Learning for Change: the Challenges of Resourcing and Diversification for Sustainability
This session was an exploration of different ways in which long-lived manifestations of social innovation initiatives have managed to sustain themselves. Long-lived manifestations are often the exception rather than the rule; for example, around 70% of time banks in the TBUSA network fail within their first three years of life and hardly any have sustained longer than a decade. There are nevertheless some individual exceptions in the US, UK, and elsewhere that have bucked the trend. This begs the question: ‘what did these exceptions do differently that makes it possible for them to sustain and thrive when so many others fall back?’
The background for discussion was presented by Paul Weaver in the form of a set of propositions. One is that: if social innovation initiatives are to have transformative societal impact many more local manifestations will need to sustain long term. Another is that transformative societal impact also depends on social innovation initiatives working with each other and with external organisations in concerted fashion, as they are unlikely to be able to deliver societal- or systems-level change as individual initiatives. In this perspective, the observations that so many social innovation initiatives struggle to sustain their activities even when they demonstrate positive social impact and that the net effect of new start-ups being offset by die-backs of existing initiatives is that social innovation networks often find themselves with ‘their wheels spinning’ rather than driving forward urge us to address the financing, diversifying and resourcing challenges facing initiatives.
Research by Weaver, Marks, Skropke and Hogan using a success-case approach applied across a range of different social innovation types in different world regions and country contexts identifies important factors influencing potentials and prospects for social innovation initiatives to sustain and therefore also to contribute to transformative change. Diversifying income streams, becoming entrepreneurial around creating own income streams, creating networks of partner organisations to deliver mission, and maintaining focus on mission and values, especially in internal governance arrangements, are all important.
This ‘challenge’ workshop looked mostly at the challenge to individual initiatives and drew on the experience of three practitioners, Barbara Huston, Sarah Bird and Michael Marks. Each described a different resourcing strategy for individual initiatives. These covered, respectively: starting a social enterprise to create own income; embedding in a larger organisation; and becoming a commissioned service provider. The cross-over opportunities were also explored. There was also some discussion around strategic approaches based on wider partnerships among initiatives linked to projects for building secondary economies using new socio-economic models.
Each resourcing strategy was introduced as a basis for round-table discussion of the challenges it implies with discussion stimulated around three guiding questions:
What can grassroots SI organisations/initiatives do themselves to develop and seize opportunities to augment and diversify income streams, pool resources, and develop co-production possibilities?
What changes in framing conditions are needed for these to support and enable social innovation initiatives to sustain and develop their potential to contribute to positive societal- and systems-level transformation?
What interventions are needed to support partnerships across organisations for co-produced sustainability and transformative change?
Own income stream through social enterprise
Barbara Huston introduced her own social innovation organization, Partners-in-Care, which has been operating successfully as a not-for-profit for over 25 years in Maryland helping older people stay active and to age ‘in situ’ as valuable members of their communities.
The fortunes of her operations turned around taking advantage of an opportunity to develop a thrift store and to incorporate that into the time and service exchange culture she and her co-founders were using to provide self-help opportunities for older people. A time bank boutique has been developed from the basics of time banking combined with a repair and valorise model of up-cycling surplus-to-requirement clothes and goods. The boutique generates an own income stream that offers financial stability but in its own right is also a very tangible instrument of community building and creating opportunities for older people to be active. It is staffed by time bank members in return for time credits. The high compatibility of the boutique to the core mission makes this a successful social enterprise. The boutique also makes Partners-in-Care much more ‘visible’ to the wider community, as there is a physical space – the boutique – which is a tangible and evident symbol of the presence of Partners-in-Care compared to its other activities, such as providing transport for older people or organising home repair, which are ‘invisible’ to the wider public and to grant-givers: “Partners-in-Care arranges 20,000 rides annually. People don’t see that… but people do see the boutique”.
The boutique operates in line with time banking values and principles. It’s not a consignment store – those offering their unwanted items to the boutique don’t get a percentage of proceeds from their sale but get credits for the time taken to gather, valorise, package and get their donated items to the store. Mission is the most important principle here. “Money is scarce, not precious. Mission is precious. Mission is more precious than money.” Barbara has nevertheless found it important to profile the impact of Partners-in-Care in ways meaningful to mainstream actors, such as expressing the hours contributed to the organisation by its members in terms of money-equivalent contribution (saved wage costs) and the value of the work done in terms of avoided costs and cost savings.
The guiding principle both internally and in relation to external partners is to “stay on mission”. It’s important that everyone – all the members – feel ownership of Partners-in-Care. While there is a CEO “it can’t be led by just one person”. There’s a process of succession planning for the CEO and leadership team currently underway. This started already three years ago to provide for a new CEO (a replacement for Barbara who is retiring) to understand and learn how to work with the mission, principles and values of the organisation, as it is so different from a conventional business model. Partners-in-Care invests in developing the skill sets within the membership needed to protect the mission and to enable distributed ownership and leadership.
Staying on mission and maintaining core principles and values while being entrepreneurial have, therefore, been important foundations for the long-term sustainability and success of Partners-in-Care.
As her organisation and its social impact have grown, so too have wider awareness of what Partners-in-Care achieves and its powers when negotiating with external actors and commissioners. For many years Partners-in-Care has worked alongside the Department of Aging to support the elderly living actively in and being supported in and by community. “Partners-in-Care can achieve what the Department of Aging can’t do". It enables elderly people to live at home and is effective in reducing hospital re-admission rates by not only supporting the elderly and frail in their own homes with services but engaging them as active members of the time bank. “We started to work with LifeLine. They supply emergency call out devices. We also have small mobility buses. We now operate with over 3000 people across five sites”.
Long- term partnerships with organisations like the Department of Aging have helped Partners-in-Care understand the needs they can help address and helped the organization identify new services to offer and additional partners they can work with, like LifeLine. Partners in turn help further extend the partnership network in a snowballing process.
New legislation has been passed that now imposes financial penalties on hospitals if re-admission rates are high. Hospitals are now seeking to contract Partners-in-Care to help reduce re-admission rates. The Centre for Medical Services in the US is requiring that hospitals use the kinds of approaches that Partners-in-Care has developed and delivers. There is a special concern over health and hospital system ‘super-utilizers’. ‘Again, the principle that “mission is more precious than money” is overriding for Partners-in-Care. Partners-in-Care only works with hospitals on its own terms to ensure that those it helps accept the principles and values of the organisation and are willing to be co-producers in value creation.
The new legislation is potentially a game changer for Partners-in-Care. It creates a financial imperative for hospitals to seek lower rates of re-admission and creates demand for Partners-in-Care services and its delivery model.
Similarly rich and insightful discussions were held around the discussions of the two other development pathways and business models, ‘embedding’ and ‘offering commissioned services’.
Embedding in bigger organisations
Sarah Bird introduced this strategy and pathway in relation to her experience as a time banking practitioner and CEO of TBUK, leading to discussion of the opportunities and challenges it presents.
Currently, TBUK has around 250-270 member time banks in the UK, with around 5,800 individual members of these exchanging 3.2 million hours annually. Many external organisations are interested in time banking and want to partner with time banks. Experiences range across Local Authorities, Government Departments, Health Authorities, Hospitals, Churches, Charities, NGOs and Businesses. There are important links between the UK Department of Work and Pensions (DWP) and time banking. Time exchange systems and those active in them are provided with special fiscal and welfare benefits exemptions. DWP has a policy of signposting claimants to local time banks, seeing “time banking as a stepping stone to paid employment”.
TBUK and local time banks use pilot and demonstration projects to build embedding relationships. Hosts often provide physical space and cover money costs of operations and salaries of paid coordinators in return for a time bank being set up within the organisation, among its clients, or among the served community and helping achieve the goals of the host. There may be other in-kind benefits.
Care is needed to maintain the integrity and identity of the time bank and there are risks attaching to embedding in larger organisations, as the leadership of the larger organisation can change and this can arbitrarily lead to the end of an embedding relationship even when this has been successful in its mission. Demonstrating the impact of the activities of the embedded social innovation in terms of outcomes achieved and costs saved is important for maintaining the relationship, but not a guarantee.
An important recent development is the interest shown in establishing time banks within business organizations as a way to break down barriers between levels. Ralph Lauren stores in Central London, for example, are embedding time banks within their organisations to “help level the playing field and remove social barriers between senior managers and shop floor workers.”
Providing commissioned services
Michael Marks introduced the strategy and development path involving social innovation organisations and initiatives being commissioned as service providers.
Social innovation organisations, like the Parent-Support-Network that Michael is involved with as an action researcher, may develop activities that offer new, better or more efficiently provided services that enable them to take on formal roles as commissioned service providers. The main differences between being a commissioned service provider and being embedded in an organisation is that a social innovation organisation can operate with several different commissioning agencies simultaneously rather than having only one dedicated partner and relationship and that a contract is established involving money transfers. The pros and cons of commissioning include that service commissions are prone to the vagaries of the mainstream economy and public finances. There is no guaranteed smooth flow of contracts to provide secure funding. Diversification is therefore important and empowering for the social innovation initiative.
Key challenges relate on the one hand to the silo nature of government departments and agencies that could commission services (as well as changes in policies) and on the other hand the limited capacities of individual social innovation organisations to meet the quality assurance requirements of commissioners and investors, who are risk averse. Upscaling, upskilling and improved safeguarding are often needed to overcome commissioning risk. This requires upfront investment to get the social innovation organisations ‘investment ready’. Programmes such as the UK’s Big Potential are important for capacity building. Social impact bonds and pay-for-success contracts offer important new financial mechanisms and instruments. These are still in the early stages of their development and there is an important agenda of work to be undertaken still to design, test and register interventions; e.g. in prevention. This is challenging owing to the need for appropriate evaluation metrics and protocols.
Further information
The workshop was co-designed by Linda Hogan, Barbara Huston, Michael Marks, Paul Weaver (all Associates of Groundswell Research) and Sarah Bird. It was co-presented by the last four of these. Paul Weaver and Sarah Bird are representatives of Timebanking UK. Paul Weaver is also a TRANSIT researcher.
Further information available from: pweaver.groundswell@gmail.com
