Change for Good: An Action-Oriented Approach for Businesses to Benefit from Solving the World's Most Urgent Social Problems
Paul Klein
272 pages, ECW Press, 2022
When businesses have serious problems, they find people who have experience in successfully solving similar problems. When it comes to helping to address important social problems, businesses make decisions about how this will be done based on having no experience with the problems they are trying to help solve. In the first chapter I wrote for Change for Good, entitled “Nothing About Us Without Us,” I explain why businesses need to include people with lived experience and how this should be done.
Today, there is an imperative for corporations to contribute to social change in meaningful ways and opportunities for businesses that make the shift from social responsibility to social change to benefit considerably. However, most businesses decide what social issues to support and how this will be done based solely on the perspectives of internal leaders and managers who, with few exceptions, are people who have no direct understanding of the issues being addressed. This is the case despite overwhelming evidence that solving social problems depends on understanding the problem from the perspective of people with lived experience and creating opportunities for these same people to develop and implement new ideas and approaches.
Solving social problems has never been more important and the reasons why businesses should contribute to social change have been well documented. However, the current approach, which could be described as “everything about us without us,” is one of the reasons that business-based social change programs don’t work well enough. As the imperative for corporations to contribute to solving social problems continues to grow, businesses need to shift from what I refer to as “CSR lite” (the practice of doing as little as possible to be seen as responsible) to taking effective action informed by people with lived experience, that will help solve social problems.—Paul Klein
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Until recently, involving people with lived experience in the development of social change programs has been almost exclusively limited to civil society organizations. The ways in which this has been done include participation on advisory committees, co-design of programs, inclusion in focus groups and surveys, involvement in peer-to-peer programs, and the development of tools to help guide personal treatment or life choice decisions.
The Canadian Association of People Who Use Drugs is an organization that aims to raise the voice of people who use drugs throughout the policy-making process and at every level of government. “Nothing About Us Without Us” is their guiding principle, and their board of directors is composed entirely of people with lived experience of drug use. The organization’s 2014 report, Collective Voices Effecting Change, highlights key issues for people who use drugs in Canada, current actions by peer-run organizations of people who use drugs, and what the organization’s plans are to address these issues. Along the same lines, the British Columbia Centre for Disease Control’s Peer Engagement and Evaluation Project creates opportunities for people with lived experience of substance use to engage as experts and use their lived experience to inform effective health service programming and delivery.
In the private sector, the model has been what I describe as “about us, without us.” In doing research for this book, I couldn’t find a single example of a business that has adopted the approach of involving people with lived experience, and it’s safe to assume that virtually no businesses are actively involving people with lived experience — or the few that are, do not believe it’s important enough to communicate. However, the lack of “first voices” limits the effectiveness of these corporations’ social change initiatives and deprives them of other benefits including increased legitimacy and authenticity, improved program efficacy, and innovation and enhanced ability to build social change partnerships.
The Need for a New Perspective
My discovery of why lived experience is so important and what the benefits are of involving those with lived experience happened inadvertently. In 2015, our team at impakt was helping the Home Depot Canada Foundation to develop its social change focus of helping to end youth homelessness. During the development of this program, we learned from experts in the homelessness sector, and from people who had themselves experienced homelessness, that access to employment was key to ensuring people had stable housing. We also learned that most youth-serving organizations in Canada offered “pre-employment” training to youth and that, despite a well-documented shortage of labour for entry-level positions in large corporations, very few of these youth were able to secure employment.
This discovery led us to develop HireUp, what I believe was the world’s first platform to connect youth with lived experience of homelessness to entry-level positions in corporations. It was the first time we had gone beyond solely advising clients on how to develop and improve their programs, and created our own social change enterprise. I remember realizing at the time that we now had the responsibility of helping people directly but weren’t confident that we really knew how to do this. No one on our team had experienced homelessness or knew first-hand why the pre-employment programs offered by youth-serving non-profit organizations were not effective. How could we develop an innovative response to this important problem without any direct experience?
We reached out to the Yonge Street Mission in Toronto for their help in finding a youth with lived experience of homelessness who could help us build HireUp. We had the very good fortune of hiring a young man named Cameron, who was still experiencing homelessness at the time he joined our team. Cameron was instrumental in helping us build HireUp and help to connect youth to entry-level positions at companies including Home Depot Canada, Walmart Canada, and Scotiabank, among others. During the two years he worked for impakt, Cameron was able to secure stable housing and enroll in university.
It was the first time I realized that we had never involved people with lived experience in the development of social impact programs for our corporate clients. Beyond our work, I wasn’t aware of any other corporation that had done this. Across the board, corporate investments in social change were being led by people who had never experienced any of the social problems they were trying to address.
It’s not hard to see why this was the case. Try to imagine a large corporation inviting a group of people experiencing homelessness into their boardroom to hear about their lives. It’s equally unlikely that most corporate executives would visit a settlement organization to speak with refugees about the challenges these people face in finding employment and ensuring their families are secure. How about asking young people with alcohol and drug dependencies to decide what youth-serving organizations should receive grants?
A few years ago, we convened a group of youth who’d experienced homelessness to help allocate $400,000 in charitable grants to youth-serving organizations. This involved a remarkable session in a downtown social service organization where these youth reviewed applications for funding from a variety of community organizations. The questions they asked about these groups really showed the importance of their perspective. Their questions included asking if the organizations applying for funding included the youth they were serving in developing the programs. They also asked very specific questions about how the proposed funding would be used, which revealed their experience of seeing funding that was often misdirected to initiatives that didn’t deliver enough impact.
More recently, we had a group of executives from Canada’s largest oil and gas corporation participate in a series of presentations from potential community partners at a social enterprise restaurant and catering company in downtown Toronto. It was clear that this experience contributed to the executives’ understanding of these organizations in a way that would never have happened in one of their boardrooms.
Improve Your Impact: How to Take Action
I think the Lived Experience Advisory Council’s ideas are the foundation for a new approach that businesses can take to improve the impact of their investments in social change. I’ve developed a tool that is based on input from people with lived experience and impakt’s work in developing social change programs that businesses can use to improve the social impact of their community programs.
Below: Figure 8.1 Ways to improve impact by involving people with lived experience. (Source: impakt)
There are a number of considerations that are necessary throughout the steps outlined above. The following list will help ensure these are in place and that businesses and their partners with lived experience are set up for success.
1. Build trust with lived experience experts:
- Understand each individual’s strengths and personalities, and don’t push them out of their comfort zone. Some people might be willing to speak openly in a meeting or on camera/video, but others may not.
- Assign one corporate social responsibility manager to be the principal liaison with participants with lived experience—at and in between meetings.
2. Ensure adequate briefing and training before your project begins:
- Provide communication skills, such as media training, to help them talk to people in their communities and gather feedback, and training to understand business and other language that may be unfamiliar to them.
- Offer briefings prior to meetings to ensure full participation and to help people become familiar with the agenda, meeting protocol, and documents for review.
- Provide use of and access to technology. Ensure that experts with lived experience have the necessary resources to participate—like a phone plan with data, a laptop, or a tablet to use for the duration of the process.
- Be sensitive to dress and attire. It can be difficult for those who’ve never worn a suit to meet with people in suits.
3. Offer necessary support to ensure participants can actually be involved in the program:
- Ensure meetings take place at accessible locations and provide transportation or transit/taxi fare if required. Provide adequate notice for meetings.
- Provide funds for childcare for parents who need it so that they can attend program meetings and events without worry.
- Share agendas or other written documents in advance of meetings to allow experts with lived experience enough time to read them.
- Pre-pay for hotels and flights if needed, and provide cash or gift cards for meals.
- Provide compensation equivalent to what would be provided to any external consultant/advisor.
The ideas above will help ensure businesses can meaningfully engage experts with lived experience in tackling issues of social change in a way that will build trust, is sensitive to their priorities and circumstances, and will make corporate leaders and managers feel comfortable.
The Value of Lived Experience
Involving experts with lived experience isn’t necessarily easy. However, the personal, business and societal benefits of doing this are always rewarding. I think involving people with lived experience is core to what it means to Change for Good. I also believe that the reason most corporate social change programs don’t work well enough is that these companies aren’t involving people with lived experience in developing solutions to problems that affect them.