We Pursue Social Impact

We act as catalysts for big ideas.

Organizations — non-profit actors, philanthropies, companies — pursuing change at a systems level must think of themselves as catalysts, initiating and accelerating “chemical reactions” in the ecosystems they inhabit. The work of systems change often unfolds over long time horizons and requires a diverse “we” made up of a range of stakeholders bigger than any one organization.

Much of our work is in this catalytic mode:

We serve as strategic advisors to leaders and innovators in the social sector
In partnership with foundations and with actors across sectors, we play a catalyst role in advancing systems change
Many of the ventures in our portfolio are built to achieve significant social impact as well as financial value

Traditional corporate strategy puts the institution in the foreground and asks how that institution can create and realize the most value. Strategy in the context of systems change places in the foreground a large outcome in the world, recognizing that achieving this outcome will require an interlocking system of actors and treating institutional context as an instrument in this pursuit.

For any endeavor of this kind, time is the medium in which change occurs. Strategy for systems change must frame the long arc of how big goals can be achieved, as well as the work that can be done now in today’s conditions and with today’s resources. Achieving ambitious long-term goals requires reaching interim milestones that enable the next phase of success. No matter how momentous the goals of an endeavor might be, it can only progress by graduating from one era to the next, where each era is characterized by a clear set of pivotal achievements that build the foundation for the next level of work.

Our work in systems change has been diverse, including advancing the potential of data science to accelerate social progress, building the movement to strengthen national service, improving the effectiveness of the federal government, and expanding the ecosystem of solutions that can improve youth employment outcomes.

A selection of our partners

Our research on systems change

The Art and Strategy of Changing Systems: Part 1

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The Art and Strategy of Changing Systems: Part 2

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The Messy Work of Changing the World

Case Studies

Rockefeller Foundation - US Youth Employment

We find ourselves in unprecedented times. Once more, we are looking out at a period of great economic difficulty, followed by a period of recovery that we all hope will be swift and equitable. Over the course of the recovery from the last financial crisis, the overall US unemployment rate for younger workers remained stubbornly and worryingly higher than the national average. Over the course of several years, we worked with the Rockefeller Foundation to build and deliver an approach to serving the millions of chronically disconnected youth who have been neither in school nor working for more than a year. For these young people, failure to gain an early foothold in the labor market often translates to a lifetime of lower earnings, as well as family and community instability.

Until recently, efforts to improve youth employment in the U.S. have primarily focused on education and training to better prepare young people for jobs. While these programs are important, there is massive leverage, scalability, and sustainability to be had in working through employers, building practices that meaningfully scale their ability to access under-leveraged talent pools, well beyond the scope of typically smaller-scale CSR-themed programs.

Working in a multi-year partnership with the Rockefeller Foundation, we developed a comprehensive, cross-sector impact hiring strategy that brought employers to the table in a new way to address the youth unemployment crisis. Collaborating with some of the nation’s largest employers (including Walmart, McDonald’s, and Accenture), leading community-based organizations, and forums like the White House First Jobs Compact and the 100,000 Opportunities Coalition, we developed a body of knowledge about tools, resources and talent practices that create business advantage through hiring and developing individuals who face barriers to economic opportunity. Through this effort, the Rockefeller Foundation became a leading voice in reshaping how funders, employers, advocates and other key actors respond to the persistent challenge of youth unemployment.

Rockefeller Foundation - Equity and Economic Opportunity

Service Year Alliance

At a moment marked by fraying social fabric and weakening civic ties, many organizations and individuals have been asking how civic engagement can be driven among young people through formative service-oriented experiences. Through a strategic planning grant from the Einhorn Family Charitable Trust, we began working with four allied organizations each playing a leadership role in the national service movement—the Aspen Institute’s Franklin Project, Service Nation, National Conference on Citizenship, and Voices for National Service. These four organizations saw the opportunity to work together to advance an ambitious shared goal of dramatically increasing the number of Americans who commit to a year of national service, from 60,000 at the time of the project to a goal of 1 million within an aggressively short timeline.

This goal requires sparking a cultural shift in which completing a service year is both an opportunity and expectation for all young Americans. Together, we helped the alliance build a multi-year vision, strategy, and roadmap for an effort to build a culture in which completing a service year is both an opportunity and expectation for all young Americans. Through an intensely co-creative strategy process, three of the four participating organizations decided to formally come together to create a single organization, Service Year Alliance, to pursue the strategy together and to more powerfully leverage their combined capabilities. Chaired by General Stanley McChrystal, Service Year Alliance works to strengthen and grow existing service corps, build awareness among young people, and unlock more service year funding from public and private sources.

Service Year Alliance