know that you did the right thing to the best of your ability, that you know you always made the legally compliant choice.”

In the words of one of the intermediary funders: “After 40 years, we have never made the decision to step back from this work. To achieve a more just society, we have to support efforts to oppose authoritarian and oppressive regimes [everywhere] because it supports the rest of the globe. It’s all about getting educated about what the law requires, and how to put processes in place that ensure you are meeting the requirements in the grantor and grantee jurisdictions. We always find a way.”

As these and other funders point out, there is more than one way to fund regions and organizations facing invisibility, and none requires meaningfully increasing risk or harm to either the funder or grantee. Staying informed, collaborating with other donors, and finding the path that fits within your entity’s size and risk tolerance is within every funder’s capability. As a mid-sized foundation stated it: “The worst thing we can do as funders is to give away our power by taking a position that it is too risky for us to engage.”

In the United States, scores on the National Assessment of Educational Progress (the nation’s educational report card) peaked in 2013 and have since stagnated or declined. The percentage of eighth graders failing to meet basic proficiency in math and reading has reached record highs. To address these problems, federal, state, and local governments have poured billions of dollars into smaller class sizes, longer school days, enhanced curricula, and teacher training.

But the evidence increasingly points to a more fundamental challenge: The skills gaps that drive these outcomes start long before children ever reach a middle-school classroom—often before they reach any classroom at all. Parents are the people with whom young children spend most of their time, and it is within families, not schools, that early skill differences take root.

Over more than a decade of working with low-income families, our research has shown that inexpensive, technology-based tools parents can use with their children—including text-delivered conversation prompts, digital libraries, and math apps—can meaningfully help parents close early childhood skills gaps. Yet these proven tools fail to scale because there is no institutional buyer to purchase them, no distribution channel to deliver them, and no trusted intermediary to bring them to families. We propose reversing the sequence: build the institutional market for parenting interventions first, and innovation will follow.

The Parenting Gap

Between birth and age 18, a child who never misses a day of school and attends two years of preschool still spends only 15 percent of their waking hours in classrooms (assuming approximately 1,100 school hours per year across 18 years, with 16 waking hours per day). The remaining 85 percent is spent with family and caregivers. This matters most for children from low-income families, who are less likely to have access to the enriched home environments—including shared book-reading, rich conversation, and educational play—that drive early skill development. Research shows that by kindergarten, children from the lowest-income families enter school scoring more than a standard deviation below their highest-income peers on reading and math assessments, and they rarely climb higher in the skills distribution.

What distinguishes families that build strong skills is not money. The Baby’s First Years experiment gave low-income mothers $333 per month and found no effect on children’s cognitive outcomes after four years. What matters is parental investment in activities that build children’s skills. This is not rote teaching but instead, consistent, stimulating interactions such as open-ended conversation, asking questions, and other joint activities that build vocabulary, curiosity, and reasoning.

The evidence suggests that inexpensive, high-quality technology-based tools can meaningfully support parents in engaging in these activities and building the skills that matter most for their children. Across randomized trials with low-income families, the Behavioral Insights and Parenting Lab we codirect at the University of Chicago has found that text-based conversation prompts tripled parents’ use of open-ended language with their children. Our research also showed that a preloaded digital library used for an average of just seven minutes a week moved children’s language scores from roughly the 40th to the 50th national percentile, and that math apps used by parents without college degrees closed roughly one-third of the initial child skills gap. So, why aren’t these solutions more widespread?

The Missing Market

Like all parents, low-income parents want to help their children succeed. Research from our lab consistently finds that when low-income parents learn about effective, low-cost digital tools, they embrace them. But what is missing outside the lab is access and awareness. The gap is not motivation. The gap is structural: There is no institution whose job it is to find those families, acquire the tools on their behalf, and get them into parents’ hands.

Consider the contrast with schools. Epic, the digital reading and audiobook platform for children designed to promote reading practice, comprehension, and vocabulary, reached 90 percent of US elementary schools and was acquired for $500 million in 2021. Epic succeeded not only because it was effective, but because schools could buy it at scale. Quality alone is never enough—one needs a buyer. Schools are a functioning, albeit imperfect, market for ed tech like Epic. They have budgets, incentives to improve child outcomes and ease administrative burdens, and decision-makers who can evaluate and purchase products. Developers compete to serve that market. Innovation follows.

Parents with young children at home have no equivalent point of contact. Preschools serve only half of all children, even fewer from low-income families. Pediatric clinics see children too infrequently and are not in the business of parenting support. Home-visiting programs, which send professional health practitioners directly into families’ homes, reach only 150,000 families annually, a tiny fraction of those who could benefit. None of these institutional settings promotes digital learning tools, none has universal reach into the home, and none has the purchasing power to bring effective digital tools to parents.

This is the missing market. Parents use digital tools when available and welcome support that makes their job easier. The problem is a shortage of two things that schools take for granted. The first is a procurement mechanism with the mandate and purchasing power to evaluate, acquire, and distribute digital tools at scale. The second is being seen as a trusted institution that engages all families and provides effective learning tools for use at home. Schools have both. That is why the ed tech market for classrooms is dynamic and competitive, while the market for home-based digital parenting tools barely exists.

Creating the Market

What the ed tech market for schools demonstrates is that institutional buyers transform innovation. When schools have budgets and purchasing power, developers build for them. We propose replicating that dynamic for parents. In each state, a “Digital Tool Learning Center” would serve as a universal point of contact and distribution mechanism, enrolling every child at birth and providing families with a tablet for exclusive use with the center’s vetted tools. Developers, who now have an incentive to have the state purchase their digital tools, would be more inclined to submit their tools to rigorous evaluation. The more states that do this, the bigger the market—and the stronger the incentive to build tools that actually work.

Here’s the logic: First, enroll large numbers of families who want support. Second, secure funding to purchase tools on their behalf. Third, create competition among developers to build the tools families need and want. In that sequence, innovation flourishes because there is a market waiting for it.

The Learning Centers also address a second barrier: skepticism of technology-based learning tools. A trusted institution that vets these tools, endorses them to families, and supports their use can distinguish a good digital tool from the ineffective ed tech that has soured parents and teachers on the category.

With millions of families enrolled on a common platform, developers would have a real market to compete in. Learning Centers could evaluate and distribute tools that promote language development, math, and parent-child engagement at scale. Once that procurement infrastructure exists, targeted innovation funding makes sense: guaranteed purchase commitments to pull the best tools to market and competitive grants to push the development of new ones.

This is the logic behind advance market commitments for vaccines: Philanthropy and science establish proof of concept, governments create the institutional infrastructure that guarantees a market, and private innovation scales what works. The parallel for digital learning tools is direct. Philanthropists and researchers must fund the rigorous demonstrations that prove which tools work and build the evidentiary base that overcomes skepticism. State and federal governments must build the institutional infrastructure—Learning Centers with universal reach and purchasing power—that creates a real market. Only then does developer competition make sense, with entrepreneurs building for a market that procurement infrastructure has made real.

From Concept to Reality

Consolidation of existing state departments can also help generate opportunities for a universal point of contact and a distribution mechanism. Illinois offers a concrete example of how a single point of access institution could work in practice. In June 2024, Governor JB Pritzker signed legislation creating a new cabinet-level Department of Early Childhood, consolidating preschool grants, subsidized childcare, and day care licensing under a single agency. By July 2026, Illinois will have consolidated purchasing power over programs serving all children under 6. That agency could evaluate technology-based tools, negotiate a statewide license, and deploy them to every enrolled family. More importantly, it could enroll families at birth or when they move into the state, reaching even parents who never touch the formal early childhood system. Illinois has roughly 125,000 births per year. The market that does not exist today could come into existence within a single legislative session.

Illinois is not alone in creating departments that can serve as a universal point of contact and a distribution mechanism. Ohio’s Republican governor created the Department of Children and Youth with a mandate to be “laser-focused” on children’s issues, while New Mexico’s Democratic governor established an Early Childhood Education and Care Department to house all prenatal-to-age-5 programs under one roof. Georgia, Massachusetts, Minnesota, Virginia, and Connecticut have taken similar steps, creating dedicated early childhood agencies that serve as a single point of access for families and, critically, a unified procurement channel for evidence-based programs and tools.

Sequence Matters

The conventional approach to social innovation—fund the supply, then hope demand materializes—has repeatedly failed in early childhood. Dozens of evidence-based interventions sit on shelves. Promising pilots never reach the families who need them.

The alternative is to reverse the sequence. As a market emerges, philanthropists and researchers can take the lead and fund rigorous demonstrations that prove which digital tools work, building the evidentiary base that gives parents, teachers, and policy makers reason to trust them. As states and the federal government move to build the institutional infrastructure, developers will find it in their interest to develop effective digital tools and financially support research to prove their value for students and families.

The children entering kindergarten today will form the workforce of 2050. For the first time, we have the tools to meaningfully close the skills gap before they ever set foot in a classroom—not through more spending on schools, but through tools that reach parents during the hours that schools never will. What we lack is not knowledge, not resources, and not willing families. What we lack is the institutional architecture to turn scattered proofs of concept into something every parent can access. That architecture is buildable. The question is whether philanthropists, governors, and legislators will act in the right order—and soon enough to matter.

What do the coronavirus, a nuclear chain reaction, and Alcoholics Anonymous have in common?

At the beginning of 2020, a concept that was once largely confined to epidemiology was released into everyday use: R₀, or the “spread rate.” If R₀ is greater than one, an epidemic spreads; if it’s less than one, it fades out. This concept quickly became central to public policy discussions because it articulated a simple but decisive structural property of the way some processes reinforce themselves over time, and grow, while others gradually die out because they do not. If a case generates more than one additional case on average, growth becomes self-sustaining; if it does not, continued external input is required to maintain the process, or it will diminish to nonexistence.

The same principle appears in other domains; A nuclear chain reaction becomes self-sustaining, for example, only when each reaction triggers more than one additional reaction. The key question is not how much effort or energy exists in the system, but whether the process reproduces itself as it goes.

Most nonprofits operate through a different logic. Resources are raised, services are delivered, and when funding stops, most of the activity stops with it. Of course, nonprofits are not pathogens or physical systems. The analogy should not be pushed too far. Yet it’s worth asking if a comparable dynamic could exist in the social sector, because the social sector often treats very different organizational logics as if they were the same. When sustainability becomes the universal benchmark, leaders and funders can end up making two opposite mistakes at once: continuing to subsidize models that could be designed to renew part of their own growth, and demanding self-sufficiency from organizations whose work should never be judged that way in the first place.

Not every organization should work this way. Many should not. But where such self-propagating growth becomes possible, when it does occur, we would do well to understand how.

This article proposes a simple way to think about that question for nonprofits: the Pay-It-Forward Threshold.

Real-World Examples

Two-thirds of United States nonprofits that receive government grants could not even cover their own expenses without it, let alone grow, according to the Urban Institute’s recent analysis.

Meanwhile, organizations like Alcoholics Anonymous grew from two founders in 1935 to over two million members, with no centralized leadership or external funding. Without implying that other organizations should necessarily imitate AA wholesale, it’s worth noting that something in its design allows participation to generate further participation. Alcoholics Anonymous is not unique in this respect. Many organizations, in different ways, manage to turn participants into contributors who help extend the system.

The examples below each demonstrate a different mechanism of continuity, collectively answering the question: If impact can sometimes spread through the people reached, what organizational designs make that possible?

1. Alcoholics Anonymous: “Therapeutic transmission.” In Alcoholics Anonymous, “stabilized” members help other alcoholics, in part, because doing so supports and maintains their own sobriety. In this sense, their pay-it-forward contribution is not merely altruistic, but is woven into recovery itself.

   The design lesson is straightforward: Continuity is strongest when helping others is not an external burden added after the fact, but part of how the original transformation is maintained. 

2. Rotary International: “Role-embedded social transmission.” Between 1905 and 1925, Rotary grew from 12 members to more than 108,000, corresponding to an average transmission rate of roughly R ≈ 1.58 per year (meaning each generation of participants produced about 1.6 new participants). Rotary grew because the benefits of membership—professional networks, local prestige, civic identity, and regular access to business and community ties—made recruiting others a natural extension of participation. Existing members had a clear reason to invite new ones, and chapters provided a stable social structure that made replication relatively easy. Transmission can be embedded not only in therapy or formal obligation, but also in the social value of belonging.

   Rotary also shows how fragile this kind of transmission can be. In many places, its growth slowed as the social role once played by local business clubs weakened: Professional networking moved into other institutions and digital platforms, patterns of civic association changed, and younger professionals often became less willing to commit to the formal routines that had sustained chapter life. The lesson is that social transmission requires continuous maintenance. When the underlying value proposition erodes, the loop can break quietly even when the organization itself remains intact.

   

3. Habitat for Humanity: “Contractual transmission.” Habitat for Humanity helps families access affordable homeownership through a structured model that combines local affiliates, volunteer labor, donated resources, and participant contribution. In many cases, future homeowners are required to contribute substantial “sweat equity,” helping build homes—including those of other families—before receiving their own. The model, therefore, links receiving the good to helping produce it.

   The design lesson is that when the good delivered is tangible, and the pathway is clear, contribution can be made a condition of access rather than an optional extra. In such cases, the organization does not have to hope that beneficiaries will later give back, out of the goodness of their hearts: Reciprocity is designed directly into the model.

4. Big Brothers Big Sisters: “Depth over transmission.” In Big Brothers Big Sisters, mentors are carefully screened, matched one-to-one with youth, and supported over time through sustained relationships. The program’s model emphasizes selectivity, continuity, and the quality of the match, which makes expansion more demanding than in interventions that can be standardized or replicated more quickly.

   The design lesson here is fundamentally different from the previous cases: Some forms of impact are quality-constrained rather than transmission-constrained. In relationship-based interventions like this one, trying to maximize transmission can undermine the very conditions that make the model effective. Low transmission, in such cases, is not a sign of weak design but may be the right organizational choice.

The most common mistake in sustainability debates is to turn one growth logic into a universal standard. The value of the transmissive lens is not that it tells every organization what to become. It’s that it helps distinguish where self-propagating growth may be possible from where continuity must be funded.

In some domains, asking beneficiaries to become the engine of further growth is simply structurally inappropriate. Emergency response is the clearest example: Distributing water after an earthquake has a transmission rate near zero, and trying to raise it would make little sense. The work’s success depends on speed, logistics, and reliable delivery—not on whether recipients later become distributors.

The same often holds for pure redistribution. When an initiative exists to transfer money, food, shelter, or legal protection to people who are structurally deprived of it, the value lies in the transfer itself, not in turning recipients into a growth mechanism. Many other collective-action problems also fall into this category. Efforts to improve air quality, reduce corruption, preserve wetlands, or change procurement rules may create enormous public value while remaining dependent on durable institutions, regulation, and professional coordination.

In such cases, a low transmission rate does not signal weak design. It simply reflects a different organizational logic.

The Pay-It-Forward Framework

Social organizations typically measure inputs and outputs. They track money raised, people served, volunteer hours, or program completion. More rarely, they track the extent to which a system converts beneficiaries into contributors. Yet two organizations can help a similar number of people today while heading toward very different long-term trajectories.

• Some forms of impact are consumptive. External resources are used to deliver a service, the beneficiary benefits, and the organization must raise new resources to do it again. If funding stops, most of the impact stops with it.

• Other forms of impact contain a transmissive dimension. Some participants also become contributors—by mentoring, referring, recruiting, hosting, teaching, or helping others enter the system. Under those conditions, impact can continue or grow without proportional increases in funding. Each former participant becomes a potential channel of recruitment, support, or replication, reducing acquisition costs and extending reach over time, a dynamic reminiscent of Everett Rogers’s Diffusion of Innovations and the epidemiological concept of the basic reproduction number (R₀).

This transmissive potential is not merely theoretical. As Amartya Sen argues in Development as Freedom, development depends on agency, on the capacity of people not only to receive help but to act and shape outcomes themselves. Many social programs observe the same dynamic through the “helper therapy principle,” in which helping others often reinforces one’s own progress. Research on volunteering points in this direction.

When organizational design enables this motivation to translate into action, a simple dynamic emerges: People who were helped begin helping others in turn. If each participant eventually helps two more people, those two help four, four help eight. In such a configuration, the number of beneficiaries doubles each generation, becoming roughly a thousand times larger after ten cycles.

A useful way to track this dynamic is through the transmission rate: The average number of new people each former participant helps reach, recruit, or support. Once that number rises above one, the organization crosses the Pay-It-Forward Threshold.

Suppose a nonprofit runs a six-month job-readiness program for young adults. In one cycle, 1000 participants complete the program and in the next, 1500 do. The next question is simple: How many of those 500 additional participants entered because former participants helped bring them in? If 300 did—by referring friends, encouraging them to apply, helping with onboarding, or mentoring the next cohort—then participant transmission equals 300/1000 = 0.3. The remaining 200 are explained by the organization’s usual funded channels: staff outreach, partnerships, advertising, or recruitment campaigns.

This gives leaders a way not only to observe, but to actively test and improve transmission. Even modest rates matter: A rate of 0.3 already means that 30 percent of growth comes through participants themselves, reducing reliance on external funding.

This is not the only metric every organization should pursue. But where transmission is part of the model, it becomes an unusually important operational signal: actionable, design-sensitive, and exponential in its effects.

(To make this question more practical, we have also created a simple, freely available tool that allows organizations to estimate their own Pay-It-Forward rate.)

What Changes in Practice

For policy makers, the framework offers a way to distinguish between two different evaluation logics. In consumptive domains, the right questions often concern depth of impact and cost-effectiveness per unit of investment. In transmissive domains, one additional question becomes relevant: Is the model increasing its capacity for renewal over time? Applying a single standard to both types of initiatives wastes resources in both directions.

For organizational leaders, the first question is not “How do we maximize transmission?” but “Does our model contain any real transmission potential at all?” In some organizations, the honest answer will be no, or not much. In others, transmission is possible but under-designed. The strategic shift is then to move from asking, “How do we recruit more participants?” to asking, “Under what conditions do existing participants become contributors?”

That change in question leads to more concrete design work. Leaders can examine where the chain most often breaks. Do people benefit from the program but never re-enter it in a contributory role? Does alumni engagement remain symbolic rather than functional? Is there no visible pathway from receiving value to helping deliver it? Are contribution opportunities too vague, too costly, too late, or too detached from the original benefit?

Seen this way, “transmission” is not an abstract aspiration, but a series of design choices: onboarding, peer roles, rituals of handoff, chapter formation, referral pathways, light-touch contribution before high-commitment contribution, and incentives that make participation easier to pass on.

Every other civic club of Rotary's era relied on external outreach, and most are now defunct. Rotary prospered because it made a different design choice: It embedded transmission into the membership experience itself.

For funders, the framework changes what kind of sustainability question it makes sense to ask. Too often, “sustainability” is treated as a uniform criterion. But the relevant question is not simply whether an initiative can survive with less grant support. It is whether the underlying model contains a plausible path of renewal through the people it serves.

Three questions become especially useful. First, does this intervention contain a credible mechanism by which participants or beneficiaries help carry the model forward? Second, what share of current spending supports direct delivery, and what share supports the mechanisms that make renewal possible? Third, can the organization observe signs of renewal from ordinary operational data, even imperfectly?

The funding implications differ accordingly. Consumptive programs may deserve stable long-term support. Transmissive programs require upfront investment to build transmission mechanisms, after which external funding can gradually be replaced by internal renewal.

The point of the Pay-It-Forward Threshold is not to rank one model above the other, but to ask a better strategic question: Under what conditions can impact pass through the people reached rather than ending with them? The answer does not determine the initiative's value, but it determines its appropriate design, its realistic funding trajectory, and the criteria by which it should be evaluated. Not all impact should sustain itself. But when it can, it should be designed to.

The proliferation of global regulatory regimes in recent years, coupled with pre-existing requirements for institutional funders, has made cross-border philanthropic compliance an expensive, onerous, and far-reaching exercise. Funders around the world—including in the United States, Europe, Africa, and the Middle East—have increasingly felt its impact.

The aim of these legal and regulatory obligations, from government filings to risk management assessments, is to ensure that funder and grantee actions don’t support illicit activity. But given their growing burden, it’s important to take a look at who philanthropic compliance really serves. Governments who leverage sanctions to influence policy, or regulators who seek to protect public funds? Private funders whose legal status and reputations are at risk, or communities that the rules seek to safeguard from abuse?

The answer should be all of the above, and in many cases it is. But one group tends not to benefit: civil society organizations (CSOs). Defined here as formal and informal nongovernmental and nonprofit groups, pseudo-government entities, and hybrid for-profit vehicles that are principally focused on the betterment of society, CSOs are commonly unclear about what these systems expect of them, even as they spend significant resources on demonstrating their legitimacy and their effective use of government and philanthropic funds. Regulators, donors, and banks expect them to account for their donors, partners, and subgrantees, tracking risk exposure across jurisdictions. CSOs that need funding to survive willingly take on this liability if it is their only way to fund their work. As the International Council of Voluntary Agencies, a global NGO network, writes:

Most donors and intermediaries enforce a “zero-tolerance approach to risk” rather than a “zero-tolerance approach to inaction” … This leads to risk transfer from international to local [organizations], with donor conditions passed on to downstream partners who often lack the resources and logistical capacity to comply. … Inadequate coverage of administrative and overhead costs further prevents [NGOs] from investing in [organizational] development, risk management, and safety measures. Additionally, [NGOs] face numerous administrative and financial hurdles, including duplicative partner capacity assessment and reporting processes, highly earmarked funding, delayed payments, rigid requirements to return unspent funds, short expenditure windows, and inflexible conditions for no-cost extensions. Risk management measures, including due diligence, auditing and counter-terrorism requirements exacerbate these difficulties.

This reality intensifies the power imbalance between those giving money and those asking for it. In recent years, funders have sought to change this dynamic by committing to trust-based philanthropy, locally led development, power-shifting, and a reduction in application and reporting requirements. And yet, faced with vague and mounting menaces of legal and reputational risk, little has changed in practice.

Philanthropy can maintain strong compliance while also encouraging trust, transparency, and greater diversity in giving, but funders must first understand the extent of existing compliance and where there is room to better operate within the limits of the regulatory reality. Funders have an opportunity and an obligation to identify what true risk is to their missions and operations, and how that risk impacts their grantees. They must move from a zero-risk approach to one that dissects context-specific risk and works directly with grantees to minimize harm on both sides. Only then can they make informed decisions based on reality, not fear, and deepen the impact they seek to achieve.

A Half-Century of Regulatory Expansion

Three moments in history stand out in the evolution of philanthropic compliance, particularly for US funders and international grantees: the US Tax Reform Act of 1969, the regulatory aftermath of the 9/11 terrorist attacks, and, most recently, a global trend of authoritarian drift. Each provoked a series of new regulations impacting compliance and cross-border funding.

The Tax Reform Act of 1969 introduced the “private foundation” as a separate charitable vehicle subject to penalties for self-dealing, minimum annual payouts, limits on investments, and new diligence obligations for grants to non-charitable or foreign entities. Tax practitioner K. Martin Worthy observed, “These provisions frequently have been described as the most far-reaching legislation affecting private philanthropy in our two hundred-year history.”

Critiques of the amendments pointed to greater administrative costs and less funding for organizations. In 2015, after reviewing almost 50 years of data, economist Benjamin M. Marx wrote, “Donations and entry dropped precipitously. Proxy variables suggest significant deterrence of abuses, but half of the decline in donations can be explained by the increased cost of running a foundation. The results highlight the potential for large reductions in the benefits of regulation when the cost of compliance affects … charitable giving.”

While early evidence that funders had increased their payouts to meet the new requirement may seem to contradict this, payouts refer to all expenses related to the operation of a foundation other than investment expenses, so the total annual payout requirement would capture compliance costs as well as grants. Thus, it is not surprising that higher compliance and administrative costs would result in higher annual minimum payouts.

In any case, the legislation was a pivotal moment for the US philanthropic sector, in that it introduced a panoply of new, baseline obligations for private foundation compliance across all aspects of operations.

In 2001, the 9/11 terrorist attacks against the United States birthed a new set of requirements intended to prevent support for terrorism. The USA Patriot Act, the UN counter-terrorism resolution, and FATF Special Recommendations that followed shaped anti-terrorism financial policy around the globe. They also pointed to the nonprofit sector as particularly vulnerable to abuse.

Twenty-five years later, little has slowed the regulatory war against terror. One of the most problematic aspects of the requirements is that they are highly ambiguous but carry “strict liability,” meaning regulators can penalize funders even if funders were unaware of a violation or took ample measures to prevent one. A common response from funders has been over-compliance, leaving grantees struggling to keep pace. Smaller organizations are particularly vulnerable, as described in a joint “Submission to the Special Rapporteur on Counter-Terrorism and Human Rights” in 2025:

The “strongly recommended” compliance programs for the sanctions regime, and associated overlapping federal criminal laws (anti-money laundering, material support laws, wire fraud, etc.), are incredibly burdensome for smaller civil society organizations in particular. … The consequences are so severe, and the punishments so grievous, that this chills the operations of these small nonprofit organizations, jeopardizing their work and limiting the aid provided to those most in need.

Large philanthropic institutions have more capital to spend on these exercises, but ultimately at a cost to the number of grants they can distribute, the kind of organizations they can support, and their relationships with these partners, as Barnett Baron, prophetically remarked in 2004:

Requiring grant-makers to collect detailed information about a prospective grantee’s staff, trustees, donors, sub-contractors, and bankers, even if they are not directly involved in the program to be supported by the proposed grant, will inevitably raise questions about the role and objectives of U.S. grant-makers. In some cases, prospective grantees may view grant-makers as agents of the host government, which may be a repressive one, or as agents of the U.S. intelligence community. This could jeopardize the ability of U.S. foundations to operate effectively, and in extreme cases could even put in-country staff at physical risk.

Much has been written on this topic, including by the Charity & Security Network (US), Human Security Collective (Netherlands), Brot für die Welt (Germany), and the Council of Europe Commissioner for Human Rights. The impact on civil society continues to be significant.

Finally, the global rise of authoritarianism has also increased compliance obligations worldwide. In 2026 alone, governments introduced or adopted new laws specifically aimed at making it harder for CSOs to receive foreign funds in Angola, Georgia, Sierra Leone, Israel, and Vietnam, and local governments in Peru, Ecuador, Hungary, and Benin adopted a wave of laws and in 2025.

The increase in laws restricting NGO activities and funding over the past two decades is partly due to post-Cold War geopolitical shifts toward authoritarianism, and the continued impact of the war against terror and isolationist policies. The latter have introduced onerous foreign agent registration laws in many democracies, including the United States, the United Kingdom, Australia, and the European Union. As described by Lloyd Hitoshi Mayer, professor of law at the University of Notre Dame:

Cross-border funding is a critical resource for NGOs in many countries for a variety of reasons, including limited domestic resources and the lack of a domestic philanthropic culture. At the same time, such funding is often viewed with suspicion by the governments of these countries … because they are concerned about potential challenges to government authority, foreign influence, and possible cultural conflicts. While such concerns are generally not sufficient to justify limiting or regulating such support under international law, they provide motivations for governments to do so while publicly relying on other, more defensible justifications, such as national security and accountability.

This kind of regulatory behavior is commonly associated with authoritarian regimes, where non-democratic decision-making enables one ruling party to censor whole segments of society. However, the term “authoritarianism” may more generally describe behaviors characterized by a governing party’s imposition of rules that materially deprive citizens of rights or freedoms, which may also manifest in democratic societies.

These developments sit within the larger context of pre-existing and growing regulatory regimes. Taken together, philanthropic compliance is an expanding web of obligations and prohibitions that funders attempt to address through vastly divergent methods, that, as noted above, typically manifest in inconsistent and often excessive diligence requirements for grantee partners.

Leveraging Compliance to Meet the Moment

While these events have powerfully influenced philanthropic regulation over time, philanthropy itself—which has been slow to address the impact on grantees—may be partly to blame for the state of compliance today. Commitments to give more directly, more equitably, and more transparently have stalled in the face of political attacks, risk aversion, and a lack of investment in infrastructure. Indeed, funders’ risk-avoidant response to overreaching regulatory action gives oxygen to authoritarian rulemaking, whose very purpose is to silence civil spaces and societies. Broadly speaking, philanthropy’s retreat from what it perceives as risk and its standard offloading of risk to grantees further strains a sector struggling with diminished funding and government repression.

Legal counsel and tax advisors, who often aim to eliminate rather than understand risk within a larger philanthropic mission, often view risk narrowly as legal and reputational, rather than considering the risk of failing to achieve meaningful impact. What about the risk to communities if CSOs cannot deliver medical care, or schools shut down, or governments imprison activists?

This series sheds light on how philanthropy can leverage compliance to meet the moment. Articles include: practical tips from bold and compliant funders who give globally; an analysis of Ecuador’s new foreign funding regulations in the context of Latin America’s closing civil spaces; how one intermediary uses due diligence as a means to empower and resource its grantees; and how some NGOs in Asia are using compliance as a form of resistance. Each presents a political, legal, or regulatory obstacle that stifles or slows international philanthropy, and articulates concrete ways in which philanthropy and civil society can better understand or overcome that obstacle.

Philanthropy faces an opportunity. Even amid increased persecution and a rapidly evolving regulatory environment, the sector can both protect itself and strengthen civil society. Compliance practices offer a ready mechanism for philanthropists to gain greater awareness of local context, strengthen mutual accountability, and create learning paths to appropriately address risk. Importantly, this means not just identifying risk, but understanding how to manage it in a way that is proportionate, intentional, and fit for context—and ultimately using compliance as a means to advance, rather than obstruct, healthy and sustainable partnerships.

Last year at Skoll, I went for an early morning run along the Thames with a founder who had won it all. Every award. Every fellowship. She’d graced every stage. And she was exhausted. Not so much from the late-night cocktails in an ancient, low-lit library the night before, but the world she herself had created. The world of a development darling.

As we started ducking willows and streaking past sketchy houseboats, she started venting. “At this point,” she said, “it’s past 10, and I can feel the 200 emails just breeding in my inbox. I’ve been standing there sipping the same lukewarm glass of Riesling for the better part of two hours. And it happens. I get cornered, and I can see the question coming from a million miles away ‘So, what’s your vision for scale?’ Rather than roll my eyes, I just let the talking points spool. I give him what he wants: I say the magic words: scale, RCT, and AI.”

In Oxford, those are the magic words: “AI, RCT, and scale.” They make a donor’s pupils dilate. Toss in “government adoption” like a sprig of rosemary, and suddenly you’re very interesting. The formula works, but everyone knows it’s theater—the preferred performance we pretend leads to impact.

But it’s Oxford, you gotta play the game. They say you don’t come to Skoll to scare the horses. But Paul Farmer, for all his grace and gentleness, loved to grab the gate and give it a good hard shake. Bringing Farmer’s ghost into Skoll means scaring those locked in their sanctified paddock, saying things that might make the room shift in discomfort, questioning conversations about sustainability, scale, and why we ask the poor to settle for less.

Imagining Otherwise

Imagine a world where, instead of playing games at Skoll, or Davos, or UNGA, the founder sits across from a donor and says, “Here’s the budget. Here’s the strategy. Here are the KPIs for the next 3 years. It works out to roughly $2 million USD. Do you want to underwrite 10 percent of this every year for 3 years—unrestricted?” Not a project. Not a pilot. But rather a stake in the ground.

And $2 million is really all you need. It’s not some magic made-up number. The only reason a reliable NGO that serves a million people would need more than a $2 million budget is because a donor wants to give it to them. And if they don’t take it, someone else will.

If you can build a focused, three‑year strategy with a real budget and a handful of sharp, honest KPIs—you don’t need to fill out 200 grant applications and chase 100 donors. You only need 20 people and institutions who believe in you and the vision enough to carry 10 percent each.

It’s not scale. But it’s sanity.

And imagine a world where you, as a founder or CEO, don’t have to fundraise all day, every day, because you built a fundraising strategy that guarantees the necessary annual dollar amount needed to achieve the organizational goals for three to five years, which in turn would allow you to focus on the actual work, rather than fundraising for the work.

The Problem Is Us

The uncomfortable truth is that the reason this world is imaginary isn’t donors. It’s us, all the founders and the CEOs, that keep selling the dream of scale. We’re the ones touting “national adoption by 2030” in our theory of change. We promise cost-per-beneficiary numbers that look like they were calculated by an actuary with a drinking problem. We drink the Kool‑Aid because we’re terrified that if we don’t, the money will go somewhere else.

The truth is that none of this is really “sustainable,” and it’s almost certainly not going to “scale.” But you do the work anyway. This is about acts of service. You do this because no one else will, because once you've actually seen the problem you can't un‑see it. People don’t become founders so they can swan around UNGA making small talk and searching for the last almond croissant, they do it because kids are dying of diarrhea and mothers are bleeding out from eclampsia. Everyone loves to gripe about donors, but it’s the founders and CEOs who keep promising scale, who keep drinking the Kool‑Aid. This isn’t a donor problem. It’s a doer problem.

This is the long defeat, a phrase Paul Farmer borrowed from Tolkien, who took it from the Bible. You’re fighting not because you think you can win, but because it’s the right thing to do. You can’t look away. And the goal is not to win, or defeat poverty, it’s to bring people along, and inspire them to fight the long defeat too.

Paul Farmer looked at a human being, understood the obligation, and then bent money, logistics, and politics until reality got closer to what justice required. Cost per beneficiary, in that frame, isn’t rigor. It’s a failure of imagination—the moment you accept that the only lives that count are the ones that are cheap.

The long defeat isn’t about giving up on impact; it’s about dropping the pretense that the work will neatly “pay for itself” or glide into government adoption.

Don’t look at the work from a cost-per-beneficiary standpoint, look at the work from equity of access, or even better, an equity of outcomes standpoint. That’s the only real indicator: I have kids, are the kids in this village getting access to the same vaccines my kids have access to?

That’s the only indicator.

Everyone loves to complain about donors. And a lot of that is earned—short horizons, unnecessarily forensic due diligence, the fetish for novelty. But donors didn’t invent the cult of scale on their own. Doers say, “Yes, we can go national in five years,” when we know that what we can honestly do is make three districts radically, irreversibly better—and then encourage the state to steal shamelessly from the model. We put “sustainable” in every other paragraph when we know full well that someone, somewhere, will have to keep paying salaries and supervision as long as we expect pregnant women to have the same level of care our wives did, and children on the island of Komodo to get rotavirus vaccines the way our daughters did.

Paul Farmer’s cardinal sin was not that he ignored money. He raised oceans of it. His heresy was that he refused to let cost‑effectiveness be the outer boundary of his moral imagination. He treated “What’s the cheapest way to do the minimum?” as the wrong question. The right question was “What if it was your daughter? What if it were your son?”

Then you figure out how to fund that, piece by piece, forever if you have to.

Embracing the Long Defeat

The long defeat doesn’t mean we abandon discipline. You still need detailed budgets where you can explain the price of soap, KPIs that mean something, and strategies that don’t burn your team out.

Today, the 1000 Days Fund works intentionally across the province of East Nusa Tenggara, (think Komodo), home to 1.4 million women of reproductive age, 700,000 children under 5 and 54,000 community health workers. These numbers are on par with Liberia. The projected budget for 2027 is $1.8 million USD. And 1000 Days Fund delivers.

But a donor will read this and say, “Yeah, but what’s your vision for scale?” To which I would respond, “Name me one NGO in the last 20 years that has scaled the way its donors prophesized."

I’ve done it a few times, asked a donor to give me the name of an organization that has truly scaled in the mythic way we all romanticize—government payer, national coverage, boring budget‑line‑items. Their eyes drift toward the ceiling as I wait for the inevitable, “Well… it’s complicated.”

And it is complicated.

Scale is something donors love to talk about; government as payer is something they purport to be perpetually on the horizon. But it’s the Emperor’s New Clothes. It’s not going to happen. We’ve been waiting 40 years and it hasn’t happened. If you spent 40 years failing to do the thing you said you would do, don’t you think, in all your grace and wisdom, you would try something different? But you don’t. You just do the trendy thing which is sell yourself the idea of scale.

If you were smart you would consider seeding the next generation of local founders—the ones who can push the government’s hand through credibility and proximity. That’s what leverage looks like. Leverage is scale on fire. Scale is one darling NGO chasing Bigfoot. Leverage is a dozen $2 million USD NGOs all fighting for the same thing, the formalization of community health workers in Indonesia, for example.

But we don’t have these conversations. We don’t want to scare the horses.

The harsh reality is that we’re chasing ghosts. The government as the payer is a myth, now more than ever. Scale as it is being sold right now is a myth. The mythical handover to government funding remains perpetually on the horizon, always promised but never delivered. Rather than acknowledging this reality, the sector continues to pursue ever-larger budgets that distance organizations from the communities they sought out to serve.

Scale Is the Responsibility of the State

In health and development, only the state can truly scale. NGOs can prototype, de‑risk, even deliver beautifully, but only the state can convert innovation into everyday service delivery. The state is the only actor with the fiscal architecture, mandate, and legitimacy to transform pilots and programs into public goods. But the state is not going to absorb a $20 million USD budget.

If the state knows an organization is running on $20 million and providing a service like school lunches or health care for free, the government would be acting against its own interests to absorb that budget. Until donors accompany doers to the government offices and see behind the curtain, we’ll continue to sell the myth every year in Oxford. And if the state isn’t ready, for whatever reason—weak governance, corruption, sharp inequality or the hard facts of archipelagic geography and infrastructure—then the organization fueled by righteous indignation and dedicated to ending decades of abandon and neglect can’t just pick up and move to Sweden. They have to stay and fight the long defeat.

The $2 Million Thesis

Imagine if an organization, instead of chasing its next zero, simply said: “We’ve done the math. We know the price of soap. Two million dollars a year is enough.”

This isn’t moral math, it’s simply easy. Put simply, if you’re running an organization with a budget north of $2 million, you’ve got an obligation beyond your own growth curve. The real mark of leadership isn’t just about raising more or scaling, it’s about using your position and reputation to pull others up. Start writing checks out of your operating budget and seed the most promising smaller orgs you can find. Then put your name and reputation to work lighting their path, opening doors, and making sure the next generation gets further, faster. That’s how you build an ecosystem. Anything else is just posturing.

More importantly, if you can find 20 donors to cover 10 percent of your budget with multiyear unrestricted funding, you can do the work, you don’t have to chase money and schmooze at UNGA. You can just do the work. That’s why $2 million is the perfect number. For some orgs, it might be $5 million. But the founder has to ask themselves this question: When was the last time I was in the field? Have I lost my edge? How close to lukewarm is this Riesling?

Every dollar above that line would go toward seed funding local organizations—the ones institutional donors admit are “too expensive" to do the due diligence on and “too early” or “too risky” to take to committee. Instead of a $20 million juggernaut, you build a network of $2 million ones—each competent, rooted, and context‑aware.

Over time, what emerges isn’t a network of unicorns, but an ecosystem of healthy organizations Paul Farmer would be proud of. Together, they embody something that looks a lot like actual systems change: distributed, resilient, and capable of lasting without being dependent on the charisma of any single founder.

The health sectors of places like Komodo, East Timor, and West Papua don’t need another glossy unicorn with a keynote slot at Davos. They need a coalition of $2 million founders and CEOs who can sit in sweltering heat and argue for why community health workers deserve a line item in the district budget.

When the run ended that morning, and we stood with our hands on our hips in the hotel parking lot, I asked the question that had been smoldering the whole time.

“So, what happened,” I said. “With the donor. The one you fed the line about scale and the RCT and AI.”

She blinked once. A pirate’s smile appeared. “Oh, he lapped it up,” she said. “Loved every word. Said that as soon as he got back to Chicago, he would suggest to his committee with a $10 million grant.”

Then she winked like an actress stepping offstage and disappeared into the hotel, ready to perform development’s most enduring illusion: that chasing scale is the same thing as fighting the long defeat.

Later that day a donor listened to the whole idea of raising enough unrestricted funding to sufficiency and seed an ecosystem, before finishing his coffee and ending the meeting by shaking his head and straightening his tie, “Gutsiest move I ever saw, man.”

“Zack,” he said as he stuffed his notebook away in his leather attaché, “I gotta tell you this, you know, you’re a lot like black licorice. Not a lot of people like black licorice, but the people who do, really like it.”

Which is, among other things, a pretty good name for an NGO.

Over the past decade, an awareness of harm to Native communities in this country has grown within the social sector. In our work at the Kataly Foundation, we now often hear people offer land acknowledgments, naming the tribe on whose land they live, at the start of calls and webinars. Events and conferences we attend also frequently begin with tributes and celebrations of Indigenous people. Alongside these acknowledgements is an increasing recognition of the movement to return Native land to Native communities, often referred to as Land Back.

The NDN Collective, an Indigenous-led organization, defines land back as “a movement that has existed for generations with a long legacy of organizing and sacrifice to get Indigenous Lands back into Indigenous hands.” This process is also often referred to as rematriation, defined by Corrina Gould, co-founder of Sogorea Te’ Land Trust and Tribal Chair for the Confederated Villages of Lisjan, as “work to restore sacred relationships between Indigenous people and our ancestral land, honoring our matrilineal societies, and in opposition of patriarchal violence and dynamics.”

These efforts aim to reestablish Indigenous self-governance and political authority over territories, to advocate for communal land ownership, and to preserve language and traditions.

Interest in this movement is growing and philanthropy has the potential to play a much greater role in resourcing Native communities for land rematriation. As funders consider how to engage, it is essential to understand that the journey through rematriation is as delicate and complex as it is powerful and restorative.

This article explores the background, process, and lessons learned from one land back initiative with the Nisenan (nee-see-naan) Tribe, as well as key takeaways to consider for future efforts.

The History of the Nisenan Tribe and Yulića

For tribes like the Nisenan, who have long been erased from both land and legal systems, reclaiming ancestral territory moves beyond justice. It is cultural survival.

The Nisenan are the Indigenous peoples of what is now referred to as the Sierra Nevada foothills. Their tribe and way of life was severely impacted by the 1849 gold rush, which reduced their population from 9,500 tribal members to 500 in the span of less than two decades. In 1913, the Nisenan Tribe was granted “federal recognition” and allotted 76 acres for their reservation, the Nevada City Rancheria. But in 1964, the federal government used the Rancheria Act to overturn that recognition and auctioned off their reservation. Afterwards, the Nisenan Tribe became nearly invisible on their own homelands. Because land is foundational to every Indigenous community’s way of life, without a continued connection in the coming generations, the tribe would cease to exist.

Yulića (you-lee-cha), one of many sacred Nisenan sites, was part of a 232-acre parcel of land that the Quakers owned and where they built the John Woolman School at Sierra Friends Center. Founded in the early 1960s by visionary Quakers from the San Francisco Bay Area, the school, retreat center, and gathering place was a living embodiment of Quaker values of peace, simplicity, stewardship, and equality. For more than half a century, the campus served as a hub for Quaker education, gatherings, youth programs, and spiritual development.

In 2020, a devastating fire severely damaged the land and infrastructure of the center. This fire, in combination with the effects of the COVID-19 pandemic, led to mounting financial strain for the Woolman School. In 2022, the Woolman board decided to shut down all programming at the center and sell the property. When they began considering potential next steps, they were guided by both their Quaker values and the land’s deeper history, beginning their exploration of rematriating the land to the local Nisenan Tribe.

The Land Back Process and Challenges

Shelley Covert, Nevada City Rancheria Tribal Council Secretary and executive director of California Heritage: Indigenous Research Project (CHIRP), first met the Quaker community through a Quaker initiative called “Right Relations.” This initiative provided Quaker community members opportunities to learn about the Quaker’s history with Indigenous communities, including their role in running Indian boarding schools and the deculturalization of Indigenous communities, from Indigenous community members. When the Woolman board decided to sell the center, Shelly reached out to contacts she had met through the initiative to ask them if they would be willing to rematriate the land to her tribe.

Initially, the Woolman board and broader Quaker community understood rematriation primarily as synonymous with gifting land. However, they came to understand that rematriation can take multiple forms, especially when it prioritizes Indigenous sovereignty, equitable terms, and long-term healing. Some in the greater Quaker community wanted Woolman to gift the land to the tribe, but in order to settle Woolman’s debts, the board ultimately decided a sale would be necessary.

CHIRP entered the rematriation discussions with intention and respect for multiple perspectives. While they acknowledge the legacy of Indigenous Americans’ genocide and many Indigenous tribes being landless in their homelands, they also understand the reality that many private property owners cannot afford to gift their homes or land to Indigenous tribes, as was the case with the Woolman School. For this transaction, rematriation meant the tribe was given the first right of purchase, creating space for CHIRP to raise funds without competition, and the land was offered to the tribe at a price roughly half of the estimated market value.

Yet before any funds were raised, the tribe had to gain consensus on accepting donations for the capital campaign, which they called “Homeland Return.” Some members saw the funds as an act of goodwill, while others did not want to be recipients of what they viewed as charity. However, once there was an agreement amongst the tribe, CHIRP launched its campaign and began reaching out to allies and the broader community to participate.

Because the Nevada City Rancheria Nisenan Tribe is not federally recognized and not able to directly hold land or accept funds to purchase land, CHIRP, with its nonprofit status, became the legal vehicle for this land purchase.

Lina Shalabi, program officer for the Restorative Economies Fund at the Kataly Foundation, first learned about the land back effort from a Quaker in her community who grew up going to the retreat center. The Kataly Foundation, whose mission is to support the self-determination of Black and Indigenous communities, as well as all people of color, has funded multiple rematriation and land back efforts since it was founded in 2018. Each one has been unique and required different levels of involvement.

When Lina heard the Woolman board was offering the tribe the first right of purchase, she shared the funding opportunity with Kataly’s Restorative Economies Fund and the Mindfulness and Healing Justice program. Both collaborated to fund this effort, making a $565,000 grant to CHIRP in early 2024.

Despite strong goodwill from both the tribe and Woolman board, there were tense moments that stalled negotiations throughout the process. Cassandra Ferrera, a realtor, facilitator, and co-founder of Center for Ethical Land Transition (CELT), was brought in as a mediator after the process had reached a stalemate. CELT brings technical knowledge and a deep cultural awareness to land transitions, ensuring transactions are reparative, relational, and rooted in justice. Since no two transitions are the same, CELT’s approach is grounded in openness, trust-building, and the honoring of Indigenous leadership.

Using CELT’s framework, A Compass for Ethical Land Transitions, Ferrera introduced a shared vocabulary that emphasized relationship over transaction, and healing over haste.

This new, more relational lens allowed negotiations to move forward. When local concerns, such as casino development, forest management, and numerous regulatory challenges emerged, each was addressed with respect and shared intentions for the land. CELT’s role also ensured that the real estate and legal mechanics did not overpower Indigenous intention and sovereignty. Throughout the process, Ferrera centered Shelly Covert’s leadership and voice.

With CELT’s guidance, the Woolman board and CHIRP navigated a demanding, 12-month journey involving extensive coordination surrounding infrastructure, insurance, permitting, land conditions, and maintenance. Everyone involved, including the real estate professionals, recognized it as one of the most complex transactions they had ever encountered.

After the two groups entered into a contract, the broader community, including private and public funders and donors, rallied around the tribe’s vision of land justice. Yulića was successfully transferred into Indigenous hands.

The relationship that formed between the Nisenan Tribe and the Quakers during the land sale provided a deepened mutual understanding of their respective communities and continues beyond the land transfer. As part of the final negotiations, it was agreed upon that one of the Quaker elders would continue to live on the land and that the local Quaker group could gather on the land as tenants of the meeting house. Several Woolman board members and Quaker community members remain active supporters of CHIRP and its mission to preserve, protect, and perpetuate Nisenan culture.

Yulića now provides a safe and private place for ceremonies that have not been performed publicly in over a century. Cultural revitalization, especially amongst the Tribe’s youth, is central to CHIRP’s vision for the land and growing community. Most recently, CHIRP was awarded a three-year youth programming, substance abuse, and culture revitalization grant as they continue to inhabit the land.

In the long term, the vision is for Yulića to serve as tribal housing, with elders having first access to any completed structures. There is also a plan for an internal wellness hub where tribal members can come together for cultural practices and healing from historical trauma. The ultimate hope is to piece together enough parcels of land with springs, wetlands, and burning grounds to reestablish a full cultural landscape that will allow the tribe to live in harmony on the land as their ancestors once did.

Lessons for Future Rematriation Efforts

Since Native communities carry the heaviest cultural and emotional burden in land back initiatives, it is imperative to center Indigenous voices and experiences throughout the entire process. Dominant systems can often override or minimize Native leadership, so a more relational process should supersede legal and logical steps.

Funders should defer to Indigenous leadership to offer guidance for how much or little engagement they desire, instead of making assumptions about what the tribe wants or needs. Building strong, trust-based relationships with Native communities before a land deal is discussed is enormously beneficial in this work. The dynamics that follow allow for proactive communication and respect for boundaries that can lead to successful rematriation efforts.

In many cases, facilitators are essential for trust to be established and maintained during the process. For this project, CELT was invaluable. Cassandra helped to create a shared language and understanding between the tribe, the funders, and others when talks stalled. If real estate and legal professionals, for example, are unfamiliar with Indigenous values or lack cultural sensitivity, facilitators can step in to offer explanation and repair. Without this unique support, rematriation efforts can stall or, even worse, replicate harm.

Involved parties must also be open-minded about how expectations for what works in the dominant culture must be adjusted to each unique circumstance. Western real estate systems and legal norms are not designed for Indigenous ways of relating to the land. This process is slower, more intuitive, and more holistic. Flexibility and boldness to engage in new, helpful ways are necessary.

As tribes continue to build out their vision for their people, allies have many opportunities to come alongside this work. Landowners can consider donating land or offering it to Indigenous communities at a discounted rate. Individuals and organizations can stay connected to the journey of healing the land after the sale to learn about their evolving needs. Some choose to make ongoing financial contributions to tribes; for example, the Shuumi land tax is a voluntary payment made by non-Indigenous residents of the Lisjan Territory in the San Francisco Bay Area that helps Sogorea Te’ Land Trust sustain its work of education, advocacy, and stewardship.

A New, Strategic Vision for Philanthropy

Rematriation is not a new idea in philanthropy, however there is much more that can be done. Namely, funders can shift their mindset to the longer term through their grant-making. The biggest lesson Kataly has learned in rematriation efforts is the amount of support that is needed beyond the process of purchasing the land. Land transitions tend to rally a lot of excitement and support, as the need is definable and obvious. But the momentum and celebration tend to drop off quickly after the title transfer. It is a huge milestone, but it is only the beginning of cultural revitalization and community care.

A much longer, more emotionally taxing chapter follows—one of healing the land, and nurturing the emotional and spiritual healing of the tribe. Many Indigenous groups are descendants of those who have survived genocide and, despite living in modern times, are not fully assimilated into Western culture. Shelly Covert shared that “getting the land has given us space to process how much is gone and who is gone.” Rematriation is undoubtedly cause for celebration, but being on the land also brings grief; there is a reckoning of all that has been lost in both traditions and generations.

Funders can support land back initiatives by strategically making more multi-year grants to tribes after land has been rematriated, alongside one-time capital contributions. Funding can go beyond the requisite expenses of insurance, property taxes, and fire mitigation into a more interconnected perspective that supports Indigenous communities’ healing with their ancient ties to the land. Nwamaka Agbo, Kataly Foundation’s CEO, believes that to do this work on a generational scale, it needs “a response commensurate with the harm you are trying to solve.” Funders can shift into a longer-term vision involving patient investment that will make this work truly successful.

While no formal dynamic model exists for land rematriation, Yulića added to a growing body of lessons and frameworks CELT is translating into case studies and public learning tools to support the broader land justice movement. By showing up consistently, listening deeply, and respecting sovereignty as non-negotiable elements of ethical land return, we can be vessels that identify and remove barriers, support the essential work of more intermediaries like CELT, and engage in political education within the philanthropy sector to grow the ecosystem of people and organizations funding this work.

As individuals, we can be truth-tellers, willingly sharing the United States’ history of genocide and displacement of Indigenous, Black, and other communities who have faced marginalization.

Looking to the Future

Momentum is building for land back opportunities, and as funders become increasingly interested in supporting such efforts, they should be aware of the complexities that are inherent to the process. The rematriation of Yulića was far from simple, yet it highlights what is possible when relationship, respect, and justice guide the process. Understandably, CHIRP believes that “rematriation” in its truest sense still remains an aspiration. Their hope is that the word will someday reflect restorative and healing justice in the absence of financial barriers to tribes.

Yulića’s return to the Nisenan Tribe was not a perfect model, but it is a powerful one. It shows there is a complexity to land back that goes beyond simply moving money. It reflects both the limitations and the possibilities of land rematriation within our current legal and economic systems and realities. Ultimately, by centering the tribe’s vision and leadership, this effort lays the groundwork for future land back efforts and provides an outline of how land back projects can be better held by funders and sellers.

For at least two decades, one question has structured much of how philanthropy and the social innovation ecosystem think about change: Can it scale? The question appears in grant applications, accelerator programs, and strategy documents. It makes sense: If a solution works for one community, surely the ethical imperative is to help many more? In a world of vast unmet needs, scale promises efficiency, reach, and speed.

Yet something curious has happened as this logic has spread. Increasingly, promising ideas, organizations, and forms of collective action are all filtered through the same lens, held to the same standard. If it cannot scale, why would it be worth investing in?

This assumption has reshaped the architecture of civil society. It has influenced what kinds of organizations get funded, what kinds of knowledge are valued, and even how social problems themselves are defined. But as geopolitical instability grows, inequality deepens, and social systems fracture in new ways—as the world, in short, ceases to behave like a scalable system—it is time to ask the uncomfortable question: Must all social innovation be designed to scale? Where does “scale thinking” make sense, and where must we re-imagine our way of thinking about progress and innovation?

When Scale Is the Only Default Logic

Scale has become such a powerful organizing idea in philanthropy and development because, at its core, scale thinking is built around growth: the idea that a successful system is one that can reach far more people without a proportional increase in resources. In this framing, the most valuable solutions are those that can expand rapidly while maintaining efficiency. Measurement therefore becomes inseparable from design. If growth is the goal, the ability to demonstrate growth, through metrics such as users reached, households served, hectares restored, or units delivered, becomes central to how value is assessed.

This orientation toward scale has deep roots in development practice. Over the past three decades, governments and development institutions have increasingly searched for replicable models that can be transferred across geographies. Microfinance is one of the most cited examples. What began as locally embedded lending groups evolved into large-scale financial systems serving millions of clients worldwide, supported by standardized metrics such as repayment rates and borrower numbers.

These proof points have guided many of the trends that we now see around scale thinking in the social sector. If an intervention works in one place, the next question quickly becomes whether it can be replicated elsewhere at scale.

Yet researchers studying social innovation suggest that impact spreads through multiple pathways. They distinguish between scaling out (replication across sites), scaling up (influencing policies and institutions), and scaling deep (shifting relationships, cultural norms, and local practices). Other scholars describe scaling wide, where ideas spread through decentralized networks rather than a single expanding organization.

Each pathway has its own role to play. However, operational demands of scale thinking require one to think about some of the building blocks consistently: replicability, standardization, and measurable outputs. The implication is often that complex social processes may need to be simplified into stable models that can travel across contexts, often referred to as “datafication of civil society” by sociologists.

In practice, this can shape which kinds of solutions are prioritized, which organizations receive support, and how social problems themselves come to be defined.

Community organizing, collective stewardship, and cultural shifts rarely translate into easily tracked metrics. For example, take the case of watershed restoration. Building check dams and recharge structures can scale quickly across districts and produce impressive numbers, such as hectares treated and structures built. But whether those gains last often depends on something less visible: local agreements about groundwater use, crop choices in dry years, or who decides when a borewell goes deeper. These decisions are negotiated through trust, local institutions, and leadership within communities. Often harder to count, but they often determine whether resilience endures.

The question, then, is what do we stand to lose if scale thinking becomes the predominant lens of looking at social change? When scalability matters, what kinds of change can it meaningfully carry? What might progress look like if impact were judged not only by how far a solution travels, but also by how well it strengthens the systems around it: the communities, ecosystems, and institutions that allow change to endure?

A World That No Longer Behaves Like a Scalable System

The limits of scale thinking are becoming clearer as the world itself becomes less predictable. Climate volatility, geopolitical fragmentation, and economic shocks are producing systems that behave less like stable machines and more like living ecosystems. In such conditions, solutions designed once and replicated everywhere can quickly reach their limits. What communities need is the capacity to adapt: to learn, reorganize, and respond as circumstances change.

Societies rarely transform through replication alone. Change more often emerges from ecosystems of actors, relationships, and institutions that learn, negotiate, and adapt within specific places. When innovation begins with the realities of people and landscapes, rather than with the assumption that solutions must scale, different possibilities come into view.

For philanthropy, the task may not be to simply support what works at scale, but to cultivate the conditions in which many forms of change can take root. One way to think about this is through navigation. In uncertain waters, ships matter. But ships alone cannot chart the course. They rely on lighthouses that illuminate shifting terrain and bridges that connect otherwise isolated efforts. Civil society increasingly needs this kind of infrastructure: institutions that help actors see the landscape clearly and work together across it. Yet philanthropy still tends to fund the ships (the organizations delivering visible programs) while the quieter systems that help the fleet navigate together remain underbuilt.

What Philanthropy Can Do Differently

1. Fund the bridges. Philanthropy can invest more deliberately in social infrastructure: convening platforms, shared governance systems, and knowledge networks that allow many actors to collaborate. The Ecological Restoration Alliance, for instance, brings together restoration practitioners, scientists, and community organizations to develop shared protocols and learning systems across landscapes. Rather than scaling a single organization, the alliance strengthens the field’s ability to act collectively.
   
2. Back technology that communities steward. Digital platforms can scale while still centering community agency. The local disaster mapping effort in Indonesia, which builds on participatory disaster-mapping approaches pioneered by platforms like PetaBencana, enables citizens to report hazards in real time and contribute to open disaster maps used by communities and governments. The technology works precisely because it is co-designed with users and embedded in local response systems rather than imposed from above.
   
3. Invest in the commons. Shared resources such as open data systems, restoration protocols, training networks, and collaborative tools often act as the soil from which innovation grows. One example is CoRE Stack, developed by the Commons Tech Foundation, which provides open, modular digital infrastructure designed specifically for community-led organizations. Rather than building proprietary platforms, CoRE Stack focuses on shared digital public goods, identity systems, registries, consent layers, and governance protocols that many actors can adapt for their own contexts. Funding such commons-based infrastructure enables diverse organizations to collaborate and innovate without each having to build their own technology from scratch.
   
4. Build the missing middle. Between grassroots organizations and large global institutions sits a fragile but critical layer of intermediaries: regional networks, knowledge hubs, and field-building organizations that translate ideas across contexts. These actors mentor emerging groups, document learning, and maintain collaboration across ecosystems of practice. For example, the Consortium for Agroecological Transformation exemplifies this approach by supporting networks of farmers, researchers, and grassroots organizations to transition agricultural landscapes toward agroecology.

Looking Beyond Scale

Scale thinking has its place. Some challenges, such as mass vaccination campaigns, disaster early-warning systems, or digital infrastructure for financial inclusion, depend on solutions that can move rapidly across vast populations.

But many of the transformations we now seek from restoring degraded landscapes to rebuilding social trust do not travel in quite the same way. They are shaped slowly on the ground: through experiments that falter before they succeed, through neighbors learning how to respond together in moments of stress, and through local civil society organizations that stay present long after the urgency of a crisis fades. Over time, these everyday negotiations over water, livelihoods, risk, and responsibility begin to form something more durable. Because when crises arrive, systems rarely rise to the occasion overnight; they rise to the level of readiness that has quietly been built in ordinary times, through relationships, trust, and shared norms.

In a world defined by complexity and uncertainty, the task ahead may lie as much in cultivating these enabling conditions as in expanding solutions themselves—strengthening the lighthouses and bridges that help the whole fleet find its way.

In the morning hours, when the streets of most cities are at their busiest, Gunsan is quiet. Cars appear only intermittently on the roads, and empty shops with fading signs outnumber the ones that are still open. Restaurants have ample seating even at lunchtime, and vacant houses are becoming more common along the side streets. The massive cranes and port facilities lining the harbor serve mainly as reminders of the city’s past rather than as working infrastructure.

In a city that has lost its sense of motion, speaking about possibility is no easy task. But in 2019, a Korean organization specializing in entrepreneurship education, Underdogs, saw an opportunity to restore Gunsan’s vitality. The idea was to first create an environment where young entrepreneurs could identify local social challenges through their own distinct lenses, and then work to materialize business ideas aimed at solving those problems. Underdogs theorized that this would generate countless experiments, narratives of success and failure, and new relationships and networks—and that the dynamic energy produced through entrepreneurial activity would reanimate the city.

The organization’s Localize Gunsan initiative proved out this theory. In just three years, 17,774 people visited its centralized community and co-working space. Entrepreneurs and local groups worked together to develop a total of 502 Gunsan-related services, and 26 teams opened stores and spaces by activating underused properties.

The mission and structure of these efforts varied widely. One young entrepreneur created Gunsan Sumgim, a seaweed brand, after seeing his father’s locally grown seaweed distributed under other regions’ specialty labels. The Gunsan Bam Cooperative, which launched in response to the lack of cultural life for young people in areas that become even emptier at night, opened a food zone in the center of Gunsan’s tourist district and organized events like World Cup watch parties and outdoor concerts. And Hammer Design, founded by a third-generation carpenter who felt a deep concern over historic buildings falling into abandonment, transformed vacant structures into spaces for Localize Gunsan startup teams.

These and other projects succeeded in infusing Gunsan with new economic and social energy. But developing an effective entrepreneurial ecosystem and finding ways to actively counter community-level and psychological inertia were essential to bringing them to life. Localize Gunsan highlights the power of multi-layered, longer-term support for entrepreneurs, and offers both inspiration and lessons for funders, entrepreneurs, and communities looking to revitalize declining cities.

From Industrial Powerhouse to Structural Decline

Gunsan is a port city located on the west coast of the Korean Peninsula. With the push for heavy and chemical industrialization in the 1970s and 1980s, Korean businesses established large-scale facilities—including the Hyundai Heavy Industries shipyard and Korea GM—in different areas of the city, generating stable jobs in the shipbuilding, automobile, and machinery industries. At its peak, Gunsan’s production output reached 12 trillion won (about $8.9 billion), accounting for 43 percent of total exports from Jeollabuk-do, a province in southwestern Korea. However, in 2018, the withdrawal of two major factories marked the end of Gunsan’s prosperity. Employees and tens of thousands of residents who were connected to local supply chains lost their jobs. Many left the area in search of new jobs, weakening the local economic, educational, and cultural ecosystems.

Other regions of Korea have experienced similar decline due to deindustrialization. Cities that prioritized manufacturing during this era unified around major firms, leaving them with little capacity to diversify and absorb the risk of corporate withdrawal. Today, as a result of lower birthrates, an aging population, and a continued concentration of people in the Seoul metropolitan area, 27 percent of Korea’s regions face 소멸위험지역’, or “the crisis of local extinction,” meaning their ability to function as self-sustaining communities is at risk. Local governments have tried to attract young people through subsidies and an array of policy measures, but these efforts have rarely translated into sustained settlement.

Building an Entrepreneurial Ecosystem

Rather than saying, ‘I’m going to change Gunsan,’” says Underdogs CEO Sangrae Cho, “many people came [to the initiative] saying, ‘I want to try something fun—something different.’” Sangrae explains that applicants for Localize Gunsan were motivated less by “overcoming regional crisis” and more by “trying to reshape their own lives.” For young people exploring possibility, moving to a new city or region can open up space for experimentation. But for them to perceive it as a place of opportunity, the resources and supports that allow for experimentation must come with it.

Founded in 2015, Underdogs has supported the creation of social enterprises and social ventures across a range of social issues. Since its establishment, Underdogs has backed the growth of numerous organizations through incubating and accelerating programs focused on youth and social innovation, as well as region-based entrepreneurship projects developed in collaboration with public and private partners. In particular, it has continually developed and refined practice-centered entrepreneurship education methodologies—moving beyond theory-based instruction—in response to rapidly changing social problems and operating environments.

Underdogs judged that entrepreneurs could reframe the many challenges Gunsan faced as diverse opportunities to test and expand new ideas. It also expected that in a city where youth outmigration was accelerating, young entrepreneurs would be valuable human assets in their own right—and that attracting them to the area could be a win-win strategy for both the place and the entrepreneurs.

To move the idea forward, Underdogs adopted the role of a pacemaker organization, or pacer. The SSIR article “Pacing Entrepreneurs to Success” describes pacers as entrepreneurial support organizations that provide long-term services to enable companies in emerging markets achieve their goals. Surviving in an existing market is difficult enough; achieving goals while building a new market is even harder. Pacers commit to support lasting from one year to a lifetime, including continuous learning opportunities, access to business networks, peer connections, and customized services tailored to demand.

In the Korean context, Underdogs supports young entrepreneurs who are pioneering the “emerging markets” of deindustrialized cities to achieve regional revitalization. In Gunsan, it aimed to create an ecosystem where entrepreneurs could push beyond local constraints—an environment where the work of funders, entrepreneurs, and community members complemented one another and created conditions in which entrepreneurs could persist.

Underdogs’ collaboration with SK Innovation E&S, one of Korea’s leading conglomerate affiliates, played a major role in ensuring that Localize Gunsan was compelling to young entrepreneurs. As part of its social contribution efforts, the company provided stable investment backed by corporate capital to Localize Gunsan, and offered participants comprehensive and realistic supports, including housing and workspace, business funding, and entrepreneurship education. It also connected entrepreneurs to Social Value Connect, South Korea’s largest platform for sharing and scaling social value, and the SK Happiness Foundation, and supported market access so that businesses could expand beyond the local area to the national level.

Above all, SK Innovation E&S upheld the principles of “support, but do not interfere” and a three-year commitment. This simplified decision-making processes and enabled Underdogs’ distinctive speed and intensity to fully manifest. Rather than demanding immediate results, it encouraged entrepreneurs to set key performance indicators related to sustainable growth. It also supported an annual Localize Festival, a celebration and platform led by Localize Gunsan entrepreneurs in partnership with local small business owners, where entrepreneurs could test ideas in real community settings, build and renew local relationships, and reflect on how their roles in the local ecosystem were evolving. This annual rhythm reinforced entrepreneurs’ sense of ownership and accountability to place, normalized iteration and adjustment over time, and aligned with the program’s longer-term commitment to growth over immediate results—ultimately creating conditions in which entrepreneurial capability could deepen and mature. In these ways, SK Innovation E&S combined private-sector agility with corporate capital and networks to create a field of play where entrepreneurs could build capability and grow.

Meanwhile, Local Friendly, one of the teams of entrepreneurs participating in Localize Gunsan, began connecting entrepreneurs with the local community. Led by Sujin Kim, an entrepreneur with a background as a Young Women's Christian Association activist, Local Friendly hosted convivial shared meals—such as tteokbokki (simmered rice cake) and samgyetang (ginseng chicken soup) parties—and oversaw Do It Together, an urban regeneration-style project in which local youth and entrepreneurs came together to renovate vacant buildings. The team’s nonprofit-activist identity was evident throughout their work—so much so that other entrepreneurs would ask, “Why are you working so hard on something that doesn’t make money?” The hospitality and connections the group cultivated helped Localize Gunsan’s entrepreneurs cohere to a tightly bonded youth community that ran together within the ecosystem and energized one another.

The contributions of local coach Kwon-neung Cho and Professor Zoo-sun Yoon of Chungnam National University’s Department of Architecture were also important. As a Gunsan-born entrepreneur, Cho played a role in helping entrepreneurs experience the city’s appeal, build closer relationships with the local community, and settle in more securely. He also provided practical advice and support for starting and operating businesses in the region, helping entrepreneurs reduce trial and error along the way. Meanwhile, Professor Yoon introduced domestic and international cases to Underdogs and the entrepreneurs, and interpreted the distinctive characteristics and significance of Localize Gunsan in theoretical terms, strengthening confidence in the project’s overall direction.

Finally, the Gunsan city government provided support so that Localize Gunsan’s entrepreneurs could go the extra mile. Entrepreneurs who registered as Gunsan residents became eligible for city-operated programs such as the Startup Hope Nurturing Project, which provided subsidies to young entrepreneurs, and the Youth Stay Program, which offered near-free, one-room studios in which to live. Notably, the design of Youth Stay Program emerged when the city was exploring support options and a young entrepreneur conveyed entrepreneurs’ housing struggles, demonstrating how a public institution can identify needs through youth voices and translate them into policy.

Breaking Through Inertia

This ecosystem of sustained support laid the groundwork for Localize Gunsan. But for entrepreneurs to generate regional innovation in Gunsan, they had to overcome multiple layers of inertia. At the community level, inertia included a declining local economy and stagnant mood, increasing youth outmigration, and wariness toward outsiders. At the individual level, entrepreneurs faced psychological inertia—fear of failure and a desire to maintain stability—as well as cognitive inertia, or overconfidence in existing knowledge and learned patterns of thinking.

To break through these barriers and generate dynamism, Underdogs developed a practice-centered, entrepreneurship education approach called “act-preneurship” that prioritizes four practices: immersion, peer learning, action, and adaptability. Below is a closer look at each of these in action.

1. Design for immersion. Entrepreneurship is creative work, and creation demands immersion and focus. Designing well for it requires both the “hardware” of physical space to initiate immersion and the “software” of relationships— interactions, culture, and emotional bonds—to sustain it.

Before Localize Gunsan formally launched, Underdogs leased a three-story building to serve as a gravitational center that made immersion possible. It designed the first floor to accommodate a café and a space for coaching and education for entrepreneurs, and designated the second floor as a coworking space where entrepreneurs could work at any time day or night. A shared kitchen on the third floor allowed participants to cook and eat together, and the rooftop was well-suited for parties. Underdogs also secured nearby guesthouse lodging so that Localize Gunsan entrepreneurs coming from outside the city had a place to live. This meant that, rather than experiencing work as something separate from life, participants could develop a sense of coherence between what they did and how they lived. Routines, relationships, and ways of thinking could begin to revolve around the work they were engaged in, and in turn, those lived experiences could continuously inform and reshape the work itself. Underdogs CEO Junghun Kim explains: “At first, there were a lot of complaints. But we believed that for an entrepreneurial community to form, above all else, it was essential to spend an absolute amount of time together.”

Underdogs also stationed an operator, or community host, at the building to closely observe entrepreneurs and provide tangible and intangible supports, such as connecting them to mentors and procuring relocation funding for participants who needed to move due to space constraints. In the first year, one of the operators, Seul-ki Lee, noticed that working, eating, and sleeping in such close proximity effectively fueled entrepreneurs’ immersion and creativity, but that their stamina and energy declined overall. In response, she organized a club initiative to help participants take mental breaks and regain momentum through rest and play. Lee reflects, “Since we were starting a new life in a new place, I realized we needed to support not only entrepreneurship itself, but also the overall conditions that made it possible to live well in Gunsan.”

2. Build capacity through peer learning. Population decline in deindustrialized cities naturally weakens local talent, information, resources, and networks, and local-government revitalization programs often restrict eligibility to residents. Well-designed peer learning efforts can bring the strength and diversity needed to produce creative and effective local solutions. Building the right environment and structure can increase the frequency of contact and density of relationships, and the right composition of peer groups can improve the depth of learning and the quality of growth.

During the recruitment process, Underdogs created entrepreneurial teams composed of entrepreneurs with projects in different stages of development, with different areas of focus, and from different regions. Teams included new entrepreneurs and existing founders, split into incubating and accelerating tracks. Startup projects ranged from game content for tourists, travel magazines, and video production, to cat-friendly villages, food-truck cooperatives, and community hotels. By region, 11 teams were from Gunsan and 15 were from outside.

These teams shared helpful ideas and feedback formally and informally throughout the program, and their diversity fueled growth. For example, entrepreneurs born and raised in Gunsan engaged with entrepreneurs who had accumulated experiences in the metropolis of Seoul. While the Gunsan-born entrepreneurs lacked the experience and career background of their Seoul counterparts, they connected Seoul-based entrepreneurs with local networks and shared insights only locals would know.

“We saw outcomes because the social mix worked,” Kim says. “Regardless of individual success or failure, peer learning occurred as people watched and learned how others actually made things happen.” An entrepreneur who opened a photo studio through Localize Gunsan recalls: “If the other entrepreneurs hadn’t been there, I don’t think I would have rented a space and opened a studio on my own. As a consumer, I was used to only seeing finished products and services. Watching other teams go through the startup process made me realize, ‘This is how it works. Everyone starts like this. You have to build it piece by piece.’”

Underdogs also encouraged collaboration between teams. It assigned different teams to plan collaborations with others, and grouped together teams facing similar problems. These efforts to actively connect teams in different ways deepened the entrepreneurs’ understanding of one another and of each other’s business ideas, and opened up new possibilities. For example, the design-focused Blue Mustard Studio collaborated with Mangchi Design, an enterprise specializing in remodeling idle spaces, to renovate abandoned houses in the city center. One entrepreneur, who collaborated with another startup team, explains, “Because we knew where and how the other team was running their business, we could pinpoint exactly where synergy with our own business might emerge.”

3. Promoting action, not words. Creating new dynamism in a city that has lost its vitality can give rise to tension and conflict between entrepreneurs and the local community. “When we first came to Gunsan,” recalls Underdogs Partner Daeun Park, “the local community looked at us with suspicion. … And there were major concerns that we might overlap with existing entrepreneurs in the area.” Building trust and ensuring that different community members see each other not as competitors but as partners requires that entrepreneurs actively and continuously connect with residents, merchants, and other entrepreneurs.

To clearly signal from the outset that Localize Gunsan would collaborate rather than compete with local small businesses, for example, Underdogs excluded applicants hoping to enter the food and beverage sector, since most of Gunsan’s existing businesses operated in that space. Instead, it selected Gunsan-based entrepreneurs and teams whose business models could coexist with and benefit the local community. In addition, as part of orientation, entrepreneurs walked around Wolmyeong-dong, the area where the centralized community and co-working space was located, greeting residents and handing out rainbow-colored rice cakes. They also created and shared specific “living rules,” including smiling and greeting residents first, making one Gunsan acquaintance per day, and communicating kindly with neighbors.

Through consistent efforts to expand points of contact, relationships with residents began to change. One entrepreneur describes how actively engaging with community members throughout the entire entrepreneurial process can change mindsets on both sides: “When I talk with local residents, I listen carefully and respond strongly. That attitude helps me even when I work elsewhere. It’s like I’ve become sly—but also more seasoned and flexible. Even the convenience store owner, who’s now a regular in my life, used to say, ‘Why are you here? Just go to Seoul.’ Now, when I stay in Gunsan during holidays, he takes care of me and says, ‘Gunsan is a good place to live.’”

Underdogs’ emphasis on action accelerated the speed of trust-building in the community and, in turn, the development of the entrepreneurs’ work. Rather than sitting in an office polishing proposal language on a laptop, the repeated act of meeting residents, stakeholders, and tourists on the street as an essential part of testing and refining ideas helped entrepreneurs grow and made their businesses more sustainable. Cho Kwonyung, a Gunsan-native entrepreneur, describes Underdogs’ action-first coaching as “brutal.” “They treat you like a friend, but when it’s coaching time, they push hard. When entrepreneurs came up with an idea, they’d say, ‘Go test it in the field,’ ‘Bring people and prove it.’ They’d conduct check-ins with entrepreneurs whether it was dawn or midnight.”

With constant prompting from Underdogs, the 26 teams gained a sense of belonging within the community that became a driving force, transforming their work and relationships in Gunsan from short-term projects into a part of life they wished to continue. Consequently, the community itself became a condition enabling sustainability. The entrepreneurs' continued presence and growth, in turn, created a virtuous cycle that further solidified the community.

4. Respond adaptively in crisis. The most effective strategy for preparing for an uncertain future is not sophisticated forecasting or perfect planning, but the embodied ability to sense change and adapt quickly. Just as K-pop artists endure intense training to build capability before they debut, a high-intensity coaching process strengthens entrepreneurs’ capacity to adapt. And since survival requires evolution, adaptive capacity is an essential competency for getting through crises that will continue to come.

Following its first, 13-week education program, and in line with its action-oriented style, Underdogs launched the Localize Festival—and event where entrepreneurs showcased their projects across the city and received real-time feedback from experts, residents, business partners, and tourists. The festival produced measurable outcomes—sales, visitor counts, media mentions—but it also created an unmeasured one: striking scenes that reversed the extinction anxiety hanging over Gunsan’s empty streets. Throughout the festival, communities inside and outside the region saw Gunsan’s young entrepreneurs as a force for revitalization.

However, the program’s second year brought a variable no one anticipated: the COVID-19 pandemic. For entrepreneurs who had worked largely through offline stores under the banner of revitalization, everything came to a halt. Movement between regions was restricted, and tourist foot traffic disappeared. The Underdogs coaching approach—verify results through execution, then revise and refine—no longer worked.

Shrinking revenue and an unpredictable outlook threatened the sustainability of the entrepreneurs’ new businesses. Yet at the same time, the flexibility and local understanding they had built through continuous, field-based learning proved their value. Some entrepreneurs shifted their business focus toward residents. For example, Wolmyeong Studio, which had taken concept photos for tourists, learned that Gunsan residents traveled to cities such as Jeonju, roughly 30 miles away, to take ID photos. In response, it began offering ID-photo services for local residents. Underdogs meanwhile converted the Localize Festival to an online format, showcasing projects in new ways. For example, the team selling Gunsan’s specialty seaweed shipped seaweed to people participating in the Localize Gunsan Festival online in advance and taught them how to grill it via live broadcast.

Underdogs also collaborated with entrepreneurs in Gunsan, Gangneung, and Jeju to introduce their local brands to residents in Seoul. And to help entrepreneurs persist through the crisis, Underdogs commissioned them to produce promotional programs—magazines, tours, and workshops—that publicized the Localize Gunsan project.

Sustaining Change

By establishing itself as a pacemaker organization and adopting these four practices, Underdogs succeeded in infusing the region with energy and innovation through Localize Gunsan. All 26 startup teams incubated and accelerated through Localize Gunsan completed the program.

In 2022, the formal education program of Localize Gunsan—which had supported and nurtured young entrepreneurs in the city for three years—came to an end. The intensive support and structured training of its early phase are no longer in place, but the relationships formed and the choices made through the project continue to shape the future.

“I decided to stay in Gunsan,” says Lee. “I’m renting the building we used during Localize Gunsan and trying to make something work there. I guess that makes me an entrepreneur now. Living in Gunsan, rather than Seoul, just feels a bit more interesting and enjoyable—and I wanted to keep going here.”

The inertia surrounding regional decline remains complex and deeply entrenched. Localize Gunsan proved effective in generating concentrated change over a short period of time through an act-preneurship strategy centered on external resources and a community of young entrepreneurs. Yet sustaining this momentum requires an integrated and organic support ecosystem that can be maintained over time. While the fact that a community of entrepreneurs—who have internalized a culture of action—has chosen to remain in Gunsan and continue experimenting is a significant outcome, it also leaves important questions unanswered.

What do entrepreneurs need to sustain their projects? How might the role of pacemaker organizations evolve? And how can cities build and continuously support a balanced support ecosystem rooted in local human resources, including residents, community groups, educational institutions, local businesses, and civil society organizations? Cities and regions like Gunsan now need to find ways to not simply maintain their speed of recovery, but to set a new pace for expanding local vitality.

A version of this story was originally published by SSIR Korea.

The stakes of professional development are well documented and often framed in terms of career ownership and individual responsibility. But professional development also unfolds within relationships and institutions that shape how people learn to exercise voice, authority, and disagreement. While many organizations promote the value of disagreement rhetorically, leaders often lack the skills to steward constructive disagreement themselves or, importantly, teach others how to disagree well.

Amid today’s rapid organizational, social, and technological change, leaders across sectors often observe that it has never been harder to lead. But it may also be harder to be a professional more broadly, as discontent with organizations and institutions becomes increasingly visible, particularly among younger workers. The question is not whether disagreement will emerge in organizations. It will. The question is whether leaders and teams will develop the capacity to engage with it constructively.

Developing this capacity is possible, and the necessary tools are at hand. Leaders can cultivate it by recognizing how power and influence shape interpersonal relationships, designing the conditions for voice, modeling the relational practices that make disagreement productive, and embedding these practices into everyday organizational routines.

Power, Dependence, and Influence in Work Relationships

Many early-career professionals enter organizations assuming that working hard, staying agreeable, and avoiding tension will lead to growth and recognition. However, these instincts can limit development and learning, both for individuals and for organizations that need diverse perspectives to adapt to the dynamism of even the most stable external environments.

This is not simply a matter of individual confidence or ambition. As decades of social science research show, context shapes agency. Unspoken rules about cultural norms determine who feels able to speak up, ask questions, or challenge assumptions. Left unaddressed, organizations inadvertently train people to stay silent precisely when they need to engage with and learn from constructive disagreement.

At the same time, recent societal-level tension has prompted debate. Sociologist Richard Emerson’s seminal work on power-dependence relations is helpful for leaders and team members alike in making sense of these tensions and how to move forward. Emerson emphasizes that power in organizations is rooted in patterns of dependence between people, and that power is neither inherently good nor bad. Rather, it describes a reality: To the extent that one party controls access to resources that another values, a power relationship exists.

In most organizations, power is strongly correlated with authority—the formal structures and roles that legitimize and shape power. But power and authority are not identical. Authority confers power, but power can exist without formal authority. Emerson also distinguishes influence from power as the use of power in relationships. Whether influence stabilizes trust and cohesion or deepens distance depends on how people exercise it.

Because influence shapes how others experience dependence in organizations, it also shapes whether disagreement feels possible, risky, or futile. For leaders, navigating these dynamics requires empathy—the ability to take on others' perspectives and understand their experiences, motivations, and concerns.

Importantly, leaders are not the only people who exercise influence within organizations. Team members also shape the dynamics of disagreement by how they interpret events and frame concerns, especially in moments of disagreement informed by intergroup differences. If they use influence carelessly—or weaponize it by attributing moments of interpersonal tension primarily to structural dynamics, bypassing the relational interaction itself—they can stifle other voices, even among those with formal authority.

Balancing Candor and Psychological Safety

Many organizations try to encourage openness by promoting norms of candor and straightforwardness, asking people to set aside ego and prioritize team outcomes over personal discomfort. However, promoting candor in ways that support both individual and collective well-being requires more deliberate effort. Disagreement does not emerge fully formed, nor does it improve simply because leaders grant team members permission to speak up. People learn how to disagree by observing what leaders reward, ignore, or subtly discourage.

Normalizing disagreement is a core tenet of creating a learning organization, one that facilitates the creation, acquisition, and transfer of knowledge through open discussion and systemic thinking. Although generally embraced as a management best practice, the specific ways organizations design and structure effective learning over time vary by context and by leadership approaches. One design principle in question is the extent to which organizations and leaders should support psychological safety—the shared belief that people can take interpersonal risks—alongside the evaluative pressures and accountability structures that sustain effort, candor, and direct feedback.

The investment management firm Bridgewater Associates illustrates this tension. Under the leadership of founder Ray Dalio, the firm built a culture explicitly designed to institutionalize disagreement across levels of hierarchy. The company implemented systems that supported “radical transparency” and “radical truth-telling,” with the aim of surfacing the best ideas and producing stronger organizational results. Managers frequently recorded meetings, which were archived and made broadly accessible within the organization; employees rated one another and their ideas in real time; and systems encouraged the acknowledgement of mistakes as a way to normalize learning from failure.

While many employees remained for decades and described the environment as intellectually rigorous and generative, others found the consistency of public feedback destabilizing, particularly early in their careers. Turnover among new employees was high, and those who stayed often described needing significant time to adapt to the firm’s norms of radical transparency.

A compelling comparison comes from the Wikimedia Foundation, which supports the Wikipedia volunteer community. The foundation relies on deliberative norms and encourages contributors to publicly debate sources and interpretations, often through extended dialogue. While this can slow decision-making, it ensures that disagreement remains grounded in evidence and shared standards rather than personal conflict. It also speaks to the importance of designing for disagreement with organizational strategy and operating models in mind. Wikimedia’s approach to disagreement is well-suited to its work on public knowledge sharing.

These cases raise design questions rather than verdicts: What leadership and staff practices best support the conditions under which disagreement remains productive?

Four Disciplines for Productive Disagreement

Managing disagreement well is not a one-time leadership intervention; it requires developing specific skills and abilities over time. The following four disciplines highlight areas where leaders and team members can build the habits and relational capacity that make disagreement a teachable practice.

1. Understand power, not just authority. For leaders, this means being curious about and cognizant of what team members value. For staff, it means understanding what colleagues, managers, and the organization value. Without this awareness, leaders and staff may misread where they or others have influence and raise concerns in ways that generate frustration rather than change.

In our work with organizations, we often see younger team members contest their organizations’ response to high-profile social issues. In many cases, they quickly gain peer support through internal forums or informal channels but bypass the leaders or structures responsible for decision-making. This limits their influence and can invite defensiveness rather than engagement.

Leaders face similar constraints in navigating power dynamics. A senior manager, for example, may privately agree with a team’s concern about a policy but lack unilateral authority to change it. Rather than dismissing the concern or promising action they cannot take, effective leaders should explain how the decision-making process works and where team members can apply their influence, ideally early on. By helping team members understand the distribution of authority and responsibility across the organization, leaders make latent power dynamics visible and help employees exercise voice more strategically and effectively in their context.

2. Practice inquiry before persuasion. It is important that leaders and team members approach disagreement with disciplined inquiry rather than immediate persuasion, and be honest and self-aware about their motivations for expressing dissent.

John Dewey, a foundational scholar of reflective thinking and individual and organizational learning, emphasized the importance of disciplined and honest inquiry and of discussing reflections with others. Without discussion, people are susceptible to their own biases about intentions. These and associated assumptions can lead people to engage others in ways that escalate disagreement into destructive conflict rather than supporting repair and shared learning.

A core question for staff to reflect on before expressing dissent is whether, by voicing their concerns, they intend to further the goals and work of a broader collective—the team, the organization, one or more formal or informal groups to which they belong, or some combination of these—or their own?

In our work with one organization, a long-tenured team member initially planned to criticize leaders in an organization-wide meeting for failing to listen to staff concerns. After discussing his concerns with colleagues newer to the organization, he recognized that most team members did not share his frustration and that it stemmed largely from how leaders had communicated prior decisions rather than the decisions themselves. Raising the issue as a question about how future decisions could better incorporate team input led to a far more constructive conversation with leadership.

3. Build and sustain trust through repair. Navigating and teaching disagreement requires that leaders first build a foundation of interpersonal trust—an environment where people feel known, respected, and taken seriously. Investing in meaningful conversations before conflict arises and consistently demonstrating curiosity, care, vulnerability, and follow-through create the conditions for people to express and listen to dissent in good faith.

Leaders can build trust between team members by handling tension well. Even when trust erodes, they can rebuild and even strengthen it by acknowledging the importance of relationships, repairing harm, and taking deliberate steps to create or restore the interpersonal capacity for candor, collaboration, and future disagreement.

Conflict-avoidant leaders may be inclined to simply forget moments when it is clear that trust has eroded, such as when someone bursts out during a verbal disagreement, does not feel accountable for a mistake, misunderstands expectations and intent, or causes relational harm. But leaving these moments unaddressed allows tension to accumulate, making future disagreements more difficult and personal. Rather than asking, “How do we move on?” leaders should ask, “What would it take to repair the relationship?”

4. Turn disagreement into deliberate practice. Leaders reinforce learning by creating opportunities to reflect with honesty after difficult conversations. They talk to team members about what worked and what did not, and what they would do differently next time. These debriefs turn isolated experiences into shared knowledge and build organizational muscle to navigate differences over time. Whether leaders can do this work depends greatly on their organization’s learning and development systems. Equally important is how leaders model engagement in these moments. Vulnerability and curiosity are not soft skills; they are leadership and instructional tools. When leaders acknowledge uncertainty, ask genuine questions, and share the areas in which they would like to grow to support their team and organizational goals, they make disagreement more possible and constructive for others. This does not mean oversharing or abandoning authority. Rather, it means that leaders demonstrate learning alongside their team members.

Turning Disagreement Into Collective Capacity

These disciplines help build interpersonal capacity, but they matter only if organizations treat that capacity as part of the system itself. Governance, compliance structures, strategic alignment, and cultural context all shape how organizations navigate disagreement. But none of these operate independently of human capacity.

Without the ability to engage with disagreement constructively, governance becomes performative, systems become punitive, alignment becomes coercive, and culture fractures under strain. At its core, disagreement is where power and influence become visible in everyday organizational life. Capacity does not replace structure. It makes structure viable.

By treating disagreement as an ongoing practice to develop and a teachable skill, leaders can turn moments of friction into opportunities for learning. Questioning, dissent, and uncertainty become signals that people are taking responsibility for the work they share.

Organizations are among the most influential civic classrooms that adults encounter, and the workplace is one of the few remaining institutions where people regularly interact with others who have different perspectives and interests. What people learn about dissent, authority, and repair in the workplace can travel into communities, institutions, and democratic life more broadly. Teaching disagreement well is, therefore, both an organizational leadership responsibility and a civic one.

The day after the Affordable Care Act was signed, I was at a forum with many of the nation’s leading children’s health experts. The vast majority applauded the measure but bemoaned the missed opportunity: If kids had been the top priority in the drafting of that bill, every child, including those with severe health issues, would have been guaranteed access to the top-flight medical care of their choosing. It was an especially aggravating oversight, given how inexpensive kids are relative to the federal government’s nearly $2 trillion (yes, trillion) health care budget. Comprehensive care for kids would have essentially been “budget dust”: a sprinkling on top of the cake, relatively speaking, but a game changer in absolute terms.

Other interests with better-funded government lobbyists got much of what they wanted from the bill: i.e., hospitals, providers, and insurance companies. Children’s advocacy groups were certainly paraded around to help win final passage (“It’s for the kids!”), but a dearth of advocacy dollars kept them from being at the negotiating table to truly prioritize kids.

Why did this happen? Why have there been so many missed opportunities to make public investments and reforms that would help children? It’s not because kids don’t vote. After all, "private equity" doesn’t have that many voters, per se. And billions are donated annually on behalf of kids. Why hasn’t it been enough?

The problem is that, for far too long, charitable support for kids has been disconnected from systemic change, being primarily geared, instead, toward direct service programs. That’s perfectly understandable. Donors like to quickly see, firsthand, the impact of their giving. But when that giving doesn’t scale, it only impacts hundreds or thousands of kids, not millions of kids, and doesn’t lead to shifts of billions of dollars.

This kind of massive missed opportunity simply doesn’t exist in the same way in other sectors, where it is more generally understood that government policy, regardless of which politicians are in power, is where the money is. Only when it comes to kids do we see this over-reliance on private donations for (what should be) a public good. I have never seen a city planning department, county DA’s office, state transportation agency, or the Pentagon have a fundraising drive to secure basic supplies and services like public schools regularly do.

Relying so heavily on private support is a losing strategy. If every available philanthropic dollar were donated to direct service supports for kids, right now, it would fund no more than a few days of what government programs provide. Think early childhood, education, health, social services: the pot of available dollars and the opportunity for impact is simply much greater in the public sector, providing a far higher return on investment than direct service giving.

Other sectors focus heavily on advocacy for this reason. For seniors, Social Security and Medicare have had monumental impacts on lessening poverty and ensuring access to medical care (and these programs have received consistent government funding for decades, thanks, in large part, to AARP’s advocacy). The business sector spends millions annually on top-notch government relations teams that lobby effectively for tax breaks and policy changes for their benefit. And at the state and local level, labor spends a significant amount of its members’ dues on advocacy efforts. Ironically, the opportunity for public funding for kids far exceeds these other interests, given the strong public and bipartisan support for the well-being of children.

Children’s well-being would be dramatically improved if philanthropic donors, specifically individual donors and small family foundations, dedicated at least 10 percent of their kids’ charitable giving to advocacy organizations with strong government relations teams. Imagine if a donor or foundation that wants to help foster children, in addition to giving directly to foster care agencies and other direct service programs, contributed 10 percent to advocacy organizations fighting on behalf of foster youth. In California, a recent $500,000 advocacy campaign led to a new, ongoing public investment of $30 million a year for a 24/7 statewide helpline dedicated to helping foster kids and families.

If your goal is to improve education, in addition to giving directly to schools, devote 10 percent to organizations advocating for needed reforms and increased funding. After all, also in California, a $3 million advocacy effort led to a more equitable school finance system that guaranteed billions of additional dollars annually for English Learners and kids in poverty. While philanthropic support for nonprofits that provide direct services is essential, this comprehensive approach of contributing to both direct service and advocacy organizations is critical to getting all kids the supports they need.

My organization, Children Now, has achieved huge victories for kids through advocacy by building two tandem pillars of strength: a strong government relations team with decades of combined experience in California government, and the Children’s Movement of California, a unique network of more than 6,200 diverse organizations that push for major reforms and funding for kids through collective action campaigns. After parents, communities, and even youth themselves set the agenda, our policy, communications, and government relations experts work to enact that agenda. A key ingredient is the power of the Children’s Movement, which brings hundreds of groups together to speak at the same time to push issues over the top. Our model has helped secure over $8.1 billion in new state childcare funding, health insurance for almost every child in California, landmark legislation to require age verification for social media and gaming sites, historic school funding reform, and universal preschool for 4-year-olds. And that’s with a fraction of the funding for advocacy that other sectors receive. So much more lasting support for kids is there for the taking.

Donors want kids prioritized. That’s been shown by the billions of dollars donated in support of kids each year. But if at least 10 percent of those donations were dedicated towards advocacy organizations with strong government relations teams, the return on that investment would be billions more, and the long-term impact would benefit millions more kids. That shift in philanthropic funding is how we ensure every kid has the opportunity to reach their full potential.

First, thank you for being a reader of SSIR. As you may have noticed, we have made a few changes to our website. In short, we've revamped our paywall so that non-subscribers are able to read a limited number of articles each month before they are prompted to create a free account and then, eventually, required to upgrade to a paid subscription.

We believe this is the best way to balance our mission to spread social innovation knowledge as widely as possible with our need as a nonprofit media organization to generate a sustainable amount of subscription revenue. If you're already a subscriber, thank you so much for your vital support. If you're not, please consider subscribing to help us continue to support the incredible global community of social change leaders.

What follows is a somewhat longer explanation of these changes and our thinking.

What Are We Doing?

Starting today, we are instituting a metered paywall on SSIR's website. For many readers who only occasionally visit SSIR, not much will change; you will be able to read a limited number of articles for free each month. After that, you'll need to sign up for a free account to continue reading. To be transparent, this means we'll be able to send those readers our weekly newsletter and other occasional emails—adding more engaged readers to that list helps us promote our events and makes our newsletter more attractive to advertisers. Having readers signed in to free accounts will also help us better understand reader traffic across the site and what articles are most valuable. Eventually, if a reader continues to access more articles within the same 30-day period, a paid subscription will be required.

Notably, this means that many previously locked articles, including most of our print magazine articles from the last two decades, will now be open to readers who have not used up their monthly free articles.

The other major change we're making is we are increasing our subscription prices to keep in line with the market. We've always intended to keep SSIR affordable, and we haven't raised our prices in years, despite significant cost increases. We've updated our subscription options to include a new monthly digital-only option to offer some flexibility for those who can't commit to the cost of a full annual subscription.

Why Are We Doing This?

Most of our readers are likely well aware of the many challenges facing media and journalism businesses, and we don't need to rehearse those here. Although SSIR is published at Stanford University, we are a nonprofit media organization, and we primarily rely on earned income to fund our work. In the 23 years since we were founded, our business model has evolved to depend on a mix of subscriptions, events, webinars, sponsorships, advertising, and a small amount of philanthropic support. As mentioned above, we believe a metered paywall is the best way to strike a balance between keeping SSIR open and accessible and nudging our regular readers who can afford it toward subscribing. We hope those who rely on the work we publish and produce, who appreciate our high standards, and especially those who work in and support the social sector—and who understand that nothing is ever truly free—will continue to support us.

We also believe subscriptions are the most sustainable way for us to fund SSIR's future and to make sure our small team can focus on best serving the social change community with rigorous, editorially independent work. We want to spend as much time as possible collaborating with our contributors on great ideas and as little time as possible worrying about how to make or raise more money.

How Will This Affect Readers?

If you're already a subscriber, you shouldn't notice much difference. You’ll still enjoy unlimited access to everything we publish, and our new account tools make it easier for you to log in and manage your subscription online. You should have received an email from us with a link and instructions for activating your existing subscription in the new system.

If you're not a subscriber, you may encounter a little more friction as you navigate the site. We hope you'll consider at least signing up for a free account so you can read the site more freely and get our weekly newsletter where we've been publishing some exclusive Q&As with SSIR contributors in addition to the usual digest of new articles. Ultimately, it's paid subscriptions that help us continue our work.

If you want to support SSIR further, we've made it easier to buy a gift subscription for a friend or colleague. We've also revamped our group subscription options, which are a great way to give your entire organization access to SSIR at steeply discounted rates.

What Next?

We are instituting this system out of optimism. In the more than two decades since SSIR was founded, virtually everything in media, governance, society, and the world of social innovation has been called into question, if not undergone fundamental disruption. Yet we are still here, learning, growing, and adapting along with our inspiring community of readers.

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When my Western-trained colleagues first interact with students visiting from East Asia, they are commonly concerned that these students do not speak up in class, are reluctant to debate, or avoid disagreement. These same students often demonstrate strong critical engagement in other formats such as group presentations, written assignments, and structured discussions, suggesting that verbal reticence or silence in the classroom does not equate to intellectual disengagement. Similar dynamics are present in work settings. Many Western executives I work with experience an “aha moment” when I introduce cultural norms around silence and disagreement in Asian contexts. They realize that what appears to be a lack of voice may instead reflect a different understanding of autonomy, obligation, and authority.

From a Western perspective, autonomy often means the right—and responsibility—to speak one’s mind and act independently. In this view, visible self-expression signals engagement. Research, however, shows that perceptions and desires for autonomy vary by cultural context. In many settings, autonomy is balanced with obligation: Individuals understand themselves as embedded in relationships, and responsible for upholding group norms and hierarchies.

Organizational success therefore relies greatly on cultural sensitization—the habit of questioning one’s default assumptions about voice, authority, and responsibility. For leaders operating across borders or managing multicultural teams, understanding these differences can mean the difference between misreading silence and inviting meaningful dissent. Those who recognize these distinctions and structure interactions accordingly can increase their influence and strengthen collective performance across a range of cultural contexts.

How Culture Shapes the Self and the Meaning of Silence

One reason people misread autonomy and obligation lies in culturally distinct ways of understanding the self. Psychologists Hazel Markus and Shinobu Kitayama distinguish between independent and interdependent views of the self, often associated with European-American and East or South Asian contexts, respectively. These frameworks shape not only how individuals understand themselves, but also how they interpret behaviors such as speaking, disagreeing, or remaining silent.

In contexts that emphasize an independent view of the self, individuals understand themselves as possessing stable internal attributes—preferences, opinions, and abilities—that they should express and assert. Other people matter primarily as audiences or evaluators. Social interaction becomes a space for signaling competence, confidence, authenticity, or conviction. In this framework, voice is closely tied to agency, and silence is often interpreted as disengagement, lack of preparation, or absence of a point of view.

By contrast, in contexts where an interdependent view of the self is more common, individuals understand themselves as fundamentally relational. Social roles, obligations, and relationships shape their identity. People are motivated to fulfill expectations tied to hierarchy and group membership, and to maintain relational harmony, and others evaluate behavior less in terms of self-expression and more in terms of social appropriateness.

In this framework, silence can carry a different meaning. Rather than signaling disengagement, it may reflect attentiveness, respect, or careful consideration of context. Speaking less in the presence of authority may signal social awareness rather than fear or lack of confidence. People may perceive someone drawing attention to themselves through overt disagreement as disruptive to group harmony. Silence, therefore, can function as a socially appropriate and responsible response.

These distinctions describe tendencies, not rigid categories. Individuals and organizations within any culture may draw from both models. Still, the differences are strong enough to shape how leaders interpret behavior and whether they create conditions that make dissent possible.

Inviting Voice Without Demanding Confrontation

Management thinkers often argue that dissent and disagreement are productive, and that organizations risk failure if they avoid conflict or suppress opposing views. But effective leaders operating in interdependent, obligation-oriented contexts do not eliminate dissent. Instead, they structure it differently.

Across many Asian organizational contexts, three recurring strategies emerge. First, leaders deliberately direct dissent. In many organizations, dissent does not arise from spontaneous individual assertion. Leaders recognize that hierarchy can suppress voice if left unaddressed, and they take responsibility for inviting it. They may explicitly assign individuals to raise potential objections during planning meetings. By transforming disagreement from a personal risk into a role-based expectation, leaders make it safer to surface concerns. Employees can frame their input not as defiance, but as fulfilling a responsibility to the group. In this way, leaders draw on employees’ sense of obligation as a resource rather than allowing it to slide into over-deference.

In Japanese firms, for example, employees typically use indirect or hedged forms of speech. Leaders are expected to read these cues rather than demand blunt confrontation. The Japanese concept of kuuki wo yomu—“reading the air”—captures the expectation that leaders attend to concerns that people do not state directly.

In her work on cross-cultural management, INSEAD professor Erin Meyer recounts a moment after a talk she gave in Tokyo when no one initially raised a question. Her Japanese publisher, Tomoko, paused, scanned the room, and gently invited specific individuals to speak, drawing out thoughtful questions. When Meyer asked how she knew who had something to say, Tomoko replied, “It had to do with how bright their eyes were.”

A second strategy is for leaders to frame dissent as a responsibility to the collective good rather than as an expression of individual autonomy. Over time, this collective framing reshapes not only whether employees speak, but also what they choose to speak about.

I note such dynamics in my research on the Tata Steel, one of the world’s leading steel producers and the only integrated steel company outside Japan to win the Deming Application Prize for Total Quality Management (TQM) in 2008. To qualify, the Deming Assessment required that all 35,000 workers understand and enact (TQM) practices. The management team actively encouraged employees to critique processes and suggest ways of improving quality and production, framing employee voice not as an act of individual assertion but as a responsibility toward the collective goal of organizational excellence.

Balasubramanian Muthuraman, then managing director of Tata Steel, explained that cultivating employee voice did not begin with discussions about strategy or production. Early conversations between leadership and workers revolved around everyday concerns about life in the town—things like housing and road maintenance. But over time, communication deepened and the nature of employee engagement began to shift. Workers started asking questions about the company’s commitment to winning the Deming Prize—for example, what TQMs were and how they could get involved. This shift emerged from, as Muthuraman put it, a “tremendous amount of communication” between leadership and workers.

Through this process, voice became tied to a shared organizational purpose. Employees came to see raising concerns and contributing ideas not as acts of personal dissent, but as participation in a collective effort to improve quality and performance across the organization. Similarly, the Chinese concept of he (“harmony”), which is frequently referenced in corporate mission statements, encompasses mutual benefit, balanced development, and cooperative relationships. Within this framework, people find voicing concern acceptable when it serves collective well-being.

A third strategy is for leaders to protect dignity and face, or the importance of maintaining respect and social standing in front of others. In hierarchical settings, public disagreement can threaten the standing of speakers and authority figures. Scholars of face negotiation theory note that maintaining dignity is central to effective interaction. Silence can therefore serve as a strategic way of managing social risk. Individuals may defer, soften, express privately, or communicate disagreement through group channels rather than direct confrontation. Leaders signal that they are attentive to employee perspective, even when employees express concerns indirectly.

For example, in cultures that value saving face, employees often avoid directly saying “no” or openly disagreeing with a leader. Instead, they might say something like, “We will try our best,” even if they have doubts about the plan or deadline. Experienced managers pay close attention to body language, tone, and hesitation, and they may follow up gently by saying, “You didn’t seem fully confident—are there risks we should discuss?” People who are not used to this style of communication may mistake polite responses for full agreement and overlook the underlying concern of saving face.

When leaders use these approaches to encourage feedback and demonstrate that they will not hold it against employees, employees feel safer engaging in deliberation, even if they do so cautiously. Paradoxically, this can make dissent more likely when it truly matters. Asian multinationals and leadership models now feature prominently in business education. Works such as The India Way, Fortune Makers, and Resolute Japan document practices that depart from Western autonomy-centric assumptions yet have produced globally competitive firms.

Leading Across Difference in a Pluralistic World

In a world shaped by geopolitical tension and economic uncertainty, cultural sensitization is not optional, it is strategic. Many organizations operate across borders, employ multicultural teams, and depend on global flows of talent and capital.

From both a civic and organizational perspective, effective leaders do not assume that voice will naturally emerge. They assume responsibility for drawing it out, analyzing it, and situating it within collective goals. In multicultural settings, this may mean asking: Do we reward only direct confrontation? Do we create formal roles for dissent? Do we interpret silence as resistance when it may reflect respect?

The contrast between autonomy-oriented and obligation-oriented models of voice points to a broader lesson. Disagreement is not simply something individuals do. It is something communities and institutions make possible. Whether silence is treated as disengagement or as deliberation depends less on personal disposition than on whether leaders accept responsibility for structuring voice, authority, and difference.

In the face of social and political backlash, and often alongside previous initiatives that did not meet their intended goals, many organizational leaders are tempted to divest in diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI)—formal organizational efforts to identify and address unjust inequality. But this moment, while fraught, is also an opportunity to redesign DEI for effectiveness, improving not only the experiences of people from historically marginalized groups, but also overall well-being and organizational resilience.

An important starting point is to look at how leaders interpret disagreement and conflict. Organizations often perceive conflict related to DEI efforts as interpersonal breakdowns, when in fact it frequently reflects deeper tensions, including gaps between mission and incentives, commitments and authority, and values and practice.

The challenge for leaders, then, is less about assessing the merits of DEI than about designing and sustaining equitable and inclusive practices in the context of their specific organization.

Drawing on a composite case from the social sector, this article focuses on the distinction and relationship between alignment (how clearly DEI is tied to organizational strategy and structures) and congruence (how well that strategy is enacted across operations, roles, and norms). For leaders across sectors, DEI success or failure often depends on their ability to navigate tensions between these two dimensions, and how those tensions shape team members’ experiences and relationships. When leaders do not design and implement them well, DEI efforts risk becoming ceremonial, detached from core organizational outcomes, or entirely disposable.

When Societal and Organizational Tensions Conflict

When societal tensions enter an organization without structural scaffolding to hold them, conflict rarely remains interpersonal.

Consider Monica, whose story is an anonymized composite that reflects recurring patterns we have observed across organizations and recounts specific points of interpersonal conflict in one of these spaces. Monica leads a regional nonprofit focused on expanding college access for low-income students through test preparation and socio-emotional support. Its office is located in a historically mostly white but increasingly racially diverse working-class town.

In 2021, Monica deepened her organization’s commitment to racial equity by launching a series of racial allyship trainings. Monica engaged a training provider recommended by a primary funder, but the initiative faltered when the provider adopted a compliance-driven approach focused on legal risk management and behavioral interventions to address microaggressions. The provider encouraged employees to speak up when they perceived harm, but did not offer any recourse for dialogue or repair. It also offered a technical approach that emphasized immediate responses to behaviors without attention to long-term work to strengthen connection, resilience, or opportunity to learn from mistakes.

In the years that followed, employees increasingly disagreed about whether the initiative was valuable, with perspectives generally split between the organization's two functional teams. The first team, a 20-person program staff responsible for program design and delivery, consisted of slightly more women than men and was a racially diverse group in their mid-20s to late 30s. The second team, a 10-person operations staff responsible for working with prospective and current students and families to support program administration, consisted entirely of women, most of whom were over 40, and all but two were white.

Due to a complex set of interpersonal dynamics, Monica meanwhile became more reluctant to translate racial allyship principles into organizational operations. As a white leader navigating an increasingly high-friction DEI climate, she sometimes hesitated to voice her specific concerns about training content and framing. And her education at high-status universities, like most of her program team, made her keenly aware of latent but increasingly visible class dynamics between the two teams.

In late 2023, at the encouragement of a funder, Monica coordinated a general racial equity training with a new provider. Whereas the previous training sessions prompted mostly private disagreement, this session produced noticeable disengagement, with several operations team members rolling their eyes at points and others openly engaging with their phones more than the facilitators. Eventually, when prompted by a facilitator to share reflections, a senior operations team member expressed disdain at being “told what to do” by program staff, despite having a longer tenure and no direct-report relationship to any program staff member.

Immediately following the session, a program staff member said to no one, but loud enough for everyone to hear, “White people just don’t get it.” This comment, alongside the operation team’s lack of engagement during the session, explicitly surfaced tensions that had been building for years.

Alignment, Congruence, and Why Conflict Escalates

Monica’s situation illustrates how conflict intensifies when DEI efforts bring to light inequities that strategy and operations are not designed to absorb. While social sector missions may champion access to education, economic mobility, or inclusive workforce development, internal organizational structures and cultural norms do not always fully reflect the same principles. Cultural competence may be underdeveloped, and internal inequities in pay and well-being may mirror those seen in the private sector.

Alignment and congruence help explain when and how tensions like these shape team members' day-to-day experiences and interactions. Although organizations often treat these two concepts synonymously, understanding how they differ and how to pursue them in DEI work is essential to success.

Strategic alignment refers to the degree to which an organization explicitly connects a strategic initiative to its mission, goals, and decision-making structures. Congruence refers to whether the organization enacts that initiative consistently across roles, incentives, and informal norms. Alignment answers the question: Is this core to who we are and how we succeed? Congruence answers: Do our everyday practices reinforce what we say we value?

In DEI work, alignment fails when leaders cannot explain how DEI advances strategy. Congruence fails when organizations ask staff to meet equity goals without the authority, resources, or required cultural and structural support to do so. Indeed, when both misalignment and incongruence are present, organizations can reasonably expect negative reactions and resistance to DEI.

The table below details four theorized outcomes for sustainable and resilient equity work, depending on the alignment and congruence of DEI efforts. (The terms ceremonial and disposable draw from scholarly literature in organizational behavior.)

Prior to 2021, with a more modest DEI strategy, Monica’s organization operated comfortably in the “impactful and sustainable” quadrant. The organization saw limited internal concern and addressed DEI-related challenges with students and families through discrete engagements with a few select culturally competent staff. Although this worked as a temporary arrangement, Monica recognized it placed undue burden on these team members and was therefore unsustainable.

Because of this, she was excited to build the full team’s capacity to engage with students and families across cultural difference through racial allyship work in 2021. However, by 2023, disengagement and open resistance from the operations team made it clear that the organization’s DEI work was at risk of falling into the “contested and disposable” quadrant.

Designing for Durability

If misalignment and incongruence drive conflict in DEI implementation, then durable solutions must engage how team members understand and relate to organizational strategy and design, and how stated and latent cultural norms support or hinder the success of strategy and design. Leaders can make DEI initiatives at their organizations more effective and durable in three main ways:

1. Aligning internal and external equity goals. Effective leaders understand how societal inequalities intersect with their organization’s strategy and operating model. They clarify how external equity goals align with internal culture, incentives, and work structures to prevent unclear priorities and fractured communication. This requires organizational-level self-awareness and a clear understanding of how the organization works toward its goals in the context of its external environment.

This is especially important in the social sector. Take, for example, a charter school in which 90 percent of the students are Black. Given well-documented racial disparities in educational experiences and outcomes, strategic alignment around equity is essential if the organization is to fulfill its stated mission. Monica’s organization could have drawn a clear through line between its commitment to racial allyship and equity and the day-to-day coordination between the program and operations teams. Such alignment and congruence could have strengthened cross-cultural engagement with students and families; deepened recognition of how race, class, and culture intersect to shape barriers; and improved the organization’s ability to address them.

Importantly, detailed racial equity approaches may not be as appropriate for organizations that do not directly interact with community members or organizations that serve a different demographic composition, such as a primarily rural and white community where economic inequality plays a larger role in shaping access to social services. An organization’s awareness of context, environment, and goals is a first step toward effective and durable DEI work. At a minimum, they need supporting structures and processes that ensure fairness, access, and dignified treatment for team members and the people and communities they work with. Scaling beyond this in a way that does not support alignment and congruence can lead to performative and symbolic work.

2. Tailoring DEI to specific intersections of identities and roles. Being curious about how race, gender, class background, and other identities show up across different roles, departments, and hierarchy can unearth potential faultlines, or areas that are more susceptible to conflict. Faultlines can activate and amplify team members’ perceptions that their social identities are negatively evaluated or stereotyped.

Many of Monica’s operations staff, for example, perceived themselves as having less power than program staff in their specific context, in part due to their lower-status educational credentials. To help address the tension around power dynamics and perceived authority, we designed a workshop session that focused on identifying unstated dynamics and norms. A shared insight emerged when several operations team members reported feeling condescended to by program staff who referred to the town as “backwoods,” implying it was culturally unsophisticated. A program team member responded, “It sounds like you experienced a microaggression,” a term central to the prior racial allyship workshop series.

Monica later reported that the team made progress in the weeks following this session. Some participants began reflecting on how their racial identities might shape their interactions with prospective students and their families—an idea that some operations team members were defensive about in earlier racial allyship trainings, because the sessions were framed in a punitive and compliance-driven way. Monica shared that the introduction of a shared vocabulary allowed team members to interpret perceived slights in a less accusatory way.

3. Investing in programs that emphasize self-awareness, emotional regulation, and cultural competence. Strategic alignment and operational congruence set the stage for effective DEI work, but they do not guarantee it. Sustained success requires that people have the interpersonal capacity to engage with each other respectfully and to disagree in productive rather than destructive ways. Without this, conversations intended to work through disagreement can devolve into call-out dynamics—conversations that intend to surface disagreements or experiences of harm but devolve into punitive labeling—that can result in alienation and shame, and erode team cohesion.

Effective DEI learning and development efforts must therefore build team members’ capacity to understand their own cultural lenses and emotional triggers, regulate responses in moments of conflict, and avoid reactive behaviors that damage trust. For leaders, this includes the ability to engage and hold team members accountable and provide corrective and developmental feedback, regardless of social or racial identity. In their zeal for demonstrating commitment to equity, leaders with traditionally dominant social identities, including men and white leaders, may drift into pre-emptive overcorrection. In response to broader societal realities of inequality and discrimination, they may withhold the provision of difficult feedback, undermining equity efforts.

Alongside intergroup contact anxiety, this helps explain research findings showing that women, and women of color in particular, receive less developmental feedback than their male counterparts, potentially leading to career shifts, and deferred or never received promotions and advancements. Conversations in which race, class, and other context-relevant identity categories are explicitly relevant can be difficult, but disciplined leadership requires engaging them with clarity and consistency. Avoidance does not protect belonging. Rather, it erodes legitimacy and efficacy.

From Resistance to Redesign

Resistance to DEI is not always rooted in rejection of its core values. Often, it reflects a mismatch between aspirational commitments and the organizational conditions required to enact them. In an environment of polarization across myriad dimensions, DEI is most effective when it focuses on context specificity, strategic alignment, and operational congruence, embedding equity into the fabric of how organizations and team members operate, solve problems, and grow.

Leaders who learn to treat conflict as diagnostic rather than disruptive can redesign DEI to withstand backlash and internal strain, making it harder to marginalize and easier to sustain.

Late last summer, I received two pieces of unanticipated news. The first was that the Stanford Center on Philanthropy and Civil Society, the organization that publishes SSIR, was to be housed in Stanford’s Graduate School of Education, where I have my primary academic home. As a scholar of the sociology, history, and politics of education in America, I know that neither universal mass schooling for children nor wide postsecondary access in the United States would be possible without philanthropy. The campus building in which I work was what we now call lead-funded in the 1930s by Ellwood Cubberley, a Stanford professor with a lucrative side business selling textbooks and consulting in the then brand-new specialty of educational administration. There was a healthy market for his products because business and civic leaders across the country had for decades been assembling officially public schools whose survival often depended on the labor and money of volunteer contributors. And of course Stanford itself is a gorgeous example of what sociologist Elisabeth Clemens calls a civic gift, a contribution to the public good freely (albeit strategically) offered by a husband and wife who were railroad titans, canny politicians, and generous benefactors all at once.

The other news was, for me at least, even more surprising. I was asked to serve as the next academic editor of Stanford Social Innovation Review. Answer: YES. And surely a high point of an admittedly luck-filled career. Situated at the intersection of academia, philanthropy, and business, SSIR is exactly the sort of interstitial platform that builders of civic capacity can leverage for practical benefit in our present time: when political and cultural polarization divides and weakens what were presumed to be the most durable democracies worldwide; when a handful of global firms rival nation-states in the sheer scale of their capital holdings, computational capacity, stores of data, reach into everyday lifeworlds, and capacity; when trust in public institutions has in many places reached historic lows; and when spectacular technological advances challenge us to dramatically expand our imaginations of what might be possible for human societies to achieve—or destroy.

SSIR has always been a critical but optimistic venue. It takes blind spots, negative externalities, and outright failures of social innovation seriously and invites readers to learn from them. It also recognizes the inexhaustible promise of human creativity and collaboration and the many forms these can take as history unfolds. It shares good news. It empowers dedicated people in a wide array of endeavors to listen to one another, share wisdom, work harder, try again—and to find intellectual insight and sheer pleasure along the way.

I already have found such pleasure a mere two months into my editorial appointment. The professionalism, seriousness, and camaraderie of the SSIR team are consistently evident in face-to-face meetings and Zoom calls. The quality and international reach of the magazine and its contributors are truly impressive. And possibilities are open: for new story formats, media channels, and collaborative editorial, convening, and educational ventures. In the coming months, SSIR will be assembling a new advisory group to help us cast an even wider net for creative ideas and business models. We also will be considering possible “tent-pole” initiatives to lend ongoing attention to a few domains in which we have especially deep pools of talent and investment, and that seem especially germane for our time. Please reach out to me directly with any ideas or advice. All the while, be assured that maintaining the integrity, excellence, and practical usefulness of SSIR is my top priority.

Kevin Starr’s critique of impact investing resonates with anyone who has worked where results cannot clearly be linked to invested capital: Intentionality without additionality is mostly theater. Market-rate capital rarely flows toward the places where risk is real, margins are thin, and the human stakes are highest. The assumption that deep social change can be achieved without trade-offs in returns, liquidity, or risk, has often hollowed out the middle of the social impact field, leaving entrepreneurs in low-income and high-complexity contexts stranded, between philanthropists who see them as too commercial and investors who see them as too risky. No one is well served by euphemisms. Starr is right that calling concessionary capital what it is—philanthropy—can restore a kind of moral clarity and operational discipline.

However, the argument makes some assumptions about who benefits from impact and where returns actually accrue, classifying the activity as philanthropic if the investor cannot capture a market-rate financial return. However, in the social impact field, our work often produces public cost savings that must be understood in a different framework. Interventions might be economically productive without being privately capturable, where the returns do exist, but land elsewhere.

That distinction is visible, concrete, and measurable in places like Austin, Texas, where I serve as the CEO of The SAFE Alliance (the largest organization in the South providing services for survivors of domestic and sexual violence, sex trafficking, and child abuse). Our services conservatively save public systems $120 million per year in avoided costs. These savings are not speculative. A substantial body of research shows that stabilizing high-need individuals typically reduces public expenditures by approximately $20,000 per person per year, once health care, shelter, and justice-system costs are accounted for; SAFE’s approximately 6,000 people served annually yields striking public savings.

Despite the scale of these savings, however, they accrue primarily to systems that do not fund SAFE’s work at levels that reflect the value they receive: emergency departments that see fewer crisis visits, law enforcement and courts that handle fewer incidents, child-welfare systems that avoid foster care placements, and public payors that shoulder less long-term medical and behavioral health costs. The return is real, but it is structurally displaced, captured downstream by public institutions rather than upstream by the organization or capital that generated it.

This dynamic becomes clearer when examined program by program. SAFE Futures, our intensive family-stabilization initiative, operates on an annual budget of roughly $700,000 and helps children remain safely with their parents or kin rather than entering foster care. In a single year, SAFE Futures supported 149 children in avoiding foster care placement. From even conservative estimates of foster care and child-welfare systems costs—ranging from $5,000 to $10,000 per child per month when casework, courts, and Medicaid-funded care are included—this translates to $9 to $18 million in avoided public costs in a single year. The public return is roughly $12 to $25 for every dollar invested, even before accounting for long-term educational, health, and economic outcomes for those children.

We can see a similar pattern with SAFE’s forensic center for survivors of sexual violence. Hospitals routinely absorb the high, poorly reimbursed costs of sexual assault medical forensic exams (conservatively $10,000 per case when staff time, infrastructure, medications, labs, and other costs are included). By conducting more than 500 exams annually in a specialized, survivor-centered setting, SAFE generates at least $5 million per year in avoided or more efficiently delivered hospital system costs (while also reducing emergency department congestion, improving evidence quality, and minimizing the retraumatization that drives repeat care). Over the past decade, SAFE’s forensic services have saved public systems approximately $50 million while receiving less than $1 million in direct investment. SAFE conducts an estimated 85–95 percent of all sexual assault forensic exams in the county within a specialized, survivor-centered setting, a level of coordination and consistency rarely achieved in the United States. Fully funding the approximately $3 million annual cost of these services would sustain a proven response that delivers care more efficiently, reduces system strain and liability exposure, and strengthens accountability for sexual violence. It would also position Austin among a small number of communities nationwide replacing fragmented emergency room care with a coordinated model that improves outcomes while lowering public system costs.

If an intervention produces tens of millions of dollars in demonstrable public savings, is the capital that enables it “philanthropy”? The SAFE Alliance’s approximately $28 million annual operating budget produces an estimated $120 million in avoided public costs, representing a system-level return of $4 for every dollar invested.

The issue in this case is not that the work lacks economic returns but that our public finance systems are poorly designed to recognize, budget for, and reinvest in the value they already receive. What can appear as concessionary capital at the organizational level is really a bridge across a coordination failure, for which the state continues to pay, but only after harm has occurred. The challenge is less that impact investing sits awkwardly between philanthropy and markets, but that prevention and early intervention sit between public budgets that reward crisis and markets that cannot, or simply do not want to, price avoided harm.

Of course, it is still true that what I am describing is, by Starr’s definition, philanthropy. Capital still takes a hit in the service of impact (even if it’s impact that would have been paid for by public funds). But philanthropy has long functioned as the mechanism through which society covers the gaps left by public systems, funding what governments will not, or cannot, pay for. This kind of public cost-savings analysis reveals the problem with stopping there: If everything that absorbs misrouted public value is “philanthropy,” then philanthropy has become a substitute for public finance failure, with consequences we need to reckon with. The “hit” philanthropy absorbs in these cases is not evidence that the work is uneconomic; it is evidence that public systems are failing to recognize and route the value they already receive. The system still collects its debts—through emergency rooms, courts, foster care, and disability systems—when those debts are not collected earlier through taxation or appropriate public investment. Treating this dynamic as philanthropy alone collapses a governance failure into a moral category and obscures the distinction between work that truly lacks economic return and work whose value is simply misrouted.

Pay-for-success models, prevention and early intervention compacts, and outcome-based contracts are imperfect but telling responses to this failure. They exist because savings are being generated, but public systems still lack durable ways to recognize, capture, and reinvest those savings upstream. But such mechanisms are less evidence of confusion between philanthropy and markets, than they are ways public systems are struggling to modernize their budgeting and accountability structures. The risk is that philanthropy becomes a permanent substitute rather than a bridge: When the work that organizations like SAFE do is framed as generosity rather than public value creation, responsibility quietly shifts from redesigning systems to pay for what works to hoping donors continue to be kind, entrenching inequities in who receives protection and stability.

Markets alone will not save us, as Starr is right to observe, challenging the self-deception embedded in much of what passes for impact investing. But public cost-savings work demonstrates that there is something in between philanthropy and the market. The challenge, then, is not how we label capital, but whether public systems are willing to pay for what already works and to redesign their budgeting and accountability structures accordingly.

At a moment of heightened polarization around diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) efforts in the United States and elsewhere—echoing earlier tensions surrounding the #MeToo movement—organizations face increasing pressure over practices intended to promote equal opportunity. These dynamics require structures and skills that enable people who are different from one another to engage in conversations about challenging topics. Yet traditional equal employment opportunity compliance systems, though essential, often leave organizations unprepared to navigate that conflict constructively.

Many organizations orient toward avoiding complaints, lawsuits, and regulatory scrutiny, but in doing so, they miss opportunities to surface and correct problems early through systems that build employees’ trust. And when employees do not trust that leaders will hear and fairly address their concerns, productive dialogue and solutions are less likely to emerge. This risk avoidance posture leaves leaders without the tools, skills, and structures they need to respond to fairness concerns in ways that maintain accountability while preserving healthy working relationships.

Productive conversations that navigate disagreement—whether about fairness, organizational change, or competing priorities—have never been more necessary. Across much of American life, for example, people are increasingly divided in how they live and see the world—residential integration has stalled and school segregation has grown. Workplaces may be the most consequential setting where people from different backgrounds regularly come together to navigate disagreement and solve shared problems. When employees collaborate in pursuit of common goals, they create sustained contact—the condition research shows is most likely to reduce bias. This also builds organizational capacity to engage differing perspectives in ways that strengthen decision-making, surface problems earlier, and support durable performance over time.

The good news is that many capacity-building tools are at hand. Organizations can benefit from employee insights on policy development through advisory councils; provide mediation or ombuds services, and/or restorative justice programs, and use digital platforms to facilitate and increase transparency. These pathways between silence and formal complaint equip organizations to address concerns before they escalate and, more broadly, support organizational effectiveness.

Shared Ideals, Broken Systems

People largely agree that fairness is a core value. Across the United States, people of all races, ethnicities, and genders—whether in cities, suburbs, or rural areas—overwhelmingly agree that equality matters. Contrary to the conventional narrative of racial polarization, a nationwide survey conducted in August 2024 found that more than 90 percent of people believe that individuals of all races should be treated equally, and over 70 percent prioritize improving racial equality. This consensus—including among those who are white—runs counter to prevailing assumptions. A common refrain among diversity experts is that whites believe that there is more racism against them than against Blacks. But while a vocal minority holds this view, the vast majority consistently reject it.

What people do contest is how to achieve equality objectives. The current polarization around DEI efforts provides a vivid example. Most Americans share the ideals underlying DEI, believing that diversity of backgrounds and perspectives is valuable, that equity (making sure that people have a fair shot) matters, and that workplaces benefit from inclusion (meaning people feel respected and valued, and have a chance to contribute). But they are divided about how organizations implement DEI commitments. Some employees fear that DEI efforts undermine their chances for promotion and other benefits, while a much larger number worry that organizations do not value the programs or achieve meaningful change through them. Companies that dismantle DEI programs, citing reasons like “inherent tensions in practicing inclusion,” reinforce these concerns.

Gender equality in the workplace provides another instructive parallel. Animating the #MeToo movement was widespread agreement that sexual harassment is unacceptable, yet some saw the movement as not doing enough, and others as going too far. When allegations concerned powerful people, employers frequently prioritized containment over accountability. In addition, worries that sexual harassment allegations would automatically end a person’s career fueled what some referred to as #MeToo Backlash. One result was that some male managers became more reluctant to mentor or hire women for roles that required close interaction. Without structures to surface concerns, test competing stories, and challenge internal power dynamics, organizations struggled to address misconduct in fair and effective ways.

The Limits of Formal Compliance

Spurred by the American Civil Rights Movement, federal, state, and local civil rights laws in the United States established a legal commitment to equal opportunity and nondiscrimination. These laws, enforceable by individuals as well as government entities, provide that all workers are entitled to fair and nondiscriminatory treatment in hiring, pay, promotion, and other terms and conditions of work without regard to legally protected characteristics, such as race, ethnicity, gender, religion, disability, and age. Initial compliance structures leaned formal and adversarial, placing primary responsibility on individuals to assert their rights, often overlooking workplace power imbalance and the risks of speaking up. Despite the more covert and complex forms that discrimination takes today, equal opportunity compliance mechanisms have remained largely unchanged for decades.

Formal mechanisms remain essential, but they are inherently reactive and capture only a fraction of workplace concerns; studies estimate that just 6 to 13 percent of harassment incidents are formally reported. When organizations route a wide range of concerns—many relational, ambiguous, or rooted in misunderstanding—into rigid, adversarial processes, they risk escalating issues. Employees may hesitate to raise concerns about a manager who discourages dissent, for example, or to stop a colleague’s harmful conduct, if the only available avenue is a formal process that may result in damaging relationships or triggering retaliation. Defensive responses that dismiss credibility or fault those who raise concerns increase polarization and discourage interpersonal risk-taking. Meanwhile, managers fearing legal action may avoid giving candid performance feedback to employees or making hard policy or business decisions, undermining organizational effectiveness.

Organizations need to provide multiple, accessible avenues for raising concerns, including informal and confidential options, and proactive tools such as climate surveys, focus groups, exit interviews, and systematic reviews to identify patterns and risks early.

Designing Systems for Early Conflict Navigation and Organizational Growth

In this fraught moment, many organizations are either dismantling existing, top-down programs—citing lack of support or impact, and increased risk—or maintaining ineffective, symbolic programs. The fix is twofold: Establishing clear, credible mechanisms for employees to surface conflict early, and investing in leaders’ skills to navigate conflicts that emerge. Importantly, employees need an opportunity to help shape how organizations design and implement efforts to create genuine fairness. While many people presume that conflict undercuts productivity and well-being, the constructive clash of views—what researchers Robert Kegan and Lisa Lahey call “optimal conflict”—can reveal new insights, and help organizations identify and address vulnerabilities.

Conflict navigation can feel challenging in the workplace generally, and people tend to have less experience in addressing conflict about equal opportunity and identity than scheduling or feedback models. When issues of race, ethnicity, or gender are at play, intergroup anxiety can undermine cross-group interactions both inside and outside organizations.

To promote genuine equal opportunity, leaders and managers need what Donna Hicks calls “dignity-based skills.” Among the most important are the fundamental tools to give, take, and ask for feedback, along with the relational skills to protect people’s dignity in the moment. Relational skills include “bystander” strategies to step in when someone may be experiencing harm—say, if colleagues ignore someone’s comments in a meeting or attribute their ideas to someone else, or if people begin making sexual jokes. They also include the ability to bring people together to resolve potentially explosive dynamics with constructive dialogue.

These skills allow leaders to engage in problem-solving directly rather than deferring to compliance or formal adversarial processes. They also benefit organizations more broadly: While diverse teams often face more conflict, those that bridge disagreement constructively unlock the innovation and performance gains that multiple perspectives provide, as well as strengthen relationships and improve accountability among and across work teams.

Systems to Promote Constructive Conflict and Stronger Work Cultures

For skills to translate into meaningful impact, organizations need well-designed, complementary channels to understand workplace concerns and to transform individual capacity into collective progress. John Palfrey, president of the MacArthur Foundation, described collaborative work toward a dignity-centered organizational culture by integrating restorative practices, conflict coaching, and communications training into its core mission—so that all employees experience “equitable access, treatment, consideration, and opportunity.”

The five mechanisms below are examples of ways organizations can detect emerging problems before they harden into formal disputes while enabling employees to raise concerns and strengthen practices without the personal risk of filing a complaint.

1. Advisory councils and task forces are employee committees that review practices and recommend changes related to diversity and conflict resolution. A landmark longitudinal study of more than 800 US firms found that diversity task forces and committees were among the most effective organizational practices for increasing the representation of women and people of color in management. These structures outperformed training-only interventions by creating responsibility and accountability for diagnosing problems and pressing for change.
2. Organizational ombuds offices are staffed by trained conflict-management professionals who operate under established standards of independence, confidentiality, neutrality, and informality. Many organizations engage ombuds as part of their internal governance or ethics infrastructure, offering employees voluntary, confidential, impartial support outside formal reporting channels. By clarifying issues, explaining options, and facilitating informal resolution, ombuds help resolve conflicts—particularly those rooted in differences in communication style and cognitive approaches, including neurodiversity—by fostering mutual understanding and practical strategies that support working relationships.
3. Restorative justice programs are operated by either outside organizations or in-house facilitators. They bring together parties in structured, facilitated dialogues to understand harm, restore relationships, and prevent recurrence, with often profound results. At one national nonprofit, formal complaints to human resources (HR) declined while requests for restorative processes increased. Employees began describing identity-based conflict and strained relationships in terms of repair and accountability rather than discrimination. Some ombuds have also successfully relied on these approaches, particularly with equal employment opportunity violations or harassment allegations.
4. Voluntary mediation offers a non-adversarial pathway for resolving conflict, drawing on trained mediators—internal professionals or external neutrals—to facilitate voluntary agreements through structured negotiation. The US Equal Employment Opportunity Commission (EEOC) evaluated its mediation program and found that more than 98 percent of employers and 92 percent of employees said they would participate again. Participants reported that mediation enabled creative, flexible resolutions, including apologies, communication agreements, training, schedule changes, or supervisory adjustments—remedies often unavailable in litigation. Although EEOC mediation takes place after a charge is filed, its effectiveness points to the value of internal mediation even earlier, when organizations have greater room to resolve issues constructively and prevent escalation.
5. Electronic fairness or equity trackers have shown great promise in strengthening accountability and worker voice. These digital platforms (often operated by HR or an advisory council) allow employees to anonymously raise systemic concerns and track organizational responses from proposal through implementation and outcomes. Employees at one health care nonprofit reported that leadership commitments to fairness felt abstract and unverifiable. In response, leadership implemented a dashboard that invited feedback from staff about topics like the availability of mentorship programs, workplace culture concerns, and vacation scheduling, and that tracked the organization's plans for actions and progress. The nonprofit simultaneously launched a platform allowing leaders to respond to employee suggestions directly. These tools closed feedback loops, modeled transparency, and rebuilt trust by demonstrating that leaders saw, tracked, and acted on employee input.

Importantly, these five mechanisms complement rather than replace formal processes, including HR or union grievance procedures. They provide employees greater agency while enabling organizations to respond before relationships fracture and productivity suffers. Conflict coaching and skills-based communication training reinforce these systems by equipping individuals to address tensions early and by building a shared organizational language that makes those skills usable across teams.

The benefits of building organizational capacity to effectively manage disagreement are manifold. On an individual level, consistent with our respective experiences, employees who use resolution-oriented channels early are more likely to remain engaged and to view organizational responses as fair. For organizations, enterprise-level efforts that demonstrate institutional courage through transparency and active harm-repair—by systematically evaluating practices, analyzing workforce data, and listening through multiple channels—can identify and address conflict before it escalates. This advances workplace effectiveness and equal opportunity in turn. But the positive effects extend further still: Learning to manage conflict and fostering cooperation among people from varied backgrounds and viewpoints also strengthens the collaborative capacity essential to resilient democracies.

Nonprofits are struggling under the weight of growing demand, budget uncertainty, and middling levels of public trust (which is often lowest in the communities most in need of support). In our years advising, founding, leading, and benefitting from nonprofit organizations, we have often seen them respond to these and other challenges by doubling down on rigorous, well-established ways of working—from reinforcing transparent hiring and documentation to launching new strategic plans and implementing rigorous measurement processes.

This mix of behaviors is emblematic of a way of working we call the institutional paradigm. It is often valuable. And it often leaves value on the table.

Here, we lay out an alternative: the creative paradigm for social impact. We compare these ways of working, unpack the benefits of learning from other disciplines, and identify three opportunities where it makes particular sense for nonprofits to adopt those lessons.

What Do We Mean by Institutional and Other Paradigms?

At its core, the work of nonprofits is to create social value. They do this by hiring staff and volunteers to deliver products or services to beneficiaries—using financial and in-kind support as effectively and efficiently as they can. This approach of bundling activities into organizations—i.e., of institutionalizing outputs—is what we call the institutional paradigm.

Because they operate in this way, nonprofits share a number of attributes: They have roles that are variously professionalized to correspond to those found in the for-profit sector, including managers to oversee culture and operations and a board of directors to provide governance; they typically lack an “expiration date”; and there is a direct relationship between the size of the organization and its capacity to deliver value.

The institutional paradigm is the predominant way of working in the private sector as well; it is, in the words of David Foster Wallace among others, “the water we swim in”—so common and well-understood it’s easy to forget it represents a choice at all. But it is not a foregone conclusion that the institutional paradigm is the best way of delivering socially valuable outcomes.

There are other paradigms for doing valuable things. In a democratic paradigm, people are elected or appointed rather than hired, and work to deliver policies that direct the behavior of other public, private, and/or civic bodies. They are primarily funded through taxation and constrained by the authorization of the electorate. Contrast that with a legal paradigm—where experts are selected in order to represent, interpret, and shape the legal environment (which they are also beholden to) in ways that limit the actions of and shift resources between other parties—or a social movement paradigm—where mass (often unpaid and/or informal) groups mobilize in order to focus attention on an issue.

What distinguishes these paradigms is not just the sectors they are found in or the daily activities they involve. It is that, even when the purpose is to create social value, that purpose is mediated by different organizational structures, strategic levers, capital flows, and constraints.

Recognizing the suite of available options invites nonprofit leaders to search outside the institutional paradigm for ways to deliver value.

What Is the Creative Paradigm?

A plethora of artists, community organizations, and design and production companies have collectively mobilized billions of dollars towards creative endeavors. Like nonprofits, these entities measure their successes independently from (or in addition to) economic returns. However, the way they achieve those successes is distinct. It follows a creative paradigm.

Where the institutional paradigm tries to create social value via the effective management of an institution, the creative paradigm tries to do so through effective management of the creative process. It offers different ways to organize your talent base and relate it to the value produced, with entities often deploying elite contributors (sourced through professional reputation) on time-bound, project-specific outputs. Those outputs are evaluated using different metrics, with people discerning the quality of work more through the cultivation of taste than through formalized performance indicators. And ultimately, the work is constrained by authorial vision.

Working as a script supervisor, for example, involves a completely different set of expectations about duration, compensation, and intensity than working as a development coordinator at a nonprofit, and no one is conducting IRB-approved randomized control trials to get audience members to see the resulting movie. In other words, work delivered via a creative paradigm is—among many other things—generally more flexible, output-oriented, and driven by expert discernment.

What Can Nonprofits Learn From the Creative Sector?

There is nothing inherently wrong with the institutional paradigm. It is tried and tested, supported by decades of management theory, and—crucially, when it comes to rebuilding trust—signals to the world that nonprofits are “serious” organizations.

It also poses challenges. For instance, it minimizes the fundamental differences between for-profit organizations, whose imperative to maximize profit generates the resources needed to sustain the institution, and nonprofit organizations, whose imperative towards impact does not. In the process, it does not seem to be convincing the public that the nonprofit sector deserves its singularly distinct status in the US tax code. The institutional paradigm also imposes more rigidity in hiring, managing, and evaluating than is desirable in all circumstances. Most importantly, especially when it is adopted uncritically or by default, the institutional paradigm can blind nonprofits to opportunities to learn from other ways of working. Given the scale of the delivery, financial, and social challenges that nonprofits face, we cannot justify leaving this learning on the table.

Instead, we advocate taking a step back, recognizing the strengths and weaknesses in how things are currently done, and realizing that there are not just different ways of doing things but fundamentally different paradigms for organizing talent models, workflows, and strategies. Putting on a play, staging a concert, or designing a game may not be the same as educating young people, resettling refugees, or reducing the prevalence of malaria. Yet many of the mechanics are transferable.

Below, we identify the three opportunities where we think the creative paradigm has the most potential for impact: employing a more flexible talent model, planning work on more discrete time horizons, and augmenting hard impact measurement with expert insights. These examples may be a helpful jumping-off point for nonprofit leaders who want to confront the challenging scenarios they face with every tool available.

Opportunity 1: A More Flexible Talent Model

The “future of work” has arrived; hybrid and remote working have stabilized at significantly higher levels than before the pandemic, and in 2023, there were approximately 73 million freelancers in the United States, representing over 40 percent of the workforce.

Despite these trends, nonprofits still run an employee-centric model, hiring significantly more staff per establishment than for-profits—especially in nonprofit-dominated sectors like health care and education. Nonprofits gain back some flexibility through volunteerism; according to the US Census Bureau and the Bureau of Labor Statistics, there are five times more volunteers than nonprofit employees in the United States. But volunteers do not always provide the same accountability, technical skills, and global reach as contractors.

Meanwhile, in the creative industries, contracting is foundational; the arts and design industry consists of 77 percent freelancers, far more than second-placed marketing with 58 percent.

There are lots of benefits to this talent model. It provides flexibility, with workforces that can be onboarded quickly and shaped by operational needs without incurring long-term obligations. This flexibility, in turn, acts as an incentive that can offset low compensation and make it easier to attract talent. Shorter-term contracts and a lower need for cultural integration facilitate remote working, and it is therefore possible to cast a wider net for that talent. Hiring high-quality contributors (who are responsible for their own financial administration) for a set period may even lower the burden of management for their supervisors and lead to a more productive use of time from all staff.

For senior leaders, it can provide more time to stay close to frontline work even as the organization grows (something that is never in question for writers, directors, choreographers, etc.). This has been the case with Playworks, a nonprofit that creates chances for safe, meaningful play to improve the health and well-being of low-income students. Playworks’ senior managers continue to lead trainings on a regular basis, embracing the idea that no one should be promoted out of the core activities of the organization.

For potential contractors, this approach presents tradeoffs—principally, earning potential and flexibility versus predictability and organizational support. We would not want to see nonprofits promoting jobs that are highly unpredictable at the macro level, as often happens in the gig economy, but those nonprofits should nonetheless prioritize impact over the perpetuation of work.

Other implications of a more flexible talent model, in addition to organization size and tenure, include culture, the scope of job descriptions, the speed of the hiring process, and the rigidity of the reporting hierarchy. As such, nonprofits seeking to shift their talent model should make sure the right conditions are in place.

First, a creative paradigm makes more sense if time availability is poor. Every nonprofit has experienced the challenges of maintaining a learning and development culture amidst the bombardment of daily emergencies. Time to support, mentor, and manage employees is scarce and that scarcity is not always alleviated by introducing multiple layers of middle-management. The bandwidth needed to manage a capable, experienced freelancer, while not nothing, is substantially lower.

Secondly, it helps when nonprofits are financially under-resourced (given that freelancers offer a shorter commitment than permanent hires) or over-resourced but only temporarily (in which case a freelancer can be acquired even at a premium in the knowledge that there will be limited operational or legal friction when that funding comes to an end). This is particularly helpful given the annualized, nonrecurring nature of much of the nonprofit funding landscape and may even provide a channel for more people contributing to important nonprofit work than could afford to on a more permanent basis. 

Thirdly, it makes sense when the work requires a different type of management, for example, because it is seasonal, specialized, or unpredictable. Organizations that already operate in this way include wildlife research nonprofit Point Blue Conservation Science, which hires seasonal scientists and research partners, and Médecins Sans Frontières/Doctors Without Borders, which typically recruits international mobile staff for 9-12 months but places recruits like surgeons on assignments of 6-8 weeks.

To make this model work, nonprofits need a certain level of capacity. A survey by journalist/coach Jon Younger and the University of Toronto showed that nonprofit freelancers are consistently more critical of their treatment and access to information than those in the private sector. Nonprofits should consider competency fit and expectation-setting, and that, while not “managed” in the traditional sense, contractors still require attention: deliverables need to be scoped, feedback must be given, and context should be provided in order to set them up for success.

Opportunity 2: Work on More Discrete Time Horizons

Related to, and sometimes an enabler of, changes in a nonprofit’s talent model are changes in the time horizon over which it conducts work. The very nature of the institutional paradigm means that many nonprofits (and most for-profit organizations) operate on continuous timelines—they offer a broadly standard slate of products and services on an ongoing basis (notwithstanding the rhythms of reporting requirements, seasonal purchasing patterns, etc.) and their aim is not just to succeed according to some impact or income metric, but to continue doing so for as long as possible.

The creative industries, however, are oriented to discrete or project-based timelines, typically galvanized around the release of some sort of product. When gauging their success—and especially creative success—we speak not about how long these organizations have been in existence but about their specific pieces of work. As magazine editor James R. Quirk once said, “a star is as good as [their] last few pictures.”

The outcome-first approach that makes sense for creative pursuits also makes tremendous sense for nonprofits, whose very existence is tied to delivering social value. Working on discrete time horizons reduces the likelihood that the imperative to solve the problem is crowded out by the understandable yet maladaptive imperative to perpetuate the institution. It also incentivizes progress by instilling a greater sense of urgency and accountability. It drives efficiency by maximizing expertise (i.e., high-end talent) while minimizing overall financial obligations. With clearer endpoints and milestones, it can make it easier to tell a more compelling version of your story to key stakeholders, including members of the public.

This approach is worth adopting in cases where the work is particularly urgent or time-bound (as is the case with many environmental nonprofits) or if the organization faces an action-forcing event such as a public commitment or legal deadline. Politicians are masters of engineering such events to deliver real and perceived progress, but other examples include the 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development, which introduced the UN’s Sustainable Development Goals.

It is also valuable if there is an inflection point past which further work on the problem is less productive. This can be because of a nonprofit’s focus—working with a community being relocated, civic engagement in the lead up to a national referendum, or promoting health system engagement against the backdrop of a crisis. The work of Mothers Against Drunk Driving, for example, can be bifurcated into the time before and after the passage of the National Minimum Drinking Age Act. It can also be because of workforce considerations, for example, when required or differentiated talent is only available for a short period of time, or if the nonprofit is trying to generate social proof by enrolling a density of allies, which cannot be ignored but which is also not sustainable in the long run.

Putting this approach into practice can mean applying different hiring methodologies (see Opportunity 1) or shorter bursts of effort than the typical 3-5-year focus of strategic planning. One such practice, for example, involves switching away from the sequential, preparation-heavy way in which many institutions work and towards the more agile methodology found in some of the creative industries—breaking content into parts which can be developed, tested, refined, released, and improved upon quickly. This approach draws inspiration from sets of practices popularized in a startup context, but (as Recoding America Fund’s Jen Pahlka argues in her launch announcement) is fundamentally less about “technology” and more about an orientation away from “waterfall” project management — in particular, building feedback from deployment into the process of design rather than attempting to predict all of the relevant variables at the beginning.

Examples of nonprofits whose current version represents a significant divergence from their initial functionality at launch include online education giant Khan Academy, which started as a YouTube series; public school funding site DonorsChoose, which was initially populated by founder Charles Best’s teacher colleagues; and YouthBuild, founded by Dorothy Stoneman, which evolved from a nonprofit housing program in Harlem to a national network of affiliated, government-supported workforce and training programs — a shift reflected in YouthBuild’s transfer from the Department of Housing and Urban Development to the Department of Labor in 2006.

This deliverable-based orientation provides room for experimentation and innovation, shortens feedback loops, and reduces the costs of failure, allowing organizations to produce superior outcomes and test bold approaches without risking their entire mission. It incurs cultural changes and the confronting idea of planning for your own obsolescence. But it can also unlock real impact—the sort that nonprofits were designed to deliver.

Opportunity 3: Augmenting Metrics With Insights

The stakes for nonprofits are high, not just because of the importance of their work, but because of how difficult it can be to evaluate that work. As a result, nonprofits often face external and self-imposed pressures to measure their in/outputs as rigorously as possible. According to one report, three-quarters of nonprofit executives consider impact measurement a top priority.

At the most rigorous end of the spectrum are randomized control trials, which statistically evaluate the strength and causality of interventions (though as Nicole Marwell and Jennifer Mosley argue, RCTs bring their own suite of shortcomings). But even at the other end, nonprofits employ measurement systems at multiple stages of the theory of change and during annual planning to monitor their implementation and/or outcomes.

Some parts of the creative industries also work this way—think of test screenings for films. But although these can help identify areas of confusion, steer rework, and make a more effective financial or creative case, if poorly selected or over-relied on they can also be used to undermine directors and pull productions in controversial directions.

The key to making the most of test screenings is discernment: the ability to use them as data while ultimately relying on one’s informed judgment to determine quality. There are times when experienced executive directors should also rely on their discernment to set the direction of their nonprofits.

The main benefit of doing so is that it challenges the pressures to optimize for less effective but more measurable courses of action (the risk that nonprofits “hit the target but miss the point”). In education settings, it can be tempting to focus on test scores and attendance instead of much harder to measure but important interventions relating to purpose, creative thinking, behavioral learning, or a sense of fulfilment. While the former outcomes are valuable, optimizing for them can lead to the wrong feedback loops. Instead, augmenting naïve measurement with discernment gives decision makers permission to orient their proposals away from the symptoms and towards the root causes of issues.

A more discerning approach can also be helpful in the opposite situation, where a nonprofit lacks data or historical comparisons because it is working in a new or emerging field, or where data exist but are hard to access or unreliable, as often happens in international development work. Related to this are problems which are illegible, where the issue area is hard to classify, and what is being solved for cannot always be named, at least early on. Illegible problems are similar to the adaptive challenges described by Ron Heifetz and others at Harvard University, or some of the VUCA categories popularized by the US Army in the 1980s.

In all these cases, we are not arguing that decision-making should be subjective, based solely on seniority, or isolated from user needs. In fact, it should be informed by a deep understanding of those needs, which means senior leaders need to stay in touch with the communities they serve. What we are suggesting is that user needs are not always known or measurable, and in these cases, nonprofits have an opportunity to build structures that enable and incentivize experienced and talented people to exercise their judgment.

This relies on nonprofits having management mechanisms for recognizing, elevating, and rewarding perceptiveness and credibility in instances where those attributes are advantageous. Because it relies on a select group of highly engaged people, a discernment-based approach is also only feasible if scaling or replicating the work is not a short-term priority.

Other Lessons

There are other opportunities for nonprofits to adopt a creative paradigm. For example, nonprofit funding practices have also not changed as quickly or creatively as those in the for-profit sector, even though over 75 percent of nonprofits have seen demand increase and almost half lack the financial resources to deliver more. Taking inspiration from the creative industries, nonprofits could move beyond increasing earned income and reducing tax costs and explore implementing a nonprofit-equivalent of Business Improvement Districts (where local services benefit from businesses self-imposing property taxes) and “percent for art” ordinances (which funnel 1 percent of municipal construction costs to public art).

A supportive philanthropic sector is also an important underpinning. We invite funders to allocate portions of their portfolio toward projects structured like the creative paradigm’s “focused mission organizations”—organizations structured from the ground up to achieve their mission by any means necessary, not to perpetuate an institution for the sake of it.

The point is not to get bogged down in individual mechanics but to understand how, at a more fundamental level, nonprofits can mobilize people, legal structures, capital, and other resources in new ways to achieve the outcomes that they are struggling with.

Implementation

According to the congruence model developed by David Nadler and Michael Tushman, an organization’s performance depends on the alignment between its structure, people, tasks/processes, and culture. It will not be possible to maximize the benefit from the above opportunities simply by trying to change the behavior of individuals. Instead, we invite founders, executive directors, and boards whose organizations (or parts of them) are operating under some of the conditions we list to think about what organization design, talent assumptions, budget allocation, and incentives are needed to support and formalize change.

The good news is that cultivating taste-based discernment, working backwards from a release date, or trying to attract talented people whose schedules have opened up for a quarter are likely things nonprofit leaders—and most people—have experience with in other contexts.

Below are five tactical steps nonprofits can take to increase their chances of success:

1. Develop a clear understanding of the tradeoffs involved in changing how the organization works. These tradeoffs include both the specific costs we outline (such as coordination costs) and more general considerations like those relating to donor expectations, regulatory compliance, staff morale, and executive buy-in.
2. Assess your readiness—both culturally and structurally—to adopt a new paradigm for a particular problem or context. This can be done formally or informally, or with the support of a trusted, discerning eye. Be sure to explicitly demarcate where the new approach is also not likely to be helpful.
3. Identify pilots to test creative mechanisms in action. This can be as simple as emulating a new format for a meeting or as comprehensive as forming new structures for teams and operating units (for example, scoping roles in a particular team to parallel creative contributors rather than assigning work based on a strict hierarchy). Small projects or discrete initiatives offer the organization the chance to run “creative beta tests” without having to be all in or all out.
4. Borrow with integrity rather than blindly copying or rushing into fad implementations. The creative paradigm offers valuable alternatives, but it must be thoughtfully adapted to the specific context, mission, and constraints of individual nonprofits. Working with creative industry leaders can help you recognize personal and organizational blind spots, identify where institutional ways of working have been adopted by default, and explore new options.
5. Ensure it feels safe to fail for people involved in design and implementation. The creative industries’ tolerance for risk and iteration is higher than that of nonprofits, which are required to act with high levels of accountability and stewardship. Without explicitly creating space for experimentation—and potential setbacks—nonprofits will likely default to their familiar institutional approaches when pressure mounts.

Perhaps the most significant challenge facing nonprofits that are interested in adopting a more creative paradigm is meta-cognitive; it is hard to learn how to learn things, especially when there is a well-established way of operating that feels like “going to work.” We are not suggesting nonprofits implement wholesale change and throw the baby out with the bathwater. But we do believe there are opportunities—at least for some nonprofits some of the time—to add these tools and perspectives to their toolkits. The creative paradigm is at its most successful when it prompts us to reconsider assumptions we are taking for granted even though they are not serving us—even something as simple as asking yourself, as a nonprofit leader, “am I doing this because it’s ‘how a company is supposed to operate’ or am I doing it in order to make the best product that I can?”

We hope this provides nonprofit leaders with some permission to acknowledge the shortcomings of sticking to their existing paradigm, think in a structurally different way, and in so doing, to increase their spending efficiency, improve their public trust and community engagement, and deliver the services which are so desperately needed.

Organizations of all kinds must expect that the people within them will have differing viewpoints, and it is important to acknowledge the value of disagreement. Studies show that people generally govern themselves more wisely when they deliberate and consider diverse ideas, and when handled skillfully, disagreement can improve organizational performance and cohesion.

Learning to disagree well is also a civic act. Organizations that create conditions for constructive dissent help sustain democratic habits. Indeed, some argue that a central deficit of contemporary democracy is a widespread failure in many countries to embrace productive dissent and deliberation within civic and political culture.

Although institutional types and goals differ widely, with a deliberate approach and the right tools, leaders and their teams can transform conflict into the kind of constructive disagreement a healthy civic environment requires. They can foster ongoing negotiation, mutual recognition, and shared agreement on what to do despite areas of disagreement.

Strength Through Disagreement: Three Examples

The examples that follow—one from a social movement, one from our own higher education institution, and one from the private sector—highlight how context can shape efforts to cultivate productive dissent and how institutions can discuss and select their own guidelines for disagreement when they are challenged from outside.

1. The American Civil Rights Movement

From roughly 1955 to 1963, the American Civil Rights Movement encompassed substantial and often vigorous disagreements. The movement included strong voices advocating different approaches to change, including street confrontation, legal strategies grounded in the US Constitution, and electoral strategies to enlist large numbers of white voters and moderates. Members of the movement also disagreed about its ultimate goals. Some sought equal legal rights, some democratic socialism, and leading civil rights activist Martin Luther King, Jr. himself called for a national spiritual rebirth. These diverse views meant that organizations like the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC) and the National Urban League, at times, competed for followers, political influence, media attention, and funding.

Yet this internal disagreement also served as a resource. It kept the movement broad and flexible, attracting people with diverse values and enriching its deliberations. Andrew Young, executive director of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC), worked with King, SCLC’s former president, in the early 1960s, and recalled that King “usually could bring us together, but he always let us fight it out for ourselves for a long time. And the only time he really got mad with me was when I wouldn’t disagree with everybody. … A movement needed wild ideas and radical notions, but it also needed to be pulled back into perspective to do something that was actually doable and attainable.”

According to Young, King modeled a leadership skill: cultivating disagreement and channeling it into deliberation. The SCLC and its partners in the broader movement employed many practical methods for this purpose, including holding regular strategy meetings that fostered solidarity despite intense disagreement, as well as through music, food, and celebration.

Although the movement did not always live into its broad vision of justice and equity, perhaps most notably with regard to its treatment of women, and at times strained under pressure, including conflicts between SCLC and the SNCC, the classical phase of the American Civil Rights Movement not only tolerated but also sometimes cultivated disagreement and elevated leaders who embraced dissent. These practices helped it win concrete gains while also strengthening democratic habits beyond the movement itself.

2. Tufts University and Institutional Pluralism

Even as surveys indicate that Americans continue to view higher education favorably, many believe universities handle disagreement poorly and exhibit political bias.

One flashpoint has been institutional statements. In recent years, in response to domestic and international crises, senior institutional leaders, university presidents among them, have made public statements. For instance, Tufts University’s administration made statements about racial justice after the murder of George Floyd in 2020 and against Hamas after the attacks on Israeli civilians in 2023. While some faculty, staff, and students believed that these and similar statements were important, others believed that the statements spoke for the whole community in ways that could chill the speech of anyone who disagreed. A professor or student might refrain from saying things that countered the view of the institution’s president for fear of losing opportunities and rewards, or even being disciplined.

At least 148 institutions of higher education have adopted policies modeled on the University of Chicago’s 1967 Kalven Report (formally titled, “Kalven Committee: Report on the University’s Role in Political and Social Action.” The report essentially bans the university administration from taking positions on political or social issues, except in extraordinary circumstances, and insists on “institutional neutrality” to help preserve freedom of expression for individual faculty and students.

Yet our view is that neutrality is impossible and a misleading goal. The Kalven Report asserts that the university “is not a club, it is not a trade association, it is not a lobby.” However, universities are not only communities of scholars; they are also centrally organized nonprofits with employees, investments, real estate, and local influence. The University of Chicago itself, for example, played a role in the development of atomic weapons and deliberately shaped the South Side of Chicago in its own interests and often at the expense of Black residents.

If neutrality is impossible, pluralism is an essential ideal. In this context, pluralism means promoting an abundance of viewpoints to advance rigorous inquiry and creative exploration across disciplines. At Tufts University, a faculty-led working group considered adopting a version of the Kalven Report. But the group’s final report instead calls on the university to focus on the conditions required to sustain and enrich pluralism. As an example of a practical initiative, Tufts has established the Vuslat Foundation Generous Listening and Dialogue Initiative to study how and when people experience disagreement productively, and to teach students and others to disagree better.

3. Costco and Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion

The multinational corporation Costco offers a for-profit example of how clearly articulated principles and durable governing practices can support resilience in the face of external pressure. Recently, Costco faced a shareholder proposal challenging its diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) policies alongside criticism from elected officials. But the company had long been subject to scrutiny even before this episode. Beginning in the mid-2000s, analysts and investors questioned its capped product markups, above-industry wages, and resistance to short-term profit maximization.

Unlike the American Civil Rights Movement or a university—where disagreement often originates from internal members—Costco, like many corporations, has frequently been on the receiving end of public contestation from shareholders, political actors, and market commentators. Central to this contestation has been the company’s operating model, described by management scholar Zeynep Ton as a “good jobs” strategy, which ties above-market wages, stable scheduling, and employee development to long-term performance.

Over time, Costco has embedded this strategy into durable institutional practices, such as capped markups, promotion-from-within norms, relatively high wages and benefits, and board-level governance processes that formalize how to weigh stakeholder interests. These guardrails have shaped the company’s responses to external criticism, including challenges to its DEI commitments.

For many organizations, external scrutiny becomes a test of institutional integrity, revealing whether pressure leads to reactive shifts or principled steadiness. Clear institutional guidelines rooted in durable values can mitigate the destabilizing effects of external pressure and enable organizations to respond without abandoning core commitments.

Dimensions of Difference

All of these cases illustrate the value of disagreeing well. However, they differ in important ways that leaders need to consider when deciding how to address disagreement within their own institutions.

First, organizations differ in whether disagreement or (more broadly) discourse and communication is a central function. The Civil Rights Movement existed to change the opinions and values of the American people, as well as policies and laws. It needed a coherent view along with healthy internal disagreement. A university plays an important civic function as a location for free and continuous debate. Agreement is less valuable in a university than in a movement, and disagreement is more so. Finally, the objective of a for-profit corporation is not to debate positions or ideas. Still, Costco had to address disagreements about its operating model and DEI.

Leaders of conventional for-profit firms in particular tend to assess disagreement instrumentally, asking whether it benefits organizational performance. As Ahmmad Brown, who developed the idea for this article series, and Pamela Coukos have previously noted, disagreement can be good for the bottom line. Making space for differing perspectives and approaches can strengthen collaboration, productivity, and team effectiveness.

Yet effectively managing disagreement is not simply a matter of productivity and efficiency. The workplace remains one of the few settings in which individuals from diverse backgrounds regularly collaborate to address shared problems. As a result, organizations can function, whether intentionally or incidentally, as sites for the cultivation of civic skills.

Second, institutions have different forms of membership. A for-profit firm can choose whom it employs and can fire employees who do not support its goals. A university can choose students and professors, but most have adopted policies to protect academic freedom, including the freedom to dissent and criticize the institution. These policies include freedom of expression and due process rights for students, as well as tenure for faculty. As a result, a university cannot exclude someone for disagreeing peacefully.

Meanwhile, a social movement can, to some extent, selectively recruit participants and marginalize dissenters, but it needs members and must accommodate people with diverse views, or risk shrinking and becoming ideologically narrow. Thus, it must accept disagreement. And although we did not offer a case of a democratic community, such as a town or state, these communities are obliged to protect everyone’s freedom of speech as a right, regardless of whether individuals dissent and provoke controversy.

Enduring Frameworks to Guide Behavior

Disagreement is not merely instrumental to democracy; it is intrinsic to it. Yet disagreement must be structured and governed if it is to remain productive rather than corrosive. Political theorists have long underscored this tension: Hannah Arendt argued that a good life requires consequential debate among equals who are meaningfully different; Jürgen Habermas insisted that collective legitimacy depends on free, inclusive, and reasoned deliberation; and Albert Hirschman identified three responses to dissatisfaction—voice, exit, and loyalty—each of which, under the right conditions, can strengthen an organization.

The challenge, then, is institutional: How can organizations expect disagreement, sustain it, and still preserve shared purpose and legitimacy? While there is no single approach to effectively managing and benefiting from disagreement, cultivating diversity and creating an environment where everyone has a voice are valuable practices across all contexts—regardless of organizational type—and at the individual, organizational, and civic levels.

Leaders must attend to two related responsibilities. Internally, they must protect and encourage voice by clarifying decision rules, distinguishing disagreement from disloyalty, and building routines that prevent conflict from hardening into factionalism. Externally, they must establish clear guardrails for responding to dissenting public voices, including those from activists, shareholders, elected officials, and the media. When organizations become the object of public disagreement, the question is not whether pressure will arise, but whether their principles are strong enough to guide their response.

Clear commitments, embedded in durable practices and governance structures, help prevent reactive shifts driven by momentary outrage or market fluctuation. They allow organizations to absorb criticism, weigh competing claims, and respond without abandoning core values. In doing so, institutions do more than manage disagreement; they demonstrate how pluralistic societies can remain steady amid strain.

Organizations that invest in the structures and norms that make disagreement constructive—both internally and in response to external scrutiny—help sustain the civic habits on which democratic life depends. In an era of polarized public discourse, institutions that learn to govern both expression and response become quiet stabilizers of the democratic order.

Correction: March 17, 2026 | This article originally noted that Hamas attacks on Israeli civilians occured in 2024. This has been updated to 2023.

In the past two decades, impact evaluation has become an unavoidable topic in the social sector. Yet beyond the discourse on how to measure social impact lies a structural problem: We are not producing reliable knowledge about what works, regardless of the method used. While part of the debate gravitates toward Randomized Control Trials (RCTs), the real gap lies in the absence of standards, capacities, and institutional structures that enable civil society and philanthropy to learn systematically. This article aims to reframe the conversation on what matters: rigor.

Drawing on my experience leading impact evaluations within government (including experimental and non-experimental studies) and later advising civil society organizations and philanthropic funders, I have seen how this gap is reinforced from different directions. On one side, reporting requirements often prioritize speed, volume, and compliance over understanding. On the other, critiques of experimental and quantitative approaches have sometimes been used to legitimize evaluations that abandon basic scientific logic altogether, as if complexity or social purpose exempted the sector from standards of credible inference. This article examines how these dynamics converged and what a more rigorous, learning-oriented approach to evaluation would require from philanthropy, organizations, and evaluators alike.

The False Dilemma of RCTs

Beginning in the early 2000s, Randomized Control Trials (RCTs) became one of the most influential tools for evaluating impact in development and social policy. Their expansion was closely associated with the work of researchers such as Esther Duflo and her collaborators, as well as institutions like the Abdul Latif Jameel Poverty Action Lab (J-PAL), which helped scale experimental approaches across governments, nonprofits, and multilateral organizations.

As experimental approaches spread, they reshaped how impact was discussed and assessed, triggering both enthusiasm and backlash. Over time, however, the debate was increasingly framed as a choice for or against RCTs themselves—despite their well-established value as tools for causal inference—diverting attention from the more substantive question of how to apply rigorous evaluative standards, experimental or otherwise, to strengthen learning across the sector.

In a recent SSIR article, Nicole P. Marwell and Jennifer E. Mosley argue that privileging experimental methods such as RCTs in evaluation funding can reinforce inequality by favoring organizations with greater technical capacity. They also caution that, in complex social settings, experimental designs can overstate certainty and narrow what counts as meaningful impact. These critiques do not reject experimental methods outright but question their elevation as the dominant benchmark for measuring impact and allocating resources across the social sector.

Beyond the merits of these arguments, it is an ill-posed debate given the sector’s current position. Civil society and philanthropy do not have an RCT problem; they have a rigor and standards problem. More specifically, some organizations struggle to establish even minimal evaluative frameworks, and philanthropy has not invested enough in building their institutional capacities, including their ability to evaluate.

We Evaluate Little, We Evaluate Poorly, and We Learn Even Less

In 2017, public policy and evaluation researchers Amy L. Gardner and Claire D. Brindis reported that only 6 percent of 106 surveyed evaluators had used experimental methods in advocacy evaluations. A separate study from the Center for Effective Philanthropy (CEP) and the Center for Evaluation Innovation (CEI) based on 127 funders in the United States and Canada found that only 1 in 5 evaluations they financed were RCTs. Although not representative of the full universe, these are among the largest surveys available and suggest something essential: The problem is not methodological colonization by experimental methods. It is a scholarly debate that, while important for epistemic clarity, is far removed from the practical challenges the sector faces in adopting professionalized evaluative practice.

More precisely, the recurrent use of the concept of evaluation contrasts sharply with its actual practice. According to the CEP-CEI report, only 6 in 10 foundations have a dedicated evaluation unit. For every 10 program staff members, foundations have one full-time equivalent dedicated to evaluation. In other words, there is a 10:1 ratio between the resources used to push initiatives and the resources used to understand whether those initiatives work. Even when evaluations do occur, more than three-quarters of respondents report difficulty translating them into meaningful insights, and only 9 percent of staff prioritize sharing findings externally. Moreover, more than 2 out of 3 respondents believe their foundations invest far too little in strengthening grantees’ evaluation or data-collection capacities.

Given that philanthropy does not merely fund isolated activities but also seeks to build knowledge about effective pathways to social change, these numbers are even more concerning: Foundations do not understand their grantees’ results in nearly half of the cases, and only 1 in 5 understands the effects produced on ultimate beneficiaries. This knowledge deficit is reflected in the perception held by 6 in 10 respondents that evaluation findings will likely not influence decisions about future first-time grants.

On the civil society side, the picture is similarly troubling. In the 2025 Financial Sustainability Models Survey conducted by Civic House, a Latin American nonprofit that supports civic innovation and sustainability among civil society organizations, only 1 in 3 organizations in Latin America and the Caribbean reported conducting annual strategic planning, and a similar share reported conducting annual evaluations of results or impact.

This is not only a matter of quantity. In my work with Civic Compass, Civic House’s research and policy advocacy unit focused on technology-related public policy, I evaluated the quality of the theories of change of 60 organizations across Argentina, Mexico, and Colombia. Approximately 45 percent struggled to clearly articulate the specific variable or effect expected from a successful campaign, and around 40 percent had difficulty distinguishing routine activities from services, outputs, or outcomes. These findings suggest that organizations understand their substantive fields well but lack the structured narratives required to monitor and evaluate results, making timely course corrections difficult or impossible.

All these data point to a concerning pattern: We “evaluate” more but learn less. Evaluation, across much of the sector, has been distorted into a sequence of affirmative narratives, where little seems to go wrong and where failure scarcely exists. While scholars and practitioners spend significant time critiquing the “What works?” agenda, the dominant logic on the ground is actually: “How many people did we reach?”—often without the faintest idea of whether those people benefited. In my work as an evaluator, I have been asked far more often about participation counts in employability programs than about how many participants secured actual jobs.

The Tyranny of ‘Nominality’

All this unfolds in a sector driven by genuine goodwill. Organizations and funders are motivated by an honest desire to improve lives. The absence of rigorous evaluation is not a matter of malice; it is a matter of institutional design, incentives, and capacities—and, above all, the normalization of the belief that doing more is equivalent to achieving more.

Advocating for civil society while simultaneously celebrating the idea that its work is “too complex to evaluate” places it in a permanently disadvantaged position. It turns civil society into an actor entering strategic conversations with incomplete tools, while others participate with fully developed ones. The outcome is a symbolic civil society, heard, but not necessarily influential, whose transformative capacity is limited not by lack of commitment but by the absence of structures that allow it to learn what works and what does not.

This dynamic fuels what I call the tyranny of “nominality”: the predominance of metrics that count activities and outputs (workshops held, people reached) as if they were indicators of change. Under this tyranny, beneficiaries become numbers, and achievements become infographics. Interventions are measured by volume, not by effect. Civil society risks working tirelessly while learning very little, trapped in a logic where reporting becomes more important than understanding. Here are some ways philanthropy can reverse this pattern:

Theory-driven design: Philanthropy must change not only what it asks organizations to report, but how it designs grants from the outset. Too often, funding prioritizes novelty, scale, or the promise of rapid results, without requiring a clear articulation of how change is expected to occur. A more productive starting point would be to benchmark proposed interventions against existing evidence about mechanisms that have worked in comparable contexts, recognizing that while solutions may differ, the behavioral and institutional constraints they seek to address are often similar. This shift moves the focus away from endlessly reinventing programs and toward testing whether specific and theory-driven assumptions about access, incentives, or support actually hold.

Managing expectations: Time horizons matter just as much. Many grants are awarded for multiple years, yet success is assessed through short-term, nominal milestones that encourage constant reinvention rather than sustained improvement within the same population. Structural problems rarely change quickly, but that does not mean incremental progress is insignificant. Improving even one dimension of, for example, vulnerability (employment stability, school continuity, access to services) can meaningfully alter people’s daily lives and sometimes trigger cascading effects. Treating such changes as trivial because they do not immediately “solve” the problem reflects a misunderstanding of how social change unfolds. What philanthropy should demand instead is clarity about what improvement would look like in practice: How would the lives of intended beneficiaries be different if the intervention were working, and how would we recognize that difference?

Focus on capacity building: Evaluation is often treated as a reporting requirement to be satisfied at the end of a project, rather than as a professional discipline that must be integrated into program design. When organizations, particularly smaller ones, are forced to choose between investing in delivery or in evaluation, the result is usually superficial monitoring that satisfies donor expectations but leaves no durable learning behind. Data are collected in haste, stories are assembled to illustrate success, and once funding ends, neither the organization nor the system is better equipped to make decisions. If philanthropy is serious about learning, grants must explicitly support evaluative expertise (internal or external) and allow time and resources for monitoring systems that enable course correction, not just retrospective judgment.

Program coherence and design discipline: A related problem is the tendency to design programs with multiple components layered on top of one another, often in the belief that complexity itself signals ambition or increases the likelihood of change. When interventions combine several activities without a clear theoretical spine, participants may follow highly variable and improvised trajectories, making it difficult to know which elements mattered, which did not, and why. At the end of such projects, weak results can lead to the conclusion that nothing worked, while positive outcomes can create the illusion that everything did, when, in reality, only some components may have driven change. This lack of clarity not only undermines learning but also makes responsible scaling nearly impossible because programs that rely on ad hoc combinations of activities often require exceptional organizations capable of managing that same level of improvisation. Designing grants around clearer theories of change (limiting unnecessary components and sequencing interventions deliberately) helps ensure that both learning and execution capacity remain in place beyond the life of a single grant.

Philanthropy should not ask for speed or volume; it should ask for learning. Resources dedicated to social change are too valuable to be diluted in activity metrics that say little about people’s lives. Innovation, to be genuine, must be measured; otherwise, it is conservatism disguised as movement.

What RCTs and Alternatives Actually Offer

This is not a defense of RCTs as the only valid method for evaluation. The experimental method has significant limitations, especially in complex social interventions. Yet the inability to conduct an RCT is not an excuse to avoid rigorous evaluation. Not being able to randomize does not absolve us from the responsibility of explaining why an intervention should work. To do otherwise is not only a failure of creativity but an ethical problem: It means foregoing knowledge that could improve lives.

Having conducted several evaluations, experimental and non-experimental, I must emphasize the distinctive value of the experimental method: It is the only approach that, under relatively simple assumptions, allows causal attribution. Critics often highlight ethical concerns or the idea that RCTs create a “black box” that hides mechanisms. But no evaluation, experimental or otherwise, should operate as a black box. Without mechanisms, there can be no learning. Every serious evaluation is grounded in a robust theory of change and uses complementary methods to illuminate processes, assumptions, and mechanisms. When evaluations fail to do this, the problem lies with the evaluator, not the method.

Another common critique is that RCTs take too long. But this raises a basic question: Do we really expect complex social changes to occur overnight? What takes time is not the methodology, it is the phenomenon. Indeed, many qualitative studies and surveys, including those critical of RCTs, take years to be published. Time is not a methodological problem; it is an empirical reality.

Non-experimental evaluation has also contributed valuable tools. Rigorous qualitative approaches are grounded in the same inferential logic as quantitative methods, relying on systematic evidence to assess whether and how an intervention plausibly produced change. Contribution Analysis is particularly useful in complex contexts: It does not establish direct causality but builds plausible, evidence-based explanations of how an intervention contributes to change. For evaluations with few cases, Process Tracing and Bayesian Updating approaches allow evaluators to test and refine hypotheses by accumulating and weighing evidence over time, rather than relying on single observations. Although different in form, they share a principle: Narrative is not enough—explanation is required.

I have learned to appreciate studies that wear their limitations upfront and still manage to offer something meaningful, rather than those that hide behind their limitations to avoid saying anything at all. Rigor is not measured by the proportion of truth an evaluation claims to reveal, but by its correctness: the transparency of its assumptions, its acknowledgement of boundaries, and its responsibility in what it asserts.

The value of theory-driven approaches and robust evaluative methods (including experimental ones) becomes particularly clear when they dismantle widely held but misleading intuitions. One example comes from cash transfer programs: Contrary to the conservative belief that unconditional transfers create disincentives to work, a 2017 study showed that they generated sustained improvements in well-being without reducing labor supply.

In my own evaluative practice, I have seen similar lessons. In a publicly funded web development training program in Buenos Aires, initial data suggested a decline in employment. Subsequent investigation revealed that participants were indeed entering the tech sector but informally. Rather than treating this result as a program failure, the findings informed design adjustments, including the addition of employability training and stronger links with private-sector employers to support transitions into formal work. In another evaluation of direct transfers to secondary school students, we observed unintended incentives related to school continuity. Further analysis showed that the issue was not the transfers themselves, but their limited capacity to offset broader constraints facing vulnerable households. In both cases, combining rigorous estimation with qualitative inquiry shifted the policy conversation from questioning whether the interventions worked to understanding how their design could be improved to better achieve their goals.

Toward a Learning Sector: Rigor as Strategic Responsibility

The foundational principles of experimental methods offer lessons even to those who will never conduct an RCT: the need for a clear theory of change, explicit assumptions connecting each link in the results chain, simplicity in intervention design, and the logic of factorial or multi-arm designs when testing several solutions. These are not principles of experimentalism; they are principles of methodological seriousness, and every organization can adopt them.

If the goal of evaluation is to produce useful knowledge, the priority for the social sector and philanthropy should not be choosing between RCTs and non-RCTs. It should be overcoming the standards deficit that limits our capacity to learn. Every intervention, complex or simple, rests on an implicit theory, and evaluation consists of testing that theory honestly. The challenge is not methodological; it is strategic. And it is political in a democratic sense: Without reliable knowledge, civil society operates blindly, and those who most need effective solutions pay the price. A sector that learns can improve lives sustainably. A sector that does not learn works hard but transforms very little. Philanthropy, organizations, and evaluators have both the possibility—and the responsibility—to change this.