intern's blog

At the wee hours of Thursday, June 14^th I was forced by not-so-fresh supermarket sushi (I know, I should have known better) to pull out of a panel discussion at the Social Impact Exchange conference in New York City. In its third year, the Social Impact Exchange’s annual conference brings together nonprofits, funders, advisors, intermediaries, researchers, and practitioners to highlight and discuss how we can best support the scaling and replication of effective programs, systems, and/or policies so the benefits are experienced by a broader segment of the population.

In a world where social needs are increasing and resources decreasing, it's critical to scale organizations that efficiently and effectively address social problems. For the last three years, the Social Impact Exchange has been convening leaders in the field to address this issue.

"Scaling a nonprofit's programs without investing in its capacity is a recipe for failure," according to the report Scaling What Works: Implications for Philanthropists, Policymakers, and Nonprofit Leaders, by Edna McConnell Clark Foundation and the Bridgespan Group. This was the overarching theme of this year's conference. Seven different types of support were touched on at the conference.

With the perspective of a couple of days to recover my energy and reflect on the Social Impact Exchange Conference 2012, there are a couple of powerful themes that resonated throughout the many provocative presentations and discussions.  My own unscientific note-taking and scan brings up variations on the words “collective” and “shared” as the conference mantras, instructive in a number of ways.

It was a pleasure to chat with Jeff Liebman, Steve Goldberg, Paul Bernstein, and Cathy Clark about social impact bonds as part of the panel on "How to Scale Impact Through Social Impact Bonds" at last week's Social Impact Exchange Conference.

The key themes of the 2012 Social Impact Exchange Conference were all about collaboration. Collective intelligence. Community solutions. Needle-moving collaborations. Collective impact. Much has been made of this new brand of collaboration and it was clear at the conference that many of us who spend our days (and nights) looking for ways to scale solutions to our most vexing social problems see enormous potential in this approach.