Category: Economy

Centering Equity in Collective Impact Stanford Social Innovation Review Winter 2022

This article is too long. Note the important highlights below.

… the single greatest reason why collective impact efforts fall short is a failure to center equity.

Collective impact has lasting effectiveness only if it is focused on changing underlying systems, not just adding new programs or services.

Disaggregate the data

Unless the data is disaggregated, we cannot truly understand problems, develop appropriate solutions, or document progress.

Describing society’s problems with aggregate data: the national unemployment rate, high school graduation rates, the number of people living below the poverty line, or the percent of neonatal fatalities, masks variations by characteristics such as race and ethnicity, gender, age, sexual orientation, income levels.

Improve the precision of data collection and reporting practices to support more equitable analysis and more targeted solutions.

Disaggregated data are essential but not sufficient.

Centering equity in the work of collective impact requires a more holistic understanding of the life experience of marginalized populations that can come only from interviews, surveys, focus groups, personal stories, and authentic engagement.

Putting data into the appropriate context

Groups interpreting the data do not often include those with lived experience when making sense of the data. Data sets that are solely quantitative, fail to capture important context that only the people most impacted and those closest to them know, and

To address this problem, many collective impact efforts begin with “data walks,” in which all participants in the collective impact effort, including organizational leaders and residents with lived experience of the issues, review easy-to-understand visual data and together analyze, interpret, and create shared meaning about what the data say.

Power of stories

The very act of seeking out and listening to stories from the affected group can provide a foundation for building trust with community stakeholders. Active use of stories can also serve to locate and center the narrative for change in the community. This step can shift conversations about solutions from more conventional programmatic responses to more systemic solutions focused more concretely on achieving greater equity.

Now get this. A former C-level exec at Black Rock. Yes that Black Rock, resigned from his position as chief of sustainable investing, and basically throws up his hands and says governments have to throw their chips into the centre and quit playing coy, and step up to the plate. I’ve summarized the article from the Globe and Mail below.

Tariq Fancy was formerly BlackRock Inc.’s chief investment officer for sustainable investing.

Tariq makes the case for the government to step into the fray and legislate more effective actions to curb carbon emissions in Canada much like they stepped up to flatten the curve when the COVID-19 first struck. His article is behind the Globe and Mail paywall here

His argument is simple, straight-forward. Tariq was the Chief Investment Officer (CIO) of BlackRock. BlackRock manages nearly US$9-trillion in assets and owns interests greater than 5 per cent in a substantial majority of companies in the Standard & Poor’s 500 Index. Tariq enjoyed the support of BlackRock’s CEO, Larry Fink who was a huge backer of socially conscious investing or what has become better know as investing through an environment, social and governance (ESG) lens. But Tariq, after a while on his job came to this conclusion:

But I quickly learned that ESG isn’t as useful to investing as I had hoped. Acting responsibly is not as profitable as advertised. Moreover, going through the investment process is a bizarre place to try to create social impact in the first place. Investment professionals are like competitive athletes: They’re trained to chase yield and profits

Tariq Fancy

Continue reading “Former BlackRock exec says government should be the lead actors on climate change”

This is a simple Logic Model from a project I worked on a few years ago. From the Logic Model you decide what you want to achieve, how to measure it, what the indicators would be, and how to collect the data. From the data you craft a story of your social impact to the community at large and to funders and of course to the workers and volunteers who made it all happen.