The charity in London and its local duplicates were all competing for participants in their programmes and all competing for the same ever-dwindling pot of money. My suggestion that this charity should collaborate with other charities doing the same thing was met with disbelief and hostility. And yet collaboration is exactly what’s needed.

You only have to look as far as the UK charity register for the proof. The UK has 166,854 registered charities. 82% of these are categorised as either micro or small – 47% with an annual income of less than £10,000. All of them, large or small, compete for the same charity pound.

Meanwhile, poverty in the UK is trending downwards. More than 14 million people, including 4.5 million children, live below the poverty line in the UK. The war on poverty continues, while charities compete with each other to end it.

Despite lots of activity by lots of charities, poverty remains stable. It has not gone away and does not even appear to be in retreat.

Meanwhile, others in other parts of the world are Winning the war on poverty, not through a disintegrated, fragmented competitive strategy, but with a multisector comprehensive approach called ‘collective impact’.

In September, we published two articles in Pro Bono Australia under the broad heading of What can Collective Impact Offerbased on our research in the UK. Collective impact is a framework for ‘collective practice’ that moves beyond traditional collaboration. And it works.

As David Brooks writes in the New York Times, according to recently released data, between 2015 and 2017, Canada reduced its official poverty rate by at least 20%. Roughly 825,000 Canadians were lifted out of poverty in those years, giving the country its lowest poverty rate in history.

How did Canada do it?

Brooks notes that while the Canadian economy has been decent over recent years, it has not been robust enough to explain these outcomes. Instead, one major factor is that Canadians have organised their communities differently. They used the collective impact methodology to fight poverty.

The collective impact approach stands in stark contrast to how Brooks describes the usual route to poverty alleviation in America: everything is fragmented, with a bevy of public and private programs doing their own thing. In one town there may be four food pantries, which don’t really know one another well. The people working in these programs have their heads down, because it’s exhausting enough just to do their own work.

This is compounded by the common model of one-donor-funding-one-program. Different programs compete for funds. They justify their existence using randomised controlled experiments, in which researchers try to pinpoint one input that led to one positive output. The foundation heads, city officials and social entrepreneurs go to a bunch of conferences, but these conferences don’t have much to do with one another.

Every day, they give away the power they could have used if they did mutually reinforcing work together to change the whole system. What Brooks describes is detailed in the recent Economist essay Poverty In America. Sound familiar, whether you are in the US, the UK or Australia?

Brooks notes that ‘in Canada it’s not like that’. Why? As Brooks writes:

‘About 15 years ago, a disparate group of Canadians realised that a problem as complex as poverty could be addressed only through a multisector comprehensive approach. They realised that poverty was not going to be reduced by some innovation — some cool, new program nobody thought of before. It was going to be addressed through better systems that were mutually supporting and able to enact change on a population level.’

So they began building city-wide and community-wide structures. They started 15 years ago with just six cities, but now they have 72 regional networks covering 344 towns. They begin by gathering, say, 100 people from a single community. A quarter have lived with poverty; the rest are from business, non-profits and government.

They spend a year learning about poverty in their area, talking with the community. They launch a different kind of conversation. First, they don’t want better poor; they want fewer poor. That is to say, their focus is not on how do we give poor people food so they don’t starve. It is how do we move people out of poverty. Second, they up their ambitions. How do we eradicate poverty altogether? Third, they broaden their vision. What does a vibrant community look like in which everybody’s basic needs are met?

After a year they come up with a town plan. Each town’s poverty is different. Each town’s assets are different. So each town’s plan is different.

The town plans feature a lot of collaborative activity. A food pantry might turn itself into a job training centre by allowing the people who are fed do the actual work. The pantry might connect with local businesses that change their hiring practices so that high school degrees are not required. Businesses might pledge to raise their minimum wage.

The plans involve a lot of policy changes on the town and provincial levels — improved day care, redesigned transit systems, better workforce development systems. The process of learning and planning and adapting never ends.

A leader in the approach, The Tamarack Institute pioneered a lot of this work. They emphasise that the crucial thing these community-wide collective impact structures need is attitude change.

‘In the beginning, it’s as if everybody is swimming in polluted water. People are sluggish, fearful, isolated, looking out only for themselves. But when people start working together across sectors around a common agenda, it’s like cleaning the water. Communities realise they can do more for the poor. The poor realise they can do more for themselves. New power has been created, a new sense of agency’.

Collective impact in Canada is a real-life experience of where theory or thought leadership meets practice and brings transformational change.  The challenge is to get people and organisations to work together, not against each other. Poverty is the real challenge, but so is distrust, polarisation, competition and personal ego amongst those wanting to end poverty.

There has to be learning from the Canadian experience. We could all do with a dose of collective impact. Not for our own health, but the health of those whose daily existence is entrenched systemic poverty.

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I recently read a short article on why kids should learn philosophy and immediately thought the same about economics – but not for kids – but for all the grown ups currently working feverishly to do good and change the world through socially innovative entrepreneurial enterprises.

In fact it occurred to me that there was a business opportunity or gap in the market as they say, to have a whole semester or two added on economics to all MBA and equivalent courses that now exist for social entrepreneurs.

By now you’re yawning because as Richard Denis recalls in his article in The Monthly “I remember my first lesson in economics like it was yesterday. I’d never heard a bigger bunch of crap in my life. It made no sense. The assumptions were flawed. The examples were ridiculous and the conclusions worse.”

And that’s about where we leave economics – back in high school.

Not that we don’t hear a lot about ‘the economy’. But economics – no thanks!

Let’s just get on and do it! Economics has nothing to do with changing the world. The solution lies with new business models to challenge and solve social problems. Poverty and inequality – all solved with scaling up, volumes, price point, marketing, distribution points, strategic planning, supply chains, market segmentation and financial modeling, and more financial modeling.

In the meantime while we all learn about ‘good’ business (or is it ‘business for good’?) the economy runs on, adjusted from time to time by the invisible hand of the ‘market’.

And we know as much as we need to know about ‘the economy’ because everyday we are educated about ‘the economy’ by politicians and media to such an extent that we know all we need to about economics. Right?

Richard Denis calls this constant everyday education “econospeak” noting that “the primary purpose of the econospeak that fills our airwaves, most of which is complete nonsense, is to keep ordinary people out of the big debates about tax, fairness, climate change and the provision of essential services. Econospeak is a great way to limit the options on our democratic menu. Would you like a small tax cut and a small cut in services or a big tax cut and a big cut in services? What? You want to spend more money in health and education? You must be mad. Just imagine how “the markets” would react to such a suggestion.”

What’s really startling is that while we have all been learning about ‘good’ business to solve social challenges, we’ve taken our daily dose of econospeak and swallowed it hook, line and balanced budget. As Denis notes “the whole strategy has worked a treat for the past few decades”.

Swallowing econospeak allows us to live with myths like, it is the lifestyle of the poor that threaten the economy, or, that tax concessions to the super rich will create more jobs, or, that the great financial crisis was caused by governments spending recklessly on public services, and that business above all else is how all our problems will be solved. Ignorance produced by econospeak is a powerful tool – after all, how can you criticize economic policy when you don’t understand economics?

Perhaps that’s where education is needed.

What if all of us who want to change the world for the better took some time to educate ourselves beyond econospeak so we had some tools to use when we critically consider the economy we are part of? What if every aspiring social entrepreneur had to complete a year of study in economics before studying business tools? What if this education allowed us all to understand why even the best intentions to change the world informed by econospeak, actually just perpetuate the very challenges we want to solve?

So where to begin? Here’s a sample of some really good economic thinking – and if you don’t want to read the whole book, look for articles that discuss the thoughts of the authors – even Wikipedia is better than gulping down headfuls of econospeak. So have a look at:

John Maynard Keynes, The General Theory of Employment Interest and Money

Ha-Joon Chang, Economics: The User’s Guide

Joseph Stiglitz, The Great Divide

Thomas Picketty, Capital in the Twenty-First Century

Anthony Atkinson, Inequality: What can be done?

And after some reading, consider afresh Richard Denis’ final words: “you don’t need to be an economist to call out crap when you hear it. But unless people start calling it out and stop worrying about “what the markets think”, then one of the richest countries in the world, living at the richest point in world history, might continue to believe that we “can’t afford” to invest in a better health or education system . . . Economics doesn’t tell us that we need to cut taxes for the rich or cause climate change if we really want to help the poor. And “the markets” don’t tell us that either. Those are the sentiments of some wealthy people, and some politicians who represent them. But they say it in econospeak because it sounds so ridiculous in plain English.”

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Disruptive Dragonfly Ed 05

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