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

Impact 3: Finding novel ways to value and manage collective resources Collective social innovators also promote impact by identifying new ways to manage collective resources, which is critical as the world enters a period in which its natural and social resources are under threat. Too frequently, development experts and policy-makers rely upon just two means of distributing common goods: the market or government regulation. However, communities have been managing resources collectively for millennia; collective social innovators can revive these methods and find new ones to expand the available approaches further. The Amazon Sacred Headwaters Alliance is the world’s largest Indigenous alliance committed to protecting the environment, bringing together 30 Indigenous nations that have never before worked collaboratively. Together, these nations have developed a Bioregional Plan to protect 86 million acres of bio-culturally rich rainforests that are critical to maintaining the earth’s hydrological cycle. This plan relies upon a return to managing natural resources in balance with the Indigenous ethos of buen vivir. Similarly, the vartaLeap Coalition is promoting a new way of valuing India’s youth population – the largest in the world – encouraging employers, governments and education systems to see the young population as more than just an economic dividend and instead as a means of transforming “self and society” through nourishing “inside-out” youth leadership. Impact 4: Collecting and distributing expansive datasets to shape policy and decision-making Economic, development and environmental goals are often challenged by the lack of data to promote informed decision-making and evidence- based policy. Collective social innovators are solving this issue, overcoming data collection hurdles and assembling vast datasets that can be harnessed for good. MapBiomas is a collaborative initiative working in over 20 geographic and thematic areas to use advanced technology and data to monitor land use and cover changes in tropical forests worldwide. Using their platform, it is now possible to quantify land use changes over a 39-year period with a level of precision and speed that would have been unfeasible and prohibitively expensive in the past. In another example, StriveTogether works closely with 70 place-based partnerships across the USA to assemble detailed, disaggregated data on “cradle-to-career” outcomes, enabling municipalities to understand and address the bottlenecks to economic opportunity with targeted, evidence-based initiatives.Image credit: Amazon Sacred Headwaters Alliance, Ecuador Our objective as a network is to guarantee that there is capacity to produce land cover/use change maps in every tropical country. In our case, the network is the goal, because it’s not possible to produce such detailed and meaningful maps if it’s not through a network of local organizations and experts. No single person or organization has the capacity to do every part, so we need to have several organizations complete this complex product. With this capacity, people in each country and region are actually applying the same logic and learnings to solving other problems and developing other projects beyond MapBiomas, responding to local demands with the same technology. Tasso Azevedo, Co-Founder and General Coordinator, MapBiomas Communities have been managing resources collectively for millennia; collective innovators can revive these methods and find new ones to expand the available approaches further. The Future is Collective: Advancing Collective Social Innovation to Address Society’s Biggest Challenges 15