Starting a non-profit and dreaming of creating big systemic social change with your efforts? Well,
in this video I'm going to talk through a framework that will
help you design a nonprofit strategy that will help you disrupt systems and scale
and grow your non-profit to create large-scale social change! [Music]
Welcome or welcome back! My name is Amber Melanie Smith and I'm a non-profit founder
and executive director who makes these videos on YouTube to help folks like you who want to
make a big difference in the world, and might just need a little guidance on the steps to
do that. This is one of my favorite topics, so I can't wait to get into this with you. If you
are thinking of starting a non-profit or need a little bit of help developing a sustainable
fundraising strategy I also have some online courses at my website FounderToFullTime.com
that I hope you'll go check out. Finally don't forget to give this video a like and subscribe
to my channel for more content like this. Alright let's get into this! So this video was inspired by
a story that I recently came across on LinkedIn of all places - this was by George Anders senior
editor at large LinkedIn and he was telling the story of Habitat for Humanity. Habitat is a large
Global non-profit - you have likely heard of it - and when you hear the name Habitat for human
you're probably having this image invoked in your mind of all these volunteers hammering
away building houses and just doing work like that you can probably even picture what it looks like
in your head when you hear this non-profit's name um that's some good brand recognition but anyway
that's Topic in other videos um so what I was really inspired by in this article was we all
know what habitat's working on you know they're they're literally building houses so that people
can afford to live in them but what you might not realize is that about 10-ish years ago the senior
leadership over at habitat really examined their strategy and what they were doing and
really realigned to take aim at a different way of approaching things to create a bigger large-scale
social change habitats CEO at the time started by asking his staff how long would it take us at our
current Pace to build all of the houses that the world needed to basically solve the homelessness
and affordable housing crisis and his staff did all the calculations and came back with the answer
and the answer was that it was going to take 1030 years to basically meet all of the affordable
housing needs now I know as someone who really wants to contribute to creating large-scale social
change and I'm sure this is true of lots of you as well when you heard that number you were concerned
because that is a really long time to meet all of the needs of the people out there who need housing
um and so obviously so was the leadership of habitat they realized that they needed to come up
with sort of a new angle a new way of approaching this um this problem while still maintaining the
housing builds but they had they had to add something new to their formula so what they
did was they went Upstream to take a look at what barriers were preventing this problem from getting
solved faster so they started really researching and understanding that there were policies in
place and different nations or regions or systems that were not quite functioning equitably or
things that basically if changed would have a huge ripple effect on the supply of affordable
housing across the world so they started doing things and adding strategies like advocating
for policy changes that were preventing women from owning land in Bolivia or things like in investing
financially in new ideas for better construction materials in India stuff like that things that
once they identified that item and they could work hard and invest in changing that one thing it
would have a big impact The Story Goes that since these efforts began those changes now account for
about half of Habitat for Humanity's impact on the affordable housing issue that's pretty incredible
so obviously when we are starting a non-profit and just starting out we are not going to have
the brand recognition or the multi-million dollar budget of Habitat for Humanity but there are some
things that we can be putting in place at our beginning or growing stages that will put us in
a really strong position to create this sort of wide scale social impact down the road so
let's start talking about this framework and to begin talking about this framework I want to
first start by defining what is systemic change if this is a phrase you haven't heard before or
you're kind of new to the concept let's get into this a little bit more when I talk about this idea
of systemic change with people and I explain what it is and how it works I usually use this example
so there's charity and there's systemic change and both are important charity is someone let's say
John John is hungry today so a lot of non-profits would have a charity approach and they would you
know have a meal kitchen or feeding service something like that they would get John the
food he needs today but then there's systemic change which is asking the question well why
is John and other people in John's same situation why are they hungry what are the systems in place
that are perpetuating John's hunger every day and preventing him from getting the help that he needs
so some non-profits tackle it from that side they might use advocacy or um you know some of
the other things we're going to talk about in the framework to basically understand
what is keeping John and people like John hungry all the time how can we stop it so
that John is never hungry again and the thing is we do need both nonprofits do need to tackle
um both of these things uh you know either at the same time or taking turns doing it because you
don't want John and people like John to be hungry every single day so they do need that direct
service that support day to day and then you also want to be working on going upstream and stopping
hunger at its source so that we don't have to continuously invest resources in making sure John
isn't hungry every single day so that is systemic change with that foundation in our pocket let's
get into five steps to examine how we can build up a non-profit that will be poised to create
systemic change Step One is super important and it is Define the change we're talking about really
big complicated issues here that can really make someone's brain hurt just trying to wrap their
minds around so we've really got to get clear on the change we want to see in the world and that
we're going to be working towards you're going to need to do some research around the issue and take
a look at how many resources whether that's people power or you know staff hours or people hours
um dollars or other resources it's really honestly gonna take to put an end to the
problem that you're trying to solve in your community and you want to do this for your
particular Geographic service area so not the whole world but the specific area that your
non-profit serves if it's not the whole world obviously this research is going to take some
time and some math and I would highly recommend looking around online trying to connect to people
who might already be doing some of this research they might have a great formula you can already
use because they have also been studying the issue for your local community too so see what's out
their first research that and the whole idea here is you want to end up with a statement
like habitat had of it would take us a thousand plus years to meet the affordable housing needs
of the world if we kept on doing the exact same thing we're doing at the same pace
but here's the resources it would take or the strategy it would take to cut that down to 500
years or 100 years or 50 years right lots of places have done this the UN sustainable
development goals have done this a little bit too so take a look at the existing research
localize it for your service area and then you want to share it with your leadership team so
this could be your non-profits board of directors or the volunteer team that you're working with or
if you have staff it could be your staff it could be some of your top donors or investors
this is going to have the wonderful effect of unifying them around a compelling inspiring
Mission working with your team having this message of what the problem is and the resources that are
truly going to be needed to solve it you can work to refine this with your team and then you can
share it with the public because a message like that is really going to Galvanize support it's
going to educate people on the need it's going to make it really clear the path to get there and
they're going to want to be donating to your cause because a Clear Vision is always very inspiring
step number two is to understand who and or what is connected to the issue you're trying to solve
this is probably part of the research you would be doing in step one but here is the reality issues
do not exist in a silo hunger is connected to literacy and so is employment and so is
homelessness everything is interconnected in the systems that we have around the world that are
affecting these things so you want to really understand what are the different levers and
different things that are impacting this issue so that you can know that if an adjacent issue
over here if that were tackled in a different way that might also have an impact on your issue so
that might become part of your strategy what you can do is you can create sort of an ecosystem map
it's a visual where you're literally drawing out what the interconnected issues are and who in your
local community might be tackling these issues and in what ways the third step here is to decide what
your strategy is going to be you're going to do this using knowledge of what skills you and your
team are bringing to the table what assets what resources you might already have to bring the
bear to solve the problem you want to solve and there are sort of five main strategies that are
linked to creating large-scale social change that I'm going to talk about as part of a framework
that was created by the Taproot Foundation which is a non-profit that mobilizes people
with specific skill sets to help non-profits I'm going to talk through these five strategies that
are part of the Taproot foundations framework and you can be thinking to yourself which one are you
best equipped to take on based on your skills your knowledge Your Capacity the people you have around
you or multiple ones because when these things are combined they can often scale your social
change even more strategy number one is to spend your time focusing on finding the bright spots
which is a reference to one of my favorite books switch which I recommend you definitely read
um bright spots is all about finding what's working in the world already there are
millions of very smart people around the world who care about issues and are trying different
things and just like science they're you know they're studying they're trying things they're
doing experiments they're learning what's not working what is working if you spend your time
finding the bright spots you might find it's more efficient because someone might already have a
great solution that's working and might just need to be replicated or scaled to amplify that impact
so that's strategy number one strategy number two is data and insights and this links to the
story that I shared before it's what habitat did they did extensive research to learn how long it
would take them to meet the world's affordable housing needs and they came up with that number
of over a thousand years and that number was so startling to people that it galvanized them
to action so focusing your time on really making sure that research and the data is
known is another strategy to create larger scale social change the Third strategy is focusing on
policy shifts now this is when you are tackling a specific rule in an institution such as a company
or a government or some other organization that if that one rule were changed it would
have a ripple effect on lots of other people and lots of other things for example let's say
um a really large company changed its rule to only work with vendors who are eco-friendly well that
would have a pretty astounding impact on lots of other companies because if that com if that big
company is working with a thousand vendors then now a thousand vendors are inspired and influenced
to make sure that their products are eco-friendly so it's finding that thing that if you change it
it's going to change all sorts of other things too the fourth strategy is public perception and
how we can change it a lot of non-profits a lot of activists use this because public perception
can influence some of the other things we talked about such as shifting policy law and advocacy so
really helping the public understand an issue better or understand why they think what they
might think about an issue if that is an incorrect line of thinking and helping them find the truth
of the matter can have a big influence on social change efforts as well the fifth strategy talked
about that by the tap read Foundation is disruptive technology and we all know the
power of technology to majorly disrupt things on a large scale I mean just look at what's going on
with AI right now disruptive technology can have a big impact on systems and social change efforts
for example there was this fire department in California that came up with an app that would
alert CPR certified technicians in the area if someone was having an emergency and the theory was
that these technicians would be able to get to the scene where someone was having a problem faster
than maybe someone else they needed to dispatch from their headquarters and it's been working
so that is an example of disruptive technology that is broadening impact and helping people okay
so those are the five strategies that Taproot Foundation talks about as mechanisms to create
social change so as you're thinking about which one of these or handful of these you want to
try the fourth aspect of this the fourth step in this process is you've got to partner with
others you've got to find the right Partners so that number four finding and inviting the right
Partners is all about determining which Partners you're going to need based on the strategy that
you decided you're going to work on first let's say for example that you determined you're best
suited to work on public perception as a strategy well what kind of Partners would be the best fit
in that case perhaps media organizations or maybe even other organizations or non-profits
that are tackling the same issue but have a bigger audience than you so that you can reach a larger
amount of people thinking through things like that so at this point you've researched your
issue you have thought about which strategy you want to try you've started to reach out to some
potential Partners number five is you've gotta test Solutions and scale what works
if ending homelessness were extremely easy I hope and pray we would have done it already
things are complicated things are hard there are lots of people and forces at work against each
other and moving in different directions and so it's a lot of work and it can take time so it's
important to test Solutions at a small scale like a scientist would and really hone in on
what works from there like we talked about with the bright spots strategy then you can scale up
you can prove that your strategy is working and that in turn will bring in more dollars
more supporters and more resources to scale up that social change alright so I would love to
hear from you is this something that's on your mind are you thinking of tackling something that
would be part of this sort of large-scale systemic change effort share your story in the comments
I always love to hear about people doing that kind of work because I'm just fascinated by it
um like I said before if you are in the process of starting a non-profit you're not sure what
the steps are you need some guidance or you are working on developing a sustainable fundraising
plan I have my courses at foundertofulltime.com you can check out I also have a newsletter the
link is below this video where you can subscribe and get information about the latest trends
and social impact and non-profits funding opportunities stuff like that so you can be
sure to subscribe to that and opt out anytime you need to finally I have a group on Facebook called
Change the World or Bust - we have 4,500 people in there from around the world who are trying to make
an impact in their own ways and I hope you can join us. That's all I have for you today, bye!