Inside Social Innovation

Research shows that when talented social innovators lack “invisible capital”—the so-called right pedigree, right passport, right skin color, right gender—they may fail to get the attention and investment they need to succeed. How can leaders in philanthropy improve access to capital? What tools can help nonprofit leaders overcome these barriers and get the support they need?

Social entrepreneur, author, and Stanford University lecturer Kathleen Kelly Janus leads a discussion about these questions with Echoing Green President Cheryl Dorsey, Whitman Institute Co-executive Director Pia Infante, and California Endowment CEO Robert Ross.

“Philanthropy is reinforcing many of the very forms of inequality that we are all working so hard to solve,” Janus says.

Dorsey identifies three main systemic barriers—a lack of access to capital and opportunities, psychological stress from social exclusion, and the unequal control of resources and political power in society—as some of the challenges to achieving more equitable investment.

Funders have to take a structural response to addressing these barriers, says Ross. Solutions might include changing the makeup of board rooms, staffs, and leadership teams. Or it might mean looking out for emerging leaders who haven’t already received major investment, and supporting them or having funders participate in implicit bias training.

“You can’t see what you can’t see,” Infante says. “It’s important who’s in those choosing seats.”

Black women face racial and gender stereotypes and biases that often keep success in the hands of the few—and their experiences working in the social sector are no exception.

To understand the unique set of racial and gender barriers—coined “double jeopardy”— that stymie black women, listen to this discussion from Makiyah Moody, senior consultant at La Piana Consulting; Tyra Mariani, executive vice president of New America; Crystal German, principal of Prosperity Labs; and Ify Walker, founder and CEO of Offor. They provide insight into everything from survival strategies to creating more inclusive work environments.

“In my daily life, being black and being female comes into play on a constant basis, and that takes a toll,” German says. “It gives me a different level of appreciation. It gives me a different level of empathy.”

The conversation was based on Moody’s interview series, “Black & Bold: Perspectives on Leadership,” which she expanded upon in her 2018 SSIR piece about black women’s use of kinship to overcome career barriers in the social sector.

Due to her father’s work as an engineer, Paula John moved around a lot in her youth. She often felt seen but not heard in the relationship with her dad. With her own family, she tried hard to listen, and she expected the same consideration from her local Houston health agency, she told former NPR host Bill Littlefield. When she reached out to the agency for help with an illness, and it sent her home empty-handed after a four-hour wait, she gave it harsh feedback. “She was right,” said Cathy Moore, executive director of Epiphany Community Health Outreach Services (ECHOS). “Some of the things she said were some of the things we focused on most.”

Through a Listen for Good grant, ECHOS began regularly surveying clients like John and responding to their feedback to transform the way ECHOS works.

What practices make the arts more or less inclusive? At Stanford Social Innovation Review’s 2018 Nonprofit Management Institute conference, leaders from three San Francisco Bay Area arts organizations discuss how they are shaping both their organizations and their performances to make them more diverse and welcoming to all.

“That's the next big shift if we are to survive—to go into the community, knock down those norms, and be something that is accessible,” said panelist Tim Seelig, artistic director of the San Francisco Gay Men's Chorus.

Nayantara Sen, manager of cultural strategies with Race Forward moderates the conversation with Seelig, Judith Smith, founder and director of AXIS Dance Company, and Sherri Young, executive director and founder of the African-American Shakespeare Company. They discuss the meaning of equity within their respective communities, learning from failures, and building sustainable partnerships.

When Shannon Revels came home to Oakland after nearly 15 years in prison, he found his criminal record made it difficult to get a job. But through the Center for Employment Opportunities (CEO), he found a role first as a janitor then resident services counselor in transitional housing for the formerly homeless. In this interview with former NPR host Bill Littlefield, Revels discusses the importance of his being heard by a teacher he met in prison, giving feedback to CEO and seeing it acted upon, and how he created ways to listen to his residents and dignify their suggestions with action.

The nonprofit Color of Change was formed after Hurricane Katrina to use online resources in the fight for the rights of Black communities in America. Since then, Color of Change has grown into the nation’s largest online racial justice organization, with more than 1.4 million members.

Rashad Robinson, president of Color of Change, spoke at our 2018 Nonprofit Management Institute conference about the nature of political and cultural power and the importance of continually assessing the nonprofit sector's efforts to bring about change. Robinson says, “We have to continue to challenge and ask ourselves, ‘What are we winning?’”

Additional Resources

• View a PDF of Robinson's Nonprofit Management Institute presentation.
• @rashadrobinson on Twitter
• @colorofchange on Twitter

Technology can magnify the power of grassroots organizing and social innovation, but it can sometimes bring about societal harm, whether intentionally or not.

At SSIR’s 2018 Frontiers of Social Innovation conference, Rob Reich, a Marc and Laura Andreessen faculty co-director of Stanford PACS, explores the implications for the social sector and free speech in conversation with Kelly Born, a program manager at the William and Flora Hewlett Foundation’s Madison Initiative, and Arisha Hatch, a managing director of campaigns at Color of Change, the largest online racial justice organization in the United States. They touch on topics including election integrity in the United States, online organizing around discriminatory policing, and the spread of hate speech and false information on social media platforms.

“Our democracy, our informational ecosystem, has been outsourced to a very few, very powerful platforms,” says Reich. “We don’t really know how the algorithms that power them are working to facilitate the very communication that we all depend upon.”

Artificial intelligence (AI), once a niche discipline within computer science, has blossomed over the past decade—including in the social sector. In this recording from our 2018 Frontiers of Social Innovation conference, Johanna Mair, academic editor at SSIR and a professor at the Hertie School of Governance in Berlin, speaks with AI expert Lab Fei-Fei Li about the growing importance of AI to the social sector and the imperative to improve representation within the community of AI technologists. Li is an advocate of “human-centered AI”—an approach emphasizing human psychology, augmentation rather than replacement, and social and human impact—and in 2017, she co-founded AI4ALL, a nonprofit organization working to increase diversity and inclusion in AI. Li argues that including people of diverse backgrounds is important to putting fears about the technology at bay.

“We know AI will change the world,” Li says. “The real question is who is going to change AI?”

Emerging technologies like biotech and artificial intelligence have the potential to transform so many of the systems that make up the world around us.
         
At our 2018 Frontiers of Social Innovation conference, Katherine Milligan, who directs the Schwab Foundation for Social Entrepreneurship spoke with a few savvy social entrepreneurs who are harnessing these tools for social impact right now. Milligan speaks with Keller Rinaudo, CEO and cofounder of Zipline, which is using drones to deliver blood and medicines to remote parts of the world; Kristin Richmond of Revolution Foods, which is using data and technology to increase access to fresh, healthy food to underserved communities and schools; and David Risher, CEO and co-founder of Worldreader, a global nonprofit that provides people in the developing world with free access to culturally relevant, digital books via e-readers and mobile phones.

In the mid-1990s, NGO activists began shining a spotlight on the concentrated use of slave child labor in Pakistan to produce soccer balls for the global market. The attention prompted the industry to make deep changes in its supply chain to eliminate the problem. Today, the campaign is viewed as a model for improving labor standards, with the gains a result of government, NGO, and donor involvement.
                       
And yet human trafficking, modern slavery, and child labor remain pressing concerns in many industries’ global supply chains. At SSIR’s recent Frontiers of Social Innovation conference, Siddharth Kara, who directs the program on human trafficking and modern slavery at the Harvard Kennedy School, spoke with Nina Smith of Goodweave International, Leslie Johnston of C&A Foundation, which works to transform the fashion industry, and Bama Athreya of USAID, about how their organizations and sectors are addressing these issues.