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Nonprofits & NGOs
The Time Is Right for Organizational Learning
A look at how nonprofits and nonprofit workers in the United States changed during the COVID-19 pandemic—and how to navigate the new changes ahead.
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Collaboration
What Working in Crisis Mode Teaches Us About Collaboration and Impact
Strategies like embracing urgency and putting egos aside are vital in a crisis. They might improve our day-to-day work as well.
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Health
Ensuring Equitable Access to Vaccines
As the United States struggles to vaccinate everyone in the nation, governments and community-based organizations trying to eliminate barriers to access for high-risk, rural, and remote communities must consider geography, partnerships, language, schedules, and technology.
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Health
SSIR Guide to COVID-19 Vaccine Distribution
A collection of SSIR articles on civil society's insights into the logistics behind a global vaccination campaign, including ideas for winning over the hearts and minds of people who aren’t yet convinced they should get the shot.
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Philanthropy & Funding
How COVID-19 Is Shifting the North-South Philanthropic Power Dynamic
Amid a global pandemic, philanthropic organizations in emerging markets are finding their voice and challenging historical constructs.
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Education
There’s No Formula for Taking Sensitive Trainings Remote
While the pandemic has clarified some best practices for online trainings, centering participants requires a creative approach, a deep understanding of participants’ needs, and thoughtful work to be responsive and flexible.
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Health
Lessons From Journalists on Building Trust With Local Communities During Crises
Any organization tasked with getting critical information to local communities—whether responding to a crisis like the pandemic or trying to challenge social injustices—needs a strategy for making sure their message is believed. Journalism offers insight into building trust as people's wariness threatens the uptake of COVID-19 vaccines.
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Nonprofits & NGOs
Nonprofits Need to Change for Good, and the Moment Is Now
An incredibly challenging year has highlighted for nonprofits the value of authentically putting organizational egos aside, collaborating more deeply, and honestly considering mergers—and those practices need to continue.
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Philanthropy & Funding
How Philanthropy Can Support Equitable Vaccine Distribution
Four ways philanthropy can effectively partner with governments to support equitable vaccination distribution and ensure that more individuals are vaccinated against COVID-19.
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Health
East African Health Accelerators and the Pandemic
Health-care innovation will be needed to put the brakes on the current pandemic and prepare the world for the next one. But how are accelerator programs adapting their activities to pandemic conditions?
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Philanthropy & Funding
Household Generosity During the Pandemic
Social and behavioral sciences can help us understand why COVID-19 is making giving practices more localized and expansive.
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Health
Orchestrating Systems-Level Change in the Battle Against COVID-19
How individuals and coalitions are orchestrating and activating neglected resources to help end the pandemic and build more resilient health systems.
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Philanthropy & Funding
Outcomes-Based Contracts in a Time of Crisis
Have outcomes-based contracts allowed more flexibility and adaptability in responding to the COVID-19? Lessons learned on building more resilient strategies to tackle social problems.
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Food
Turning Short-Term Crisis Relief Into Longer-Term Social Innovation
How civil society responses to COVID-19 in South Africa are resisting the all-too-common return to pre-crisis “normal.”
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Philanthropy & Funding
How to Raise $200 Million in Two Months to Battle a Global Crisis
Four principles were key to the success of the COVID-19 Solidarity Response Fund, a joint effort of the UN Foundation and the World Health Organization to raise hundreds of millions of dollars to help nations around the world survive the pandemic.
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Education
A Better Education for All During—and After—the COVID-19 Pandemic
Research from the Abdul Latif Jameel Poverty Action Lab (J-PAL) and its partners shows how to help children learn amid erratic access to schools during a pandemic, and how those solutions may make progress toward the Sustainable Development Goal of ensuring a quality education for all by 2030.
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Social Enterprise
Emerging Stronger From a Crisis
These battle-tested insights can help social enterprises increase their impact as they navigate severe crises like COVID-19.
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Health
COVID-19 Is Challenging Medical and Scientific Publishing
To transform how early medical data is shared, reviewed, and published, MIT and UC Berkeley are developing a new model of academic publishing.
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Leadership
How to See What the World Is Teaching Us About COVID-19
We need to look to other countries to change how we see our own, opening our imaginations to new ideas, solutions, and futures.
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Scaling
Scaling Big in India: Leveraging Behavioral Science to Help Feed Millions
A look at how a community kitchen initiative in India used insights from behavioral science to rapidly scale its services, delivering 4.5 million meals to homeless migrant workers even as the country instituted the world’s largest lockdown to combat COVID-19.
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Civic Engagement
Healing Our Health System, One Vote at a Time
How the work of bringing voter registration kiosks into emergency rooms has become more urgent—and more difficult—during the COVID-19 pandemic, and also expanded in scope. Part of a series on civil society's response to the pandemic.
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Leadership
Making Strategic Decisions in the Context of COVID-19
The long-term impact that the COVID-19 pandemic will have on society is still uncertain, but the tools of scenario planning can help social sector leaders better prepare their organizations for the different, possible futures that may unfold. Part of a series on civil society's response to the pandemic.
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Philanthropy & Funding
Reestablishing Philanthropic Vitality After the Emergency
The COVID-19 pandemic is forcing nonprofits to reinvent themselves at lightning speed, and many foundations are supporting them ad-hoc. But when the dust settles, the social sector will need to take strategic steps to restore its philanthropic vitality and contribute to a post-COVID social contract. Part of a series on civil society's response to the pandemic.
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Health
How to Ensure Medical Devices Help Communities in Low- and Middle-Income Countries
Governments, foundations, and social enterprises that want to ramp up the production and distribution of medical equipment in response to COVID-19 and other ongoing threats need to assess the process holistically or risk overpromising and underdelivering on important aid. Part of a series on civil society's response to the pandemic.
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Technology
A Digital Lifeline in a Public Health Crisis
Five lessons from a global development organization in Bangladesh that used a digital cash transfer program to help poor families struggling with COVID-19. Part of a series on civil society's response to the pandemic.
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Health
Frugal Innovation for Today’s and Tomorrow’s Crises
Organizations that reuse, repurpose, recombine, and rapidly innovate under resource and time pressures can help build a more inclusive and sustainable future.
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Leadership
A Better World Ahead Means Shaping Emerging Narratives Now
The groups that set the narratives about what happened during the COVID-19 crisis, what to do now, and what’s next will have outsized influence on who we hold responsible, who gets help, and what we do moving forward.
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Health
Fighting COVID-19’s Disproportionate Impact on Black Communities With More Precise Data
By weaving together an unusual array of data into a simple measure of a community's vulnerability to COVID-19, health care practitioners can develop tailored interventions to help Black Americans, who disproportionately bear the burden of the pandemic.
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Government
Mass Decarceration, COVID-19, and Justice in America
COVID-19 and the horrific murders of George Floyd and other black Americans have amplified the desperate need for the US justice system to be radically reimagined.
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Technology
The Problem With COVID-19 Artificial Intelligence Solutions and How to Fix Them
How nonprofit and business leaders can equitably and responsibly use AI systems in the fight against COVID-19.
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Nonprofits & NGOs
COVID-19’s Impact on Nonprofits’ Revenues, Digitization, and Mergers
Interactive charts show how hundreds of nonprofits face dramatic changes in their operations and plans as the pandemic continues to upend life around the world. Part of a series on civil society's response to the pandemic.
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Environment
Dispatch From 2030: What a Global Pandemic Taught Us About Tackling Climate Change
A look back from 2030 reveals how ambitious industrial policies, high-quality data, and courageous leadership saved us from an affliction worse than COVID-19. Part of a series on civil society's response to the pandemic.
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Human Rights
Advocating for Age in an Age of Uncertainty
How the COVID-19 crisis is amplifying ageism, and how advocates can push back.
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Leadership
Leading a Global Team Through Crisis Means Focusing on Local Details
Three steps every global organization should take to care for staff, and build resilience during COVID-19 and beyond. Part of a series on civil society's response to the pandemic.
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Philanthropy & Funding
How Foundations Can Make Progress on Long-Term Social Change Amid the COVID-19 Crisis
Amid foundations' necessary and immediate responses to the COVID-19 crisis, there are unusual opportunities to advance their long-term goals of building more just and equitable societies.
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Philanthropy & Funding
How Funders Can Help Save an Economic Engine of the Developing World
The COVID-19 crisis is threatening small and growing businesses in low-income nations and the capacity development organizations (CDOs) they depend upon. Helping CDOs overcome three types of financial challenges is critical to responding to the current and coming economic devastation.
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Nonprofits & NGOs
How One National Nonprofit Is Adapting to COVID-19
Lessons learned at Friends of the Children about maintaining stability in service during this crisis and the next one.
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Health
The Cultural and Social Challenges to Slowing the Pandemic in Africa
The coronavirus was slow to make its way to Africa, but it is now there in full force and will be difficult to contain because of certain cultural and social behaviors.
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Click Here
Click Here: Inoculation, Time, and Rent Strikes
In this week's links from SSIR's editors: the race for a coronavirus vaccine, science fiction, the demise of a beloved restaurant, and rent strikes.
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Nonprofits & NGOs
Three Things Nonprofits Should Prioritize in the Wake of COVID-19
Why organizations need to examine their social impact, economic viability, and capacity to deliver in order to remain relevant and viable both now and into the future.
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Technology
Countering Coronavirus With Open Social Innovation
Germany’s first government-hosted crisis hackathon offers seven lessons on how to make the most of a messy-but-promising way to kick-start social innovation.
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Click Here
Click Here: New Normals During and After COVID-19
Links from SSIR's editors to interesting news, essays, tweets, research, videos, podcasts, and more.
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Collaboration
Creative Public-Private Collaborations in Taiwan and South Korea Bolster the Fight Against Coronavirus
Cooperation between the public and private sectors in Taiwan and South Korea are enabling a prompt response to the challenge of distributing important health products during the COVID-19 crisis.
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Nonprofits & NGOs
COVID-19 and Chinese Civil Society’s Response
An outpouring of aid from nonprofits, foundations, and businesses in the nation first to face the epidemic provide some lessons and caveats for other regions now dealing with similar challenges.
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Nonprofits & NGOs
Radically Adapting to the New World
Faced with unprecedented conditions caused by the coronavirus pandemic, organizations are rapidly adapting to serve the greatest number of people in need, now. The speed of change has been remarkable.
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Human Rights
Lessons From Mutual Aid During the Coronavirus Crisis
Community-led responses to the COVID-19 epidemic are providing a model for treating the vulnerable that should remain when this crisis comes to an end.
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Click Here
Click Here: Government and COVID-19
Links from SSIR's editors to interesting news, essays, tweets, research, videos, podcasts, and more.
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Philanthropy & Funding
After the Pandemic: Addressing the Permanent Crisis With Pay for Success Programs
Governments have an opportunity to partner with impact investors and philanthropists to turn emergency spending into long-term impact.
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Leadership
SSIR Guide to Resilient Leadership During the COVID-19 Crisis
A list of SSIR articles to help social change leaders address operational and financial problems due to the COVID-19 crisis and other situations like it.
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Click Here
Click Here: Coronavirus and Civil Society’s Response
Links from SSIR's editors to interesting news, essays, tweets, research, videos, podcasts, and more.
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Civic Engagement
Civic Health and Social Distancing
Good civic health looks like people making meaningful connections with their neighbors, public officials, and contributing to governance decision-making. But what will become of civic life during COVID-19 Part of the series Rethinking Social Change in the Face of Coronavirus.
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Health
Adapting to the New Coronavirus
How the social sector and Stanford Social Innovation Review are responding now and preparing for what comes next. Part of the series Rethinking Social Change in the Face of Coronavirus.
Rethinking Social Change in the Face of Coronavirus
COVID-19 has affected every aspect of life around the globe, from individual relationships to institutional operations to international collaborations. As societies try to defend themselves through severe restrictions on people's movement and interactions, the disease continues to decimate families, upend governments, crush economies, and tear through the social sector. The interconnectedness—and vulnerabilities—of the complex systems that make the modern world run have never been more apparent. The former US ambassador to NATO, Nicholas Burns, described the impact of coronavirus to be potentially "as serious as a world war."
How should the social sector respond to the evolving crisis? How will nonprofits, foundations, philanthropic organizations, and social justice advocates emerge from the pandemic? What unique insight and capabilities can civil society bring to bear on the problems the world now faces? How will organizations manage potentially calamitous challenges to funding their operations? In this series, SSIR will present insight from social change leaders around the globe to help organizations face the systemic, operational, and strategic challenges that will test the limits of their capabilities.