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

However, most government stakeholders still visualize traditional governance systems and single organizational entities when engaging with collectives. Governments and policy-makers can better support collective efforts by understanding their unique governance structures and creating supportive policies and funding mechanisms that capitalize on the distributed structures of collectives. Governments and policy-makers can advance collective social innovation through: –Using their convening power to initiate collective efforts in partnership with collective social innovators –Supporting scale-up (often through technology- enabled initiatives) by promoting platforms on many levels to create sustainability and objectivity –Creating novel legal entity structures that do not centralize governance in a single organization but instead distribute decision- making and governance across multiple groups –Partnering with collective social innovators to link multistakeholder initiatives with public sector services, providing opportunities for training, capacity building and continuous improvement that is directly linked to community outcomes In the beginning, we started off by supporting individual changemakers and initiatives, but then we realized that our energy and resources are better used to build those connectors and new forms of collaborations that can work at the systemic level. Who do you have to get on board so that all others follow? How do you create first mover effects? What are the levers which we only can tackle together? Lots of people think, ‘Okay, I found a lever’. But if most of the time, you only pull that one lever, nothing will change. You need multiple levers coming together. That’s when systems start changing. But building these – sometimes very unusual – alliances doesn’t just happen; it requires thorough orchestration. Today, very few are working on this structural alliance building and orchestration. That is what we realized is missing and what we are committed to building. Henrike Schlottmann, Chief Executive Officer and Managing Director, ProjectTogether Image credit: ProjectTogether, Germany The Future is Collective: Advancing Collective Social Innovation to Address Society’s Biggest Challenges 30