Many social-impact networks burst into life out of an unpredictable mash-up of like-minded people who share a problem, get together to see what will happen, and then invent a common path forward. They have an itch to do something and they share a belief that pooling their resources and collaborating might get them what they want. But they don’t know what they’ll do together.
Just seven years out of college, Sadhu Johnston had become Chicago’s chief environmental officer in 2005, appointed by Mayor Richard Daley to lead the greening of the nation’s third-largest city. Two years earlier he’d started working on that goal as an assistant to the mayor, and found himself struggling to find out what other cities were doing. “I was cold-calling people in other cities and Googling to get information. I didn’t know anyone in a similar position. It was really a vacuum. For several years this was the primary frustration of my job. What information you did get was largely spin—the positive stuff. You learn as much from the failures as from successes, and it was really hard to get that.”
Daley had announced that Chicago would become the nation’s greenest big city, but no one was sure what that meant and how to make it happen. “Even most environmental groups were not seeing cities as playing a role when it came to climate change and environmental benefits,” Johnston recalls. “Cities were still viewed as ‘the evil city,’ with pollution coming out and resources going in to be consumed.” Gradually, though, the idea of urban sustainability, of redesigning urban systems for improved environmental and economic performance, especially reduced production of carbon emissions that triggered climate change, started to catch on. When Daley met with other mayors, Johnston compared notes with their staffers and found they too were frustrated by the lack of useful information. “A number of us thought we needed to be coordinated. But I realized I couldn’t do it myself; I had a full-time job.” There followed a period of false starts: one organization was interested in helping but didn’t follow up; another proposed to help, but wanted far too much money; a gathering of people from a few cities didn’t lead to anything. “I was casting about, trying to figure out how to get this done.”
Other social-impact networks start less impulsively. They are managed carefully into existence, the result of analysis, planning, and negotiation. Usually founders initiate the process because they hope to achieve more impact by getting organizations to collaborate. But to engineer this sort of collective effort, they have to analyze the problem they want to solve and its causes, and determine who should be involved in solving it, what they should do together, and how they should do it.
The Garfield Foundation, led by executive director Jennie Curtis, invested in a year of thinking about the problems of boosting renewable energy use and halting climate change before starting a network was even considered. Garfield was a midsize philanthropy, with about $3 million in grant-making annually, and Curtis wanted to explore new approaches to achieving greater results. She recognized that philanthropies were often not getting the hoped for impact from their grants to organizations. “There was excellent work being done on the ground, but it was typically fragmented and siloed,” she says. “There was not a lot of collaboration among grantees, and there was not a lot of aligned grant-making among foundations.”
Curtis’s team identified a group of organizations in the Midwest, other philanthropies and nonprofit environmental advocates, which wanted to expand the region’s use of clean, renewable energy. “Some of the advocates were frustrated by being bound to the project parameters, defined by funders, about what they could apply for funds for,” Curtis says. “We decided to get everyone at the same table so they’d be informed by the same information.” In 2004, using consultants and Garfield Foundation grants, the cadre of 24 organizations developed a detailed analysis of the region’s electricity system and, to its surprise, concluded that the problem it really wanted to deal with was the potential impact of global warming. “It took a ton of in-person work,” Curtis recalls. “Participants were willing to experiment with a systems-thinking approach. In the process, we ended up building a tremendous amount of trust and collegiality. The experience correlated with what is said about network building: it’s about relationships, relationships, relationships.” The group’s continuing analysis identified four interdependent strategies to achieve a massive reduction in carbon emissions within the region’s electricity sector: a halt to new coal plant construction, an enormous increase in renewable energy generation, retirement of most existing coal-burning plants, and a steady, incremental reduction in electricity use through efficiency. The system analysis “illuminated what strategic points to focus on,” Curtis says, “but it did not tell us what to do.” At the group’s urging, Garfield initiated and funded a new process. “We switched from systems analysis to multi-stake- holder strategic planning,” a way for the organizations to decide how to implement strategies. But, Curtis notes, “We had no idea we were going to build a network.”
Sadhu Johnston and Jennie Curtis went on to start successful networks—two of the 20 diverse social-impact networks described in Connecting to Change the World . Their experiences and those of many other network builders, as well as the authors’ work as consultants to and builders of networks, provide the practical frameworks, tools, and advice that people starting, investing in, managing, or improving social-impact networks can use to advance their practice.
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