For-profit startups need breathing room to pivot—so do non-profits.
A few months ago, we shared a report on what we had learned from our first year of campaigns, where we wanted to improve, and what methods we wanted to explore as an organization. Looking back now, those reflections are more about a movement than just Article 25. They’re problems we heard in all margins of the global health field, from activists, community health workers, nurses, researchers, and more.
Movements are ecosystems of individuals, organizations, networks, institutions, and politicians who each play a critical and different role. (See: We didn’t start a movement. We started a network).
Partners in Health proves we can build rights-based health systems in the poorest places in the world. Health GAP is a global network of activists that pressures politicians and companies to ensure affordable life-sustaining medicines for people living with HIV/AIDS. GlobeMed and Universities Allied for Essential Medicines equip students to leverage their power at universities. Sherrod Brown is a U.S. Senator from Ohio who introduced the first piece of Tuberculosis legislation in the U.S. Congress.
What narrow gap can we fill? What problem are we uniquely equipped to solve? Where are we better serving as allies? What’s our end-game?
We speculated in our learning report. In February we settled into Beespace to begin testing answers.
Beespace is an incubator that marries the strongest elements of tech incubators — especially their customer-first approach to designing and testing innovative products — with patience and a long-term view of social impact. For two years, they provide the security of time, seed money, and a three-phased curriculum to enable non-profit founders to field-test their ideas before making the jump to organization-building.
For us, this means more creative space for risk-taking, modeling our advocacy strategies, and solving for our end-users (you!).
Beespace is where for-profit meets non-profit: “How can we profit the world?”
We’re still in Phase 1, and the process is messy. It has opened up conversations about how we imagine change will happen, where we can have the most impact, and when our work will be finished. We’re recognizing new assumptions about how people-powered campaigning and strategies borrowed from other movements may affect actors in the global health field—assumptions that need testing.
With Beespace and our anti-consulting consultants at Corelab and The Design Gym, we’re excited to lay out some campaign experiments for the year and discover a new activist journey with you. High-risk, high-impact.
This is a fresh start for us, and there’s still a lot of planning to do before we hit go. Every month we’ll share our new learnings & old musings here. What we’re reading, listening to, and looking forward to. And most importantly, how we can disrupt together.
Follow us at @Article_25 to make sure you see this month’s learnings.
Stay tuned.
Amee, Ankur, and (!) Casey (!)
