Here’s Why Knowledge Management Matters to Social Change
Whether it’s at a casual gathering, a conference reception, or a more formal convening, someone inevitably asks, “and what do you do?” That’s when I lay down two words that are an almost guaranteed conversation-killer in social sector circles, knowledge management.
Most social change organizations are engaged in an almost constant exchange of data and information about the issues they address, the impact of their work, their shifting political environments, and the needs of communities and staff. Yet, talking about knowledge management to someone working on social change feels a little like talking to an avid trail runner about the science of soil erosion. People know it’s related to what they care about, but for most of them it’s not what they actually care about. So that’s when I normally take a deep breath and start a somewhat hurried explanation of what I mean by knowledge management.
But today I am going to do something a bit different. With increasing levels of information overload, a growing number of social change organizations employing at least partially or even fully remote staff, and a political urgency to leverage each other’s lessons as quickly and effectively as possible, I want to take a litte more time to unpack this all and tell you why I think KM matters to social change, now more than ever.
- Knowledge Management in the social sector is fundamentally about information justice and equity. It’s about how we capture, organize, discover, share, access, and repurpose knowledge to the benefit of our organizations and communities. And it’s about who is able to do the discovering, accessing, sharing, and learning.
- Knowledge Management is about mobilizing one of the most valuable, renewable resources we have in the social sector, our collective insights and wisdom. I often use the term Knowledge Mobilization alongside Knowledge Management because it focuses on knowledge as a flow that can be mobilized, cultivated, and experienced rather than just thinking of knowledge as a thing that needs to be managed, described and stored. Knowledge mobilization is a term that I originally heard and adopted from work being done at York University focusing on the mobilization of academic knowledge for community benefit. I love it because it helps us put the right level of emphasis on knowledge as a dynamic and socially mediated resource that can be mobilized for good.
- Knowledge Management/Mobilization is about supporting the people who do the work of social change. Thoughtful knowledge management means we can learn better from our mistakes, we can build on the hard-earned lessons of others in our movements, we can respect our staff’s time and support them in finding what they need in order to do what is needed, and we can spend less time designing and redesigning our processes during collaboration.
- And back to that trail runner who cares about soil erosion, only sort of? The fact is that soil erosion is real and well-maintained trails that are cut and cared for only support your running. The same is true for how we care for our collective knowledge. The work of social change is built on the lessons of our colleagues and comrades, past and present. And our ability to learn as organizations depends on our valuing and caring for those lessons so they are findable, accessible, usable, and re-usable. Knowledge, like soil, can become depleted, unbalanced, even wash away if we don’t care for it.
So now that I got that off my chest and I’ve hopefully persuaded you that knowledge management can and does matter, check out my next post about “no such thing as neutral” when it comes to KM in the social sector.
Gabriela Fitz is founder of Think Twice, a consulting practice focused on helping nonprofits and foundations better mobilize their knowledge.
