Introduction

Take, for instance, poverty alleviation. Currently, thousands of initiatives around the world are devoted to bringing people out of poverty.  Many others are focused on related issues such as social justice and economic inequality, sustainable development, and ecosystems, and species conservation. Many more are directed to improving access to education and opportunity, sanitation, water, health, housing, jobs, financing, markets, and more.

But when we allow ourselves to step back and take a breath, we find ourselves facing conflicting goals and counteracting forces.  For instance, we confront issues like:

• Bringing millions of people out of poverty, while making sure that the planet can survive the increased use of natural resources, for which a good percentage of the planet’s well-off population must start consuming less.
• Informing people about the most pressing problems facing the world while ensuring people still feel empowered to act.
• Ending homelessness while dealing with a lacking mental health system or the employment prospects of people who have served time in jail.
• Fighting corruption and building transparency into the government systems, while protecting those taking public stands.

Some connections around complex social issues are obvious.  Other connections are more subtle.  Some connections go unacknowledged.  Many connections feel too overwhelming to tackle, certainly too overwhelming to tackle alone.

We divide up social problems into separate components, and that makes us feel like we can at least do something. True enough, but success in one component may have negative, unintended consequences in another part of the system that is causing the problem.  We often do not give ourselves permission to engage with the whole.  We feel that we do not have the capacity or resources.

Resolving complex social issues through systems change requires social organizations that are eager to help build an ecosystem that sustains this type of work, especially switching from project-focused work to a long-term, highly collaborative approach to problem-solving.  Funders and investors that feel comfortable supporting systems change work by financing and supporting the right partners and grantees and developing deep and long-term evidence-based relationships.  Governmental actors that are free of constraints to embrace systems change and social innovation and risk-taking initiatives. And corporations that rethink their role in society and look for paths to go beyond “doing well while doing good.”