It looked like a slam-dunk opportunity for social entrepreneurship: A nonprofit organization was given nearly $2 billion to replicate a model community center in some 30 communities. Yet this turned out to be a formula not for scaling up, but for trouble, conflict, and, five years later, mixed results.
The case involves the Salvation Army and a $1.8 billion donation (from the fortune left by McDonald's founder Ray Kroc) to create lavish community centers in cities across the country, based on one built in San Diego. But according to news reports, by 2011 only 11 of the centers will have been constructed; plans for two have been scrapped; and efforts in other places are struggling.
The Salvation Army case offers a broad lesson about scaling up social innovations at a time when the Obama administration is seeking $50 million to support replication of successful social innovations and many foundations are trying to squeeze more impact out of reduced funding due to last year's stock market collapse. The lesson: Replication of social innovation is not really about "duplicating, copying, or repeating" (the dictionary definition); it's about adapting the innovation to different contexts and it takes many forms, depending on the underlying nature of the innovation and its pathway to scale.
When the Army tried to do in Detroit and Massena, New York, what it had done in San Diego, the projects fell apart because the context for local fundraising, to match the Kroc funds, was much more difficult. In every innovation sector that we work--education, workforce development, urban sustainability, immigration, and others--it's evident there are contextual differences driven by place, cultural, and economic characteristics, as well as other factors. The "cookie cutter" model of replication doesn't work; adaptation of the innovation's underlying design to local context matters.
But design adaptation is not enough for achieving greater scale. Different innovations have different pathways to scale, described in detail in a publication of the Ford Foundation, "Asset Building for Social Change":
- Influence market forces--Creating incentives for business, organizations, and consumers to make economic choices that support desired outcomes.
- Developing public policies--Persuading government bodies to revise, adopt, and implement laws, regulations, investments or services that advance innovations.
- Fostering communities of practice--Building learning networks among individuals and organizations that can voluntarily develop, adopt and rapidly spread new tools and practices.
- Promoting social learning--Using educational processes to provide large numbers of individuals with information that influences their personal behaviors.
- Changing power relationships--Mobilizing low-income people and communities to secure representation and voice in public, private, civic and cultural decision-making processes that affect their lives.
Each “pathway” for change uses slightly different tactics, institutions, and competencies. When tackling a complex issue (like climate change), what's usually needed is work on multiple pathways simultaneously. |
