The Future is Collective Advancing Collective Social Innovation to Address Societys Biggest Challenges 2025

The Schwab Foundation’s 2020 impact report, profiling two decades of impact from the foundation’s community, revealed that most social innovators in the network are partnering with other organizations to scale their collective impact.9 Collective social innovators are taking this a step further, making collaboration the key innovation in their strategies and approaches. Importantly, through this research, the Schwab Foundation has discovered that collective social innovation produces impacts that reverberate beyond single issues and organizations. These impacts are often difficult to see because they aren’t easily captured in numbers of people benefitting, or quantities of products and services delivered. Rather, the work of collective social innovation “lays the foundations” for large-scale and systemic social impact, which is then used by existing and new groups to scale impact even further. These foundational impacts include: Impact 1: Developing shared narratives that enable diverse groups to work togetherWhen groups have not historically worked together, they arrive at problem-solving with different ways of seeing issues and, often, competing agendas for their work together. Collective social innovators describe a key impact of their work as shared narratives that enable groups to work together across differences, align their roles and activities, and sustain their work over long timeframes. These shared narratives provide a way for many stakeholders to find “common cause” while still allowing for flexibility in goals and approaches. For example, Community Solutions is working in nearly 250 communities worldwide to solve homelessness. A key impact of their work is shifting the dominant belief that homelessness is intractable to a new narrative that homelessness is, in fact, solvable, when place-based partners come together to implement shared metrics and strategies. Similarly, StreetNet International brings together street vendors, market traders and informal economy workers across the globe around a new narrative about informal workers, emphasizing their vital contributions to local economies and their right to decent work conditions. Ensuring that everyone has a safe place to live has become as complex a task as managing air traffic, yet we have none of the coordinating systems in place to make sure that housing is provided for those who need it. In this situation, in the absence of a mechanism for collaboration, we see that nothing necessarily adds up to what we all want, which is everyone in a safe home. It doesn’t have to be this way. Places like Houston and Miami and Minneapolis and Detroit and dozens of other communities are finding solutions because they’re thinking differently about this problem. They are rigorously coordinating the work of all of the actors in their system, [building] housing systems that prevent and end homelessness. Rosanne Haggarty, President, Community Solutions, in Haggerty, R. (2024). A new vision for ending homelessness in the US. TED. https://www.ted.com/talks/ rosanne_haggerty_a_new_vision_for_ending_homelessness_in_the_us. Image credit: Community Solutions, USA The Future is Collective: Advancing Collective Social Innovation to Address Society’s Biggest Challenges 13