Welcome to 100Kin10’s “Experiments in Networked Impact” Channel (post #1)

Stories about Pioneering a “Networked Impact” Approach to Large-Scale, Systemic Social Change

By Talia-Milgrom Elcott, Founder and Executive Director of 100Kin10

This blog is about how the 100Kin10 network is succeeding at the audacious goal of putting 100,000 excellent science, tech, engineering, and math teachers into schools in 10 years. We’re going to share everything we’re trying, everything that has and hasn’t worked, and all the ways we’re learning.

Our hope is that you’ll share your ideas back with us, and help us sharpen our own; that, whatever challenges you’re working to solve, you’ll borrow or adapt from what we are doing to inform and improve your own efforts at audacious problem-solving; and that, together, we’ll shape a new way of solving big, seemingly intractable problems.

In building the 100Kin10 model, we’ve borrowed unapologetically and taken inspiration from divergent and eclectic domains: design thinking, behavioral economics, community organizing, movement building, to name a few. But because we’re trying to do something that is relatively uncharted, we are also constantly tweaking, combining, and innovating at the edges of whatever we’re learning. In countless casual conversations and more official forums, people have asked about our model and what we’re learning.

Believing that information wants to be free (I cut my teeth at the Berkman Center for Internet and Society while in law school), we’ve been honored to share our tools and protocols, our learnings and failures, with whoever has asked. Now, encouraged by some good friends and mentors, we’ve decided to more deliberately and publicly share what we’re building, what we’re learning, and what we’re struggling with. Cue this blog.

So what is the 100Kin10 model? We do three things:

1. We inspire great organizations to apply to the network and make ambitious and above-and-beyond commitments to the 100Kin10 goal.
2. We experiment with how to mobilize and support those diverse and strong organizations to succeed at their ambitious commitments, and we are gratified that 70% of them are ahead, on-track, or have already completed their commitments.
3. We are mapping the grand challenges and attendant root causes interfering with achieving our 100,000 excellent STEM teachers goal and are figuring out how to align, mobilize, and activate our network and beyond to take up the hard work of chipping away at those long-standing and systemic challenges, so that those walking the road behind us have an easier way of it.

Our goal is that we, as a nation, come to a place where filling our classrooms with capable and inspiring STEM teachers is a normal part of what we do for all our kids and not the herculean task it has become.

A caveat:

There is something inherently boastful about thinking anyone wants to know more about 100Kin10 or our model. No doubt a big part of why this blog is late in coming was my own hesitation, stemming from that qualm. But we kept hearing from people in the social-change arena that they had heard from others about the 100Kin10 way and that “how do we 100Kin10 this?” had become shorthand in the White House for how do we build an innovative, cross-sector mobilization — and they wanted to learn more.

So we begin — with the belief that vulnerability is the foundation of learning and with the invitation that you will share your own stories, experiments, inspirations, and ideas with us. The hope is that we all get better and stronger and more effective in this messy social-change work together. On this tab, we are regularly going to share elements of our model:

• Heady philosophical questions about what a B2B organizing model can look like or how we hold our center as a neutral convener while also beginning to stake out territory around the expertise we are gaining through our role as a hub of so many excellent organization
• Details of how our thinking and model have evolved — and the questions we are grappling with to improve our offerings
• User-friendly, extremely tactical tools and processes that we have developed, with templates and protocols and stage directions, that readers are welcome to download and adapt

We hope you will join us in this grand experiment, contributing your own expertise and experience, your questions, doubts, and inspirations, so that we not only reach 100,000 excellent STEM teachers, but we do what President Clinton imagined we could, when he spoke to partners back in 2012:

“If all you do is give us a hundred thousand teachers to ensure America’s continued prosperity and growth for the next thirty years, that may be worth a lifetime,” he said, “ but if you do it in a way that causes more people to understand the role of nongovernmental organizations and the essential characteristic of cooperation in building alliances so that everybody’s money goes farther and their good ideas get spread and our not so good ideas get dropped, you may literally change the future of this country and the future of the nongovernmental organization movement and the world.”