What actually leads to big,
sustainable Social Change?

Read time: 5 Minutes

We grow up with stories of people at the forefront of changing the world.

We learn about these people in our classroom, in our books, and in the media.

They seem larger than life.

But the truth is, they started out as relatively normal people – like you or me.

And the other truth is, they didn’t create social change on their own.

We may not see the other people, organizations, or shifting systems at play in the stories we see, read, and hear about these people, but they’re there.

And if we can study more about both these individual changemakers and the factors that contributed to the social change they were a part of creating, we learn valuable lessons in how to create change, ourselves.

In today’s issue of Changemaker Mondays ☀️ ☕ 🌍, I want to break down how social change actually works – and how we can use this knowledge to change the world in our own ways.

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Traits of Successful Social Change Movements

As I got older, I was so fascinated by the question of how social change happens that I created my own college major around it (Yep! I have a B.A. in Social Change Leadership.)

As I studied this question, I learned that there are four major characteristics all of the most successful social change movements have possessed (summed up nicely in this article on audacious philanthropy):

1. They took time. Most of them took more than 20 years to accomplish, and some took 50, 60, or more years. That means planning for not just scale but succession is key.
2. They eventually involved some kind of policy change. Nonprofits, business, activists, volunteers – all play a role in creating social change. But at some point in the process, people came together to convince their nation’s leadership to create laws and policies that would enforce the positive social change people wanted.
3. They emphasized collaboration across the sectors. Different groups – nonprofits, businesses, civic groups, government, and everyday people – all coordinated to make it happen.
4. They involved philanthropists who made a “big bet”. Leaders convinced donors to make bold, large donations and helped them understand they wouldn’t see a social ROI right away. Social change doesn’t happen overnight.

It’s helpful to understand that these are ingredients likely needed for large-scale, world-changin’ social impact.

But what do we do with this information?

To make it actionable, we have to examine what actions changemaking leaders actually took throughout their work to facilitate these changes.

Actionable Strategies to Create Social Change

If you look at about a dozen of the most successful social impact campaigns and efforts in the last century, we see that all of them included some variation of these 5 key things:

• Leaders built a shared understanding of the problem: The changemakers involved worked together to define and agree on the features of the problem: The root causes of the problem, who benefits and who suffers, and how the problem is embedded into different aspects of our society. People can’t effectively tackle a problem if they can’t agree on what the problem is, what it means, and how it works.
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• They set “winnable milestones”, and celebrated: We mentioned above that creating lasting social change can take decades. That sounds overwhelming to most. To combat that overwhelm, we’ve got to set smaller goals along the way so our allies can stay motivated. But it doesn’t stop there: You’ve got to celebrate your wins every time you hit a milestone! Rally people around the success with an inspiring story and simple message that everyone can understand.
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• They designed simple approaches that would work at scale: If you have an amazing nonprofit or social change project, but it’s complex or hard to understand, it won’t be able to scale big enough to create the kind of long-term social change we’re talking about here. To make sure a project or campaign can scale, it has to be: A) affordable to duplicate, B) simple enough for anyone to implement, and C) an idea that people can be easily trained to lead on their own.
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  I love the story of how CPR became mainstream, because it’s a perfect illustration of this.
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  Before any of us learned CPR in our babysitting, health classes, or professional development programs, organizers poured years of research into making CPR so simple that any person could learn and perform it. Then, in the 1970s, a program launched to teach as many people as possible how to perform CPR, teaching 100,000 people its first 2 years. Today, 18 million Americans know CPR. Talk about saving lives!
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• They drove (rather than assumed) demand: If you build it, they still might not come. Successful social change movements accounted for the need for outreach, marketing, and distribution systems in their budgets and plans, knowing that spreading the word (rather than counting on people to find it on their own) is key. Lesson learned: Don’t skimp on the marketing budget.
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• They made mistakes, and embraced course corrections: All social change efforts hit roadblocks and encounter failure at some point. But in successful efforts, leaders and supporters of these movements view failure as learning and a chance to improve – not a reason to give up.
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  Here’s one example. In the 1960s, organizers advocating for kids to get school lunches to combat childhood hunger realized they were failing to reach a lot of kids. Rather than giving up, they partnered with foundations, community members, and government agencies to restructure the program and get more funding for it. By 2012, nearly half of all public school students were receiving needed school lunch assistance.

What one person can do

We’ve seen that big social change requires many people and organizations to pull off – but that doesn’t mean one person’s role isn’t important.

If you’re just starting out in your social change efforts, whether through a nonprofit, social enterprise, or other project, here are some things you can do to position yourself as a leading changemaker:

• Read everything you possibly can about the social problem you care about. Learn who is working on it, what they are doing, progress being made, and gaps – who is not yet being served. The gaps are where you might innovate.
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• Identify what you uniquely bring to the movement. Are you an amazing public speaker? A great writer? Good with numbers? Are you a social butterfly who can easily rally your friends to do something? Lean into your unique skills to plug into the cause.
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• Connect to other leaders tackling your social issue. Ask them what their biggest challenges are. Find allies.
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• Talk about it and hone your message. Tell the movement’s story to your friends, on social media, or to the media. Ask for feedback from people you know to learn how the movement’s message resonates with them.

Invest in learning, start small, and bring others into the fold.

Resource Roundup

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