Mayors and social entrepreneurs, the time is now!
As we face crises like climate change and refugees on the move, it is time to combine the vision and resources of cities and social entrepreneurs to deliver lasting change.
This is the blog version of Cities and Social Entrepreneurs: A Playbook for Catalytic Change that I wrote in collaboration with Manmeet Mehta and David Lubell, published by Ashoka and Catalyst 2030.
Social entrepreneurs and city governments have a lot in common, and by joining forces they can tap into an abundance of resources: talent, funding, regulatory and policy tools, human resources, experiences, and empowered citizens. Together, local governments, social entrepreneurs and the people they serve (and empower!) can have an immediate and sustained impact. With social entrepreneurs numbering around fifty million, they are a truly abundant resource, seeking to improve the quality of life of many underserved communities.
Cities, for their part, spent an estimated $5.6 trillion in 2021 alone on contracting goods and services for their communities. As we are consumed by our efforts to achieve the SDGs at national level, we should not overlook cities as the truly transformative labs and engines for impact. The Covid-19 pandemic was a reminder of this opportunity: millions of social entrepreneurs worked side-by-side with municipal governments. They complemented one another, and empowered residents to co-create more effective policies, programs, and services. It is almost tragic, then, to see the vast majority of collaboration attempts between cities and social entrepreneurs fail. Often failure comes about from a lack of understanding of what success could look like, and a willingness to unlearn.
Collaboration can be hard and slow, but it is worth the wait, as this report will show. The opportunity is not just a better use of funding, but truly transformative change.
Cities are increasingly the places where ‘the rubber meets the road’, as experts would say. What they mean is that local government leaders — be they Mayors, Chief Executives or City Managers — are increasingly doing more than just delivering local services. They have begun to solve problems that are bigger than their community and tackling issues that regional and national governments have proven incapable of solving on their own. Cities have been taking the lead in achieving many of the sustainable development goals (SDG) like climate change, air quality, migration, social mobility and -inclusion. They network nationally, regionally and globally to accomplish these goals.
Many would argue cities and municipalities are the most accountable level of government because they serve up the public services and regulations that have the most immediate impact on people’s lives. And this dynamic plays out in over 550,000 local governments around the world, serving billions of residents.
Less visible to experts is another force that is critical to achieving the SDGs: social entrepreneurs. One way of explaining what a social entrepreneur is would be this definition used by the Global Entrepreneurship Monitor (GEM) in their global survey in 2015:
A social entrepreneur is making it their profession to build an organization, business or movement with the explicit purpose of tackling a social problem.
Jill Vialet has made a collection of several other, more nuanced definitions here. But GEM provides us not just with a definition, but a number: according to their global survey, 1.2% of the world’s adult population can be categorized as a social entrepreneur. That’s around 50 million people who make it their job, mission and often risk their livelihood to tackle a social problem. We can find such social entrepreneurs in any town or city, working creatively to cater for those who have fallen through the system, provide mutual aid, find answers to chronic systemic challenges, or in many other ways.
City leaders around the world have hailed the heroic efforts of people stepping up to provide critical mutual aid and assistance during the Covid-19 pandemic. Many of those efforts were orchestrated by social entrepreneurs. Cities have historically also been the places where many shocks and stresses play out in their most visible form. In just the period since the global financial crisis in 2007/8, cities have dealt with significant challenges like mass unemployment, exposure of frontline workers, mass migration, social cohesion, housing and homelessness, public safety, affordability, public health crises, radicalization and extremism, extreme weather events, and rapid urbanization.
Each of these challenges is urgent, but they move at different speeds. Many are interconnected, and all are complex. Behind each challenge, we find a community in need, people struggling to have their voice heard. And we have come to realize that cities can no longer sustain approaches that simply compensate for the effects of these problems. For generations, governments have treated homelessness, for example, as an unsolvable condition that requires homelessness services that cost billions of dollars in funding every year.
But in not solving the problem, we aren’t just wasting scarce public funds, but also keeping thousands of people trapped in often humiliating circumstances.
Herein lies the opportunity we want to present with Cities and Social Entrepreneurs: A Playbook for Catalytic Collaboration.
We believe that cities, communities and social entrepreneurs share the same urgent calling to make progress on solving the many pressing urban and social problems. By joining forces, we can tap into a shared abundance of resources: talent, funding, regulatory and policy tools, human resources, experiences, and empowered citizens. Together, local governments, social entrepreneurs and the communities they serve (and empower!) can have an immediate and sustained impact to improve the quality of life in cities.
Based on conversations and interviews, we estimate that 99% of social entrepreneurs fail in their attempts to collaborate with municipal governments.
It is important to acknowledge here that we don’t think that this result is caused intentionally by anyone, but rather that many factors come into play that make collaboration difficult. If we had to try to summarize them, it would be: a flawed expectation about what success looks like. In this report, we want to explain how we can go about this collaboration differently; by providing a playbook for collaborative action.
The Six Case Studies
Case: Revolutionizing Waste (and waste-picking) in Peru’s cities
Case: Making Cities Welcoming to All Migrants.
Case: Ending Homelessness, Empowering Families.
Case: Turning City Procurement on its Head (download the playbook)
Case: Tackling the Root Causes of Child Health, Mortality and Abuse.
Case: The City as a Listening Government
Our cases provide a glimpse of what success can look like, and reveal the journeys and practices that can lead to success. Some common themes have emerged across the examples: the division of labor (and resources) among governments, social entrepreneurs and communities; the role of data and evidence in delivering measurable improvements; experimentation to find what works; seeing past quick-wins to win at the long game; and to empower people to take charge by focusing on their capabilities, rather than reducing them to problems.
As communities around the world try to achieve the SDGs, we are excited about the community of governments, social entrepreneurs, and communities striking collaboration gold because we see shared purpose and promising practices.
The good news is that the case studies we present in this report help us imagine a future in which we make the best use of our shared talents and resources to meet our common desire.
The stories also carry a more profound message: by working together, we can do more than simply service problems, and instead aim to solve them for good. This approach is called systems change, meaning a holistic approach in which multiple stakeholders and beneficiaries work together to do something in a fundamentally different way to achieve a truly transformative result.
Want to get started? Read “What next? Eight Ways to Unleash Catalytic Collaborations in Cities.”
