Systems Orchestrators create social change symphonies
Social innovators working alone in silos rarely, if ever, catalyze true transformational social change. To create lasting, systemic solutions to global challenges requires bridge-builders to work in interconnected ways to address pressing problems at their root. As we work to advance our mission of supporting social innovators driving large-scale change at the Skoll Foundation, I am constantly reminded of this piece of age-old wisdom:
If you want to go fast, go alone, but if you want to go far, go together.
Over the last two decades, the Skoll Foundation has built a platform to fuel social innovation by investing, connecting, and championing exemplary innovators. We have invested over $1 billion to fuel systemic solutions that work at the scale of the global challenges they’re aiming to solve. The problems have never been greater, or more interrelated, or more in need of interconnected systemic solutions.
The global Skoll community of social innovators tackles interconnected problems and advances solutions from every angle from disrupting unjust systems and movement building to improving policies and practices. These innovators work within and across the Foundation’s five strategic priority areas: pandemics prevention and health system strengthening, climate action, inclusive economies, effective governance, and racial justice. In each, we have seen the impact of collaboration between governments, civil society, and the private sector. We’ve seen creative coalitions working to shift entrenched systems.
We have seen the tremendous potential of systems orchestrators, also called field catalysts, both terms referring to the leaders and organizations that connect the dots, catalyze partnerships, and drive whole ecosystems forward. Working behind the scenes, systems orchestrators help orchestrate transformational social change by knitting together key actors, providing resources and technical support, and mobilising collective change efforts. This is the kind of proximate, thoughtful coordination it takes to address root causes and develop systems-level solutions.
At their best, most networked, and most resourced, system orchestrators literally “conduct” social change symphonies. They understand that complex, large-scale symphonies require many instruments, each playing their unique parts, to come together to create something truly transformational.
They bring an expansive solutions-focused view to bear on a problem and the awareness that no single solution is sufficient in solving our biggest global challenges. System orchestrators see that scaling a solution is different from solving a problem at scale. They know that their success relies on working outside the spotlight with humility, shifting power through collaboration, bringing those most proximate to the challenges and the solutions into the center, and redirecting credit for successes.
The power of partnerships
In our pandemics and health systems work, the Skoll Foundation supports social innovations that strengthen health systems, center equity, and build global systems for pandemic prevention and response. We invest in mutually reinforcing solutions that combine the power and proximity of frontline healthcare workers with a coordinated, cross-sector approach that builds robust health infrastructure globally.
The pandemic we are suffering through makes abundantly clear the need for the new forms of bridge-building and cross-sector collaboration required to support solutions that work at scale to address root causes of pressing global challenges.
Financing Alliance for Health (FAH), one of our 2022 Skoll Awardees, exemplifies this approach to driving solutions that work at scale and transforming the underlying system. In sub-Saharan Africa, where a $4 billion funding gap for community health systems persists, FAH supports Ministries of Health to develop the policies, strategies, and investment cases for community health, while also engaging with Ministries of Finance to secure the necessary budget to build and sustain these systems.
National governments that seek to streamline and scale community health worker programs face barriers including building political prioritisation, developing policy, mapping resources, and establishing financing strategies. As a result, Ministry of Health teams often struggle to mobilize resources and scale strong, sustainable health systems, with community health workers at their core.
A Kenya-based, African-led partnership and technical advisory fund, FAH, works with governments, donors and the private sector to address systemic financing challenges to scaling community health programs across sub-Saharan Africa. It has contributed to securing more than $200 million in financing for at-scale community health systems. FAH has engaged governments across 12 countries and contributed to the official recognition of more than 455,000 Community Health Workers in policy and practice.
Angela and her team at FAH are uniquely situated as proximate systems orchestrators to see the needs of the entire system and close gaps in strategic expertise and funding to build the kind of resilient community health systems needed to withstand future pandemics. FAH is working towards a new reality where domestic and international funders prioritize community health as a key contributor to achieving Universal Health Coverage and recognize community health as a critical investment in society rather than an individual cost to its members.
Cross-sector mobilisation is key
As one example, at the recent Global COVID-19 Health Summit, Her Excellency Ellen Johnson Sirleaf, FAH, and a coalition of partners including Skoll Awardee Last Mile Health and Skoll grantee Community Health Impact Coalition, launched Africa Frontline First, an ambitious new community health financing effort. This initiative assembles diverse partners across sectors – philanthropic, public, private, and multilateral institutions – to build strong health systems in ten countries in sub-Saharan Africa and professionalize 200,000 community health workers by 2030.
It centers community health workers and the health systems that support them, which when prioritized, save lives at the last mile, and provide the most local link in the chain in a global-to-local pandemic prevention network. Frontline health workers have shouldered much of the burden of fighting COVID, and Africa Frontline First recognizes NOW as the critical moment to build and finance the health and pandemics workforce of the future and knows that a problem of this scale will take coalition building and collaboration to create transformational change.
Farther together
A couple of years ago, early in my tenure at the Skoll Foundation, Safeena Hussain, founder of Educate Girls, told me that funders far too often create sprints that reward the individual efforts of social innovators.
Funders need to design more relay races, so that we are sharing and passing off to each other, she said.
It was another way to think about the idea of going farther together and it sparked the Foundation’s focused efforts to identify and support the systems orchestrators creating the most impact.
System orchestrators still face a significant barrier – funders are hard-wired to evaluate impact based on attribution over contribution. As Skoll continues to grapple with this, we have begun to shift our funding and evaluation practices, and we call on the philanthropic community to join us in increasing support of system orchestrators uniquely placed to create lasting systems-level change.
This edition of Societal Muse highlights the work of another Skoll Awardee, Harambee Youth Employment Accelerator, which builds public-private partnerships to solve the South African youth unemployment crisis. You’ll also learn about social innovators like the eGov Foundation and ShikshaLokam working across a range of issue areas, leaning into the power of collaboration and partnership.
Throughout these pages you’ll find evidence that transformational social change is a team sport – takes radical collaboration and reaching across boundaries and obstacles to tackle the world’s most complex problems. Incremental, disconnected, or siloed efforts will not transform broken systems. Only together can we build solutions that bring us closer to our founder Jeff Skoll’s vision of a sustainable world of peace and prosperity for all.
