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Effective change efforts, whether activist movements or social enterprises, must focus beyond just the problem or symptom they want to eliminate.

Posted in SSIR on September 10, 2024
By Jim Bildner

In 2017, sociology professor Kenneth Andrews, in an op-ed in the New York Times, argued social movements that succeeded in creating lasting change needed to do three things well—create cultural awareness and draw attention to a problem (what I refer to as “stop energy”); disrupt things by socializing the change they seek to create and making it, as he says, “more costly to support the status quo;” and, of equal importance, organizing the implementation of the desired change. Doing only one or two of these things, Andrews stated, will ultimately impair the movements’ ability to create lasting change. As Liz McKenna, an assistant professor of public policy at Harvard’s Kennedy School has emphasized, “Social movements often operate over years, decades. The most successful ones build a resilient community or ecology of organizations that can shift power over time rather than an episodic mass mobilization.”

Seven years later, social movements for the most part have proven this theory to be right. While it’s never the intended outcome of those initiating “stop energy” efforts (a term first coined by Dave Winer to describe a common experience in technology development), initiatives that only organize around the “stop” often end with that stage. Why is that? In looking at a number of recent social initiatives that began by organizing efforts to stop a policy or action, what often becomes clear is that stop energy is relatively easy to initiate because it doesn’t require consensus on why something is bad. “Start energy,” on the other hand, or what I refer to as a start agenda, is so much harder to initiate because it requires agreement not only on what policy or action you dislike but it also requires consensus on what should replace it. While we see this often in what political and social scientists refer to as “vetocracy” (loosely defined by New York Times columnist Thomas Friedman in 2012 as “a system in which no one can aggregate enough power to make any important decisions at all”), the dynamic is less recognized in social movements.

While much research has focused on the effectiveness of social movements, few have applied these same tactical requirements to social enterprises who, in many ways, must do the same three things: identify what they want to stop; socialize receptivity for their solution/proof of concept to build adoption; and then organize their entities to be able to implement these solutions at scale.

As investors assessing our portfolio and exploring potential opportunities, we spend an enormous amount of time thoroughly understanding the problem an organization is trying to fix and the constraints they want to eliminate. We spend an equal amount of time focused on what the organization sees as the solution and who ultimately needs to adopt it and fund it (the socialization and communication part of the task). Inherently, these organizations know not only what they want to stop, but also what they want to replace it with. As a result, they avoid the trap of just focusing on stopping something.

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Social movements and social enterprises that merely focus on the symptom they see and want to eliminate, whether solving for homelessness, inequity in the application of criminal justice, or availability of health access, to name just a few, rarely can replace the condition they want to stop—for example, homeless encampments, unequal prosecution and sentencing, or inequitable availability of health care. While they bring attention to the problem, they often fail to deliver an alternative solution that lasts.

One of the clearest examples of the power of combining stop energy with a start agenda is the work of Worth Rises in targeting the predatory correctional telecom industry that has preyed on incarcerated individuals and their human need to connect with family and friends. In an April 2024 article in The Appeal, they detailed the power of the combination of stop energy with a start agenda.

Worth Rises targeted their stop energy on the nation’s largest correctional telecom, Securus, which operates in all 50 states and, until recently, charged incarcerated individuals as much as $1 per minute for a simple phone call. They pressured the company directly, blocking merger deals and forcing executives off the board of cultural institutions, and through their investor base, denying them access to the capital markets. As a result, the company effectively defaulted on over a billion dollars in debt earlier this year and its future seemed bleak.

Part of their success in stopping this predatory industry came from Worth Rises’ simultaneous approach to their start agenda, which revolutionized the way it operated. Building on early wins in New York City and San Francisco, Worth Rises ignited a trend in state legislatures to outlaw these punitive telecom rates and instead provide fully free communication services in state prisons. Today, five states, from Connecticut to California, have passed such legislation. But there’s more, Worth Rises also advocated for the passage of the landmark Martha Wright-Reed Just and Reasonable Communications Act in Congress to expand the FCC’s authority and mandate to regulate the correctional telecom industry. Released earlier this summer, the new regulations are expected to save incarcerated people and their families over $500 million annually, according to Worth Rises’ estimates.

A number of other nonprofits have been focused on reducing homelessness. While many efforts in the past have targeted mayors and city councils to stop homelessness, few have also detailed a start agenda to create the counterfactual. Dignity Moves and Pallet, to name just two, are equipping cities with housing alternatives and more comprehensive solutions beyond simply enacting bans on encampments or public sleeping, which never solves the issue. DignityMoves provides solutions that include sourcing both the capital needed for the construction of interim emergency housing as well as project managing the construction itself. They also help identify wrap-around case management services provided by existing local service providers. Pallet helps cities meet their need for affordable and rapidly deployable emergency housing to serve their citizens. In addition, they employ a workforce who has experienced homelessness and understand the importance of designing temporary housing “villages” that help accelerate the transition of residents to permanent housing and employment.

Another example, Recidiviz, an organization dedicated to reducing incarceration, isn’t an advocacy organization focused on protesting state criminal justice systems. Rather, it works with state corrections agencies (many in so-called “red states” as well as in “blue states”) to build software that identifies individuals who are ready to be safely released and streamlines the paperwork to do so, empowering corrections staff to proactively identify and move people who are eligible through the system more efficiently. Their start agenda is data-driven. They work entirely with state corrections agencies, many who are motivated by a lack of staffing or shrinking budgets and need to reduce caseloads and staff burnout. This fidelity to the “start agenda”—socializing their solution and implementing it, regardless of the sponsor’s motivation—illustrates what Andrews described as the power of building an imagined organizational culture and capacity to create real change. An individual who deserves to be released from custody and reunited with their family is the right outcome for everyone—regardless of what motivated the process.

In a time of ever-present societal challenges, human capital is often the most precious resource we have. Deploying it intentionally to take on these challenges means thinking through all three of Andrews’ requisite tasks—the stop energy to bring focus to the problem, the alternative solution to replace what you stop, and a clear sense of who needs to adopt the solution to fix the problem. Anything short of this may not have the impact you want—and worse, it might perpetuate the very thing you want to stop.