Place-based, regional initiatives (e.g., in a community or city) allow partnerships to focus on critical outcomes for a region while enabling the interdisciplinary work required to tackle the complexity of a given issue.
Systemic collaborations are best served by relationships built on trust, recognition of nuance, flexibility and two-way problem definition.
Collaborating in person is better for creating and sustaining functional partnerships, rather than just through remote exchanges of words, such as email, text, documents, etc. This is especially important in situations where jargon threatens to create misunderstandings of what the work will be like in practice.
WHAT'S CHALLENGING
Unequal access to resources between different groups to do the early-stage, “sense-making” work of systemic change. Those who have access to resources to do this flexible, open-ended work aren’t necessarily the ones with the local system insight or context to identify systemic opportunities.
Pitching for funding is often structured around ideas rather than questions. Humans love clear, tight ideas much more than nuanced problems, so communicating the value of pursuing the issues and their emergent dynamics is challenging.
Current funding for system change has sustainability challenges; initial bursts are frequent, but continuity over multiple years is less common.
There’s a need to build specific capacity for working systemically through training programs.
Evaluation approaches are often overly simplistic or not sufficiently flexible for dynamic environments.
WHAT'S POSSIBLE
Build new, unique institutions which provide a home for the early-stage, messy convening work of system change while supporting quality.
Convene design workshops around a variety of questions, all related to the theme “How can we make the transformative relationships that seem to enable good systemic collaborations the norm rather than the exception?”
Develop new contract templates for systems-change funding arrangements.
Work between funders, communities, and people well-versed in systems change practice to co-create new, lower-jargon language to discuss systemic change.
Develop new selection criteria for funding, and new due diligence requirements, that are better matched to systemic change.
