Ep. 4: Why we’re passionate about Resilience as a key lever to start testing our impact
By Maddie Vann
Episode 4 in Network for Good’s “mini-podcast” where we are sharing key learnings for how to bring durable capital to aligned sustainable outcomes
TL;DR / Highlight: NFG’s hypothesis is that we need to demonstrate that there’s a market for investing in disaster resilience innovation, products, and projects, in order to increase adoption of resiliency solutions among communities.
I recently sat down with our Network for Good CEO, Abby Ross, to discuss how we’ve continued to refine Network for Good’s “opportunity levers.” These levers will guide our strategy as we seek to pilot new models to provide durable capital for community-driven sustainable outcomes. Our discussion centered around the “Resilience” opportunity lever and how it’s guiding our first partnership experiment.
Here is the transcript from our conversation:
Maddie: So, Abby, we talked last time about the opportunity levers that we were identifying for our organization–the “leverage points” that we’ve identified that we think provide the most impactful opportunities for where and how Network for Good can realize our disaster recovery vision: that after disaster, everyone impacted promptly recovers and communities are revitalized through equitable and resilient recovery. Since our original conversations around these levers, we’ve narrowed the list of levers down from 85, then down to eight, and now we have a list of the top six levers we think can be most impactful and help guide Network for Good’s strategic efforts going forward. So Abby, I’d like to turn it over to you for an overview of how we’re refining our six levers and where these have landed.
Abby: So, centering ourselves in our vision statement, is the idea that: after a disaster, everyone impacted promptly recovers, and communities are revitalized through equitable and resilient recovery. So that includes: everyone impacted, promptly recovering, the equity component. and resilience. And so when we think about that vision statement, we’ve identified six key levers that we think Network for Good can push on to change the outcomes for impacted individuals and impacted communities towards this vision statement. So looking at those six levers…
The first one is persistence–so recognizing that not everybody can make it through the process to receive funds, we’re thinking about: how might we increase the number of people in organizations who make it through the process to receive and access resources.
The second lever is velocity–recognizing that resources for recovery take a long time to arrive because the granting agencies have complex and frankly inefficient processes. So the question we’re asking is: how might we increase the velocity of funds to reach individuals and communities after a disaster?
The third one is flexibility–recognizing that not everybody receives the right resources to recover because they’re not given the agency to decide what successful recovery looks like for them. So we’re thinking about: how can we increase the flexibility of inbound funds for individuals and communities?
Maddie: Yeah, and that flexibility lever is one I think we’ve been the least sure about how well positioned Network for Good, specifically, is to influence. But we’ve become increasingly confident that it’s one of the most important levers in this set. So it’s one we’re holding onto and we continue to sort of circle around and see how we can influence it.
Abby: Yeah. And so the next one is about catalyzing potential resources–recognizing that communities aren’t capturing all of the available resources. I’ve shared the story about Kentucky and even just thinking about how philanthropy, at large, responds to climate-driven disasters, we’re asking ourselves the question of: how might we increase funding to communities to meet the requirements to access new or sidelined resources?
The next one is community capacity–recognizing that most resources go towards temporary or pop-up organizations that come in to help with relief, but they’re not working on the long-term recovery. So we’re thinking about: how might we give communities the capacity to allocate resources to own their own recovery and revitalization?
And then lastly is about: what does it look like to invest in resilience? So resources from the first disaster that hits a community doesn’t include ways to improve because those funds are just going towards relief and rebuilding “back to normal.” So we’re asking ourselves the question of: how might we increase the overall adoption of rebuilding, but more importantly, rebuilding with resilience? And, as it relates to resilience, it’s clear that Network for Good isn’t the only organization thinking about this as a lever. It was actually pretty serendipitous that we found out that IDEO, which is a leading human centered design firm, and two of the largest insurance organizations, CSAA and Aon, were partnering on a design challenge to answer just this question.
Maddie: Yeah and that’s been an exciting conversation to find ourselves in. We’ve had great conversations with IDEO, and with CSAA which is part of AAA insurance, and we’ve decided to come on board as a partner in IDEO’s Climate Resiliency Challenge, which is this challenge that’s designed to generate novel, scalable and community informed innovation that specifically seeks to engage frontline communities in designing innovations, all of which are geared toward preventing, preparing for, and recovering from the most urgent climate related disasters. So the alignment with our areas of focus is pretty on point.
Abby: Given that we have six key levers and a pretty juicy vision statement, and Maddie you’ve had particular energy around this partnership, how did you decide that this was the right fit for us?
Maddie: I think it so squarely lands right in this resilience lever that we’ve been talking about, but there’s also a lot of overlap with some of the other areas of focus we’ve been talking about. And one of the projects or efforts that you and I have been working on over the last few weeks is laying the groundwork for intentional decision-making around the kinds of pilots and experiments we want to pursue going forward. And with our refined levers, we built this scorecard that’s based on them, and it’s also based on not just which of our six levers does any given opportunity align to, but how does it give us an ability to push on that lever and demonstrate some kind of measurable change? Does it provide inputs for the system redesign components that we’ve been thinking about? Then there’s the more organizationally aligned question of does it help us reach our annual OKRs? And then I think another key piece we’ve been thinking about, as we think about how to rubric or scorecard opportunities, is just how strong is the partner and or the concept. And we’ve been really excited about the team that’s leading this challenge with IDEO and CSAA. I’ve had great conversations with them, so we’re excited about this opportunity mapping to all of these pieces we’ve laid out in our scorecard.
Abby: And so this opportunity scored high on our scorecard for why we think there’s alignment, but what are we really testing with this partnership and what do you expect to get out of it?
Maddie: Well our hypotheses, as it relates to this resilience lever, and relate to this opportunity, are that, first, by seeding innovation and climate resiliency solutions, we think we can help build a portfolio of investment ready organizations that are equipped to capture more or new funding. And with that hypothesis, we have some underlying assumptions, or this sort of point of view, that there are currently capacity, timescale, and funding barriers that prevent community solutions from getting funded and then from scaling. And also that community aligned resilience projects can’t always access the available funding because they aren’t ready to go. They aren’t “shovel ready” (a term we’ve heard tossed around in this conversation) because there just simply isn’t sufficient capital or early investment to support the design and planning stage so that it can become a fundable opportunity. And so our first hypothesis around this, is that by seeding innovation here, more organizations will be equipped and ready to capture funding. And this also relates also to our “Catalyze sidelined resources” lever of helping capital get directed to opportunities.
And then another hypothesis we have in this is that by elevating and accelerating these promising new solutions, we can also raise awareness of community-driven solutions. And in so doing can influence or can inspire new funders to commit capital to resilience. So we’re excited about that piece as well. And then I think our sort of overarching hypothesis with both of those is that we think if we can achieve both of those things, seeding this innovation portfolio and then elevating community solutions for funder awareness, that we can help scale community solutions and really grow this resilience part of the innovation pie.
And obviously these are very big and sort of loose hypotheses and one single experiment or pilot, this challenge, isn’t going to prove any of them out necessarily. But we’re excited to play in the sandbox alongside these really great partners who are leading this challenge, from the insurance industry and elsewhere, to explore how we can foster ecosystem collaboration around this lever too.
Abby: So we could basically phrase our hypothesis to say that: in order to increase the adoption of resilient solutions among the communities recovering from a disaster, we need to demonstrate that the market for investing in resilience innovation, products, projects, is there. Do you think that this challenge positions us, or how do you think this challenge can position us to start testing that specific hypothesis?
Maddie: I think one big piece that we’re excited about in becoming a partner on this challenge, rather than just a public observer of the results, is that we’ll gain access to some interesting submission data and have a chance to really understand the trends and what projects were submitted, and what kind of feedback those projects received, which should give us insights into what communities are thinking about. And that aligns to this bigger system redesign goal of how we can increase visibility to illuminate the gaps. What are communities focused on and thinking about and what’s not getting funded sufficiently today? And I think the hope is that in understanding where some of those innovation gaps are, it could lead to ideas around how we can uplift solutions in those areas specifically. Or maybe those gaps signal something else entirely, but the hope is that we can learn from that data to get a sense of what the market for investing in resilience innovation projects look.
Abby: Super interesting. And just really tactically, after this challenge, how are we measuring success? Is there some sort of crunchy metric we’re looking at that we’ll take forward with us?
Maddie: I think one thing we’ve talked about is that one way we might track is just seeing how many of the winning projects from this challenge, who access the prize pool at the end of this, how many of those winning projects ultimately receive any kind of follow-on funding. Through this collaboration, if we can track some of that kind of data, hopefully we can also look at who of those funders, who provided that follow-on funding, did so because of this challenge. How much of their portfolio came from the challenge or from similar innovation pipelines like this versus coming from elsewhere? And so I think there’s a little bit of longitudinal tracking and observing to see what happens with these projects after the fact. But that follow-on funding metric and what kind of scale these projects can reach is part of what we’ll be looking at to start with.
Abby: I’m really excited about this because we were thinking about how could we incubate innovation, and this gives us a really lightweight way to learn. I imagine some more quantitative metrics might emerge as we dig into the learning a little bit. Metrics around just answering the question of, “all right, what does it mean to be rooted in community solutions?” What does a model and project pipeline look like for resilience? And just having an inside peek into the journey for community, we might end up with metrics around speed to projects coming to market, and the affordability and parity with non-resilient solutions. So I think there’s a lot of really interesting things that we can do. And ultimately I think that, when we think about durable capital for a sustainable solution, and recognizing that this is about funding sustainable outcomes–what are some durability of capital metrics towards these resilience and sustainable outcomes metrics that we can impact long term? So this gives us, like you said, a great sandbox to play in and a great way to learn and drift off of other partners who are asking the same questions as us. So thanks for spearheading this opportunity and bringing such a thoughtful approach.
Maddie: Yeah, of course. I’m excited that IDEO and CSAA invited us on board. And I think, to your point, I think what we’ll learn through this also is we’re testing some hypotheses just around how we run an effective experiment. Our hypothesis now is that this “scorecard” we’ve created is the right guide to produce an effective experiment or pilot opportunity, and maybe it isn’t. So I think we’ll learn about our process as well. And it’s exciting to have this kicking off as we think about the many other pilots, opportunities, partnerships that are in our cooker. So thanks Abby, for having this conversation with me.
Abby: Excited to see where things go from here. Let’s do it!
Maddie Vann is Senior Manager, Strategy & Operations at Network for Good.
