Overview

TL;DR: Inspiring personal stories and informative general characteristics of people and organizations who led efforts to create wide-spread social change.

David Bornstein is a journalist who specializes in writing about social innovation. In ‘How to Change the World: Social Entrepreneurs and the Power of New Ideas’, he chronicles an organization called Ashoka. Ashoka seeks to identify and empower people who are solving the worlds most difficult social problems. The book is a mixture of two different types of chapters. In the first type, he gives in depth analysis of particular individuals who are making huge changes in the way their countries address social issues. In the second type, he discusses the commonalities between the people who have been able to create substantial social change.

Reactions

The people described in this book have done amazing things that it was great to read about them. Many of the people dedicated the majority of their lives to solving a particular cause, undergoing many hardships to do so. It definitely made me think about the extent to which I would be willing to give up my relatively comfortable life to help generate real change. The fact of the matter is that unsolved problems are unsolved because they are so difficult that all previous attempts have failed. Often there are a variety of barriers to solving these entrenched social problems such as people’s underlying attitudes and political/economic barriers. It takes long-term dedication and coalition building to move past these previously unsurmounted barriers.

Selected Chapter Summaries

• Childline

This chapter describes the creation of Childline, a phone line that sought to connect poor, homeless children in Bombay with support services. The group was mainly started by an individual named Jeroo Billimore who started work in Bombay. Bombay had many child services, but they were not well organized and hard to access.

There were many challenges initially. The main issue was that children in the area were rightfully distrustful of self-prolcaimed do-gooders because these people would often take advantage of the children they were claiming to help. Relatedly, the existing support organizations in the area, such as the police, were difficult to work with because the police had negative views of street children. The organization put together workshops that sought to build empathy between the children and the police, where the children described what their lives were like and why they did what they did.

Another key to the group is that they treated every call they got seriously. While they would get some abusive calls from street children, those children were often testing the service to see if it could be trusted. Also as the organization grew, many street children volunteered to spread the word to their friends. The group also thrived because they were very responsive to criticism. In one confrontation, the group had sought to help a sick child, but he refused care and died a few days later. The children in the area were very upset that the organization had let this child die. Instead of being defensive, the group learned that if a child refused care, they should tell the friends of that child so that they could convince the child to get help.

Given their success in Bombay, this group worked to scale their services to reach many other cities in India. The organization used a franchise model to allow their program to spread easily to other cities. They offered training to people who wanted to start similar organizations.

• Four Practices of Innovative Organizations

In seeking to identify and support those who created major social change, Bill Drayton and his colleagues at Ashoka learned a lot about what made organizations succeed and fail. Here are four major points based on their research:

Institutionalize listening: make sure to listen often to the target population, and be systematic about it (e.g. every call to childline was treated as important), really listen to the people involved

Pay attention to the exceptional: pay attention to the unexpected successes, (e.g. in the Grameen bank, they saw that that poor people could be reliable to invest in).

Design Real Solutions for Real People: need to be realistic about human behavior, e.g. for AIDS, taught people self-confidence, then they would feel like they had something to protect from AIDS, and only after months of building rapport did they discuss AIDS

Focus on Human Qualities: When recruiting people, see if a person demonstrates empathy, flexible thinking, strong inner core, believe it is possible to make a difference In order to sustain the organization, arrange for ways to help people recharge spiritually since they are making way less money than they would be in an industry job

• Six Qualities of Successful Social Entrepreneurs

In studying social entrepreneurs, a great deal was learned about the individuals who led these movements. Another important thesis of this book is that many major changes are led by a small group of extremely dedicated individuals (this could be due to selection bias by the organization…). More than anything, there was a key difference in motivation of these social entrepreneurs. The people who were successful determined to achieve a long term goal that was deeply moving to them. For instance, one leader in reforming disability care in Poland had a disabled child. Another leader in the reform of the use of anesthesia had a close friend lose a child due to the misuse of anesthesia. This is a summary of the main characteristics that these leaders had.

Willingness to self-correct

As these people had a strong attachment to a particular goal, they were not attached to a particular approach. This allowed these people to change course in the presence of evidence that their current approach wasn’t working. Relatedly, these organizations made use of younger people who are usually more flexible and open to changing course.

Willingness to share credit

It has been said that there is no limit to what you can do if you don’t care who gets the credit. This approach helps recruit and retain people since they feel like they are getting credit for the work of the organization.

Willingness to Break Free of Established Structures

The existing infrastructure for creating long-term institutions from the business sector do not work well for creating social change because these social good isn’t going to be profitable, Likewise, it is important to move away from academia because the time horizons for solving the largest social problems are longer than a couple years, which occur in academia due to the need to publish. Thus it is important to try and scrounge up money however you can to get a grassroots organization working. Of course these other strategies have been helpful for creating social change, but they often fail to seed the movements.

Willingness to Cross Disciplinary Boundaries

Solving the largest problems in society have resisted previous approaches, and are complex, so they require pulling together different organizations and ideas from different fields.

Willinness to Work Quietly

Many of the people who created huge change spent decates steadily working in relative obscurity and with little success before they found a solution that worked. Relatedly, one is unlikely to get a large audeince because the impact of social change efforts are hard to measure. These people needed to have a pure motivation to push an idea steadily for so long with little fanfare.

Strong Ethical Impetus

Social entrepreneurs are motivated by ethical considerations - why work for a social issue instead of making a lot of money? It was often the case that somebody with very strong values (e.g. a parent) instilled the social entrepreneur with those values when they were young. These people often felt that they had to do what they were doing in order to be consistent with their deeply held values.

Conclusions

Given all of the majority of news coverage is negative, it is inspiring to read stories about people who successfully created major societal change. It is definitely worth a read for anybody who fighting for social change now.