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

Impact 2: Tapping into grassroots knowledge to better identify and deliver social innovations Another barrier to social innovation is the fact that too many organizations delivering services and solutions are geographically and culturally distant from the communities they seek to serve. This means that critical knowledge from grassroots actors is often overlooked or underutilized. Collective social innovators take the time and patience to develop participatory architectures that enable local, embedded innovators to be part of the change process.A notable example is Shikshagraha, a people’s education movement that is dedicated to improving public schools in India. Through multistakeholder collectives and district- and community-level sub-collectives, Shikshagraha is able to harness the ideas and participation of tens of thousands of school leaders to deliver micro-improvements across more than 15 Indian states and union territories. Another example is  Tamarack Institute for Community Engagement, a network of 180 local collaboratives across 500 municipalities in Canada who are deploying localized, unique approaches to end poverty across the country. In the social change space, we are people on a mission. That makes many of us feel a sense of urgency – and rightly so; we start seeking quick solutions, quick actions because we want the problems to be solved quickly. But collective action demands the opposite. Diverse sets of people need to come together for shared meaning-making of the problem, for co-creating the solutions, and this takes time. It cannot be forced or rushed. True alignment on problems and purpose requires patience, and spaces for dialogue and trust building. This means we need to compromise speed in the short- term … slowing down at the start to go faster in the long run – to build something truly effective and sustainable for tomorrow. Khushboo Awasthi Kumari, Evangelist and Designer, Shikshagraha, India, in TheCSRUniverse. (2024). Shikshāgraha: Transforming India’s School Education. YouTube. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=id-OllrGmg8. Image credit: Shikshagraha, India The Future is Collective: Advancing Collective Social Innovation to Address Society’s Biggest Challenges 14