Several years ago, the Skoll Foundation noted a promising development in its portfolio. A few early Skoll Award winners, those models of social entrepreneurship, began to spin off new initiatives aimed at shifting systems not by scaling a solution, but by mobilizing unified efforts to solve problems at scale.
Here at Skoll, we’ve called these pioneers system orchestrators. Our partners at The Bridgespan Group call them field catalysts, and have produced substantial research on how they operate and how funders can help unlock systems change by supporting their work.
This series has explored the pathways that EYElliance, one exemplary system orchestrator, has taken to solve a billion-person problem—the lack of access to glasses that improve learning and livelihoods. It works to shift the conditions that hold this problem in place. Jordan Kassalow and Elizabeth Smith, co-founders of EYElliance, focus on solving the vision gap problem at a population level.
As an anchor funder, the Skoll Foundation made an early bet on EYElliance. The Foundation saw both the potential for maximizing impact and the opportunity to learn how it could better cultivate the conditions in which other system orchestrators might emerge. The goal of this series has been to demystify the system orchestration approach to innovative problem solving as it begins to edge its way into the mainstream of funder awareness.
Social innovators working in this manner can face some communications challenges. “Look, when you start to talk about systems orchestration or systems change, you quickly start to see eyes glaze over,” said Kassalow recently. “I’ve come to realize, it’s pretty simple, it comes down to a group of people who can successfully park their egos and work together to drive impact and solve a massive problem.”
Through this series, we’ve seen how EYElliance addresses the systemic barriers that no single eye healthcare organization could accomplish on its own, through a creative, flexible, and persistent approach. While glasses on faces is the goal, that’s not the most useful unit of impact measurement. Impact for EYElliance isn’t best reflected in dashboards. It’s measured in relationships built that shift the dynamics that perpetuate the problem—mobilizing Ministries of Health, enabling a government to enact policy change, shaping priorities of the World Health Organization. “If you’re interested in getting glasses on faces, taking a systems orchestration approach creates the routine, reliable access to glasses that’s needed to reach hundreds of millions of people,” said Smith.
EYElliance operates with four mutually reinforcing strategies, each of which we’ve explored in this series:
“The field has been on a learning journey for several years to recognize the impact potential of system orchestrators and clarify how funders can best support these innovators,” said Don Gips, CEO of the Skoll Foundation. “EYElliance’s demonstrable impact has helped to encourage the Skoll foundation to move funding and resources towards likeminded system players. Many of the lessons they’ve learned in their approach to systemic collaboration and coalition building to solve the access gap in eye health could be usefully applied to other large-scale problems.”
Embrace humility and listen deeply
Before Kassalow and Smith embarked on any strategy creation or goal setting, they immersed themselves in a listening tour to understand the gaps in the ecosystem and identify potential pathways for impact. Effective systems orchestrators must ask the right questions. “But if you enter conversations with rigid beliefs, you will never find the right questions to ask,” said Kassalow. As EYElliance worked to define its strategy, it approached each conversation with genuine curiosity.
“People will recognize and respond to a humble stance,” said Smith. “They will recognize your authentic motivation to solve the problem, this accelerates trust building. We can trace our biggest successes to conversations we began eight years ago with individuals who are now allies and champions—they are truly on the journey with us.” A clear example is the relationship EYElliance has built with Alice Albright, now the CEO of the Millennium Challenge Corporation. Smith and Kassalow recognized the important role the Global Partnership for Education, where Albright served as CEO from 2013 to 2022, could play in supporting the integration of eye health into school health programs and inclusive education. EYElliance approached Ms. Albright with a beginner’s mind and took her advice to heart. Six years later, its relationship with GPE is strong and the EYElliance school eye health program is scaling thanks to their guidance along with consultations with the World Bank and partnerships with CHAI and national governments.
Get smart before you start
EYElliance conducted a landscape assessment and went on a 9-month listening tour to learn from global alliances tackling problems at population level and as well as other eye care NGOs. While Kassalow had deep institutional knowledge from founding VisionSpring, they needed to educate themselves on other approaches that work. They co-authored an influential report, published by the World Economic Forum, with a diverse set of experts that became the basis for the EYElliance strategy. “From the start, it is important to ask the question: Whose behavior are you trying to change and to what end?,” said Smith. “Collaboration just for collaboration’s sake doesn’t bring about lasting change.”
Be agnostic to the solution: the power of being neutral
Speaking on behalf of an issue area leads to more strategic dialogue and trust. Funders, journalists, governments, and others, can sense motivation, says Kassalow. A system orchestrator’s central motivation is to represent a cause and the players in that ecosystem. Although they too need resources to survive, they are uniquely positioned to represent the problem from a more neutral place.
For instance, for years Kassalow had pitched VisionSpring to a contact of his at the New York Times. He never had success until he pitched the broader issue area instead of VisionSpring’s proprietary model. Front page coverage of the enormity of the global problem led to a new annual allocation for USAID from congress in 2019. Over the past four years, EYElliance’s role as a neutral broker representing the issue area instead of a specific solution enabled it to effectively advocate for the Senate Committee on Appropriations to double their initial allocation from $2.5 to $5 million.
Look for a corridor of indifference and fill it
“No one in our sector focused on the deal flow problem between impact investment and small optical businesses,” said Kassalow. “We stepped in, made the case for investment to DFC and now two inclusive optical businesses are in the process of applying for catalytic capital with much more favorable terms than they could find at their local bank.”
Be a conductor: One who brings a unified vision to the music
System orchestration happens at the global, national and community level. “Anything less and you end up with a high school band trying to muddle their way through the star-spangled banner,” said Kassalow. “With the scale out of school eye health we are continuously connecting the dots between the Global Partnership for Education global, country and regional leads, World Bank task team leaders, World Bank global, UNICEF at global and country level, and UNESCO.”
Lead from behind, but you might get left behind
Do all the work and get none of the credit: EYElliance embraced this philosophy whole heartedly. “We did our work quietly from the sidelines, and when good things started to happen, from the outside it looked as if the change was occurring on its own, magically,” said Smith. As a system orchestrator you need to lead from behind, and it’s important to communicate with stakeholders on an ongoing basis the role you play in driving impact. This is particularly true for donors, says Smith. “Without a steady drum beat about the success of a proprietary model, donors find themselves in unfamiliar territory and can fail to grasp the important role system orchestrators play.”
Back in 2017, The Skoll Foundation funded Skoll Awardee organization Crisis Action, a catalyst and coordinator for organizations working together to protect civilians from armed conflict, to produce Creative Coalitions: A Handbook for Change. The handbook proved to be a seminal document, the early rumblings of a movement by social innovators working across issue areas towards collective action.
Creative Coalitions also primed the Skoll Foundation to broaden its lens on social innovation, encouraging this funder to consider supporting pathways for impact that look quite different than traditional social entrepreneurship. As it turned out, several system orchestrators with ambitious visions had begun to emerge from the Skoll portfolio.
Several years ago Rebecca Onie, founder of Skoll Awardee organization Health Leads, stepped away to launch the system orchestration effort, The Health Initiative (THI), to reframe the national conversation in the U.S. about health and to spur investment in the things that impact our health, such as safe housing, healthy food, and jobs. In short time, THI influenced the U.S. Department of Health to enact policy that screens hospital and Medicaid patients for food, housing, and employment needs. THI’s vision is a health-based economy that equitably invests in health, not just healthcare.
Catalyst 2030 is a global movement of social entrepreneurs and social innovators from all sectors who share the common goal of creating innovative, people-centric approaches and shaping policy to attain the Sustainable Development Goals by 2030. “You don’t need to scale an organization to scale a concept that changes the system,” says 2006 Skoll Awardee Jeroo Billimoria, one of the driving forces behind Catalyst 2030. She now works alongside more than 500 social entrepreneurs and social innovators who are active in over 180 countries to collectively address root causes of the most pressing global challenges.
Imperative 21 brings large coalitions of organizations together around a common purpose and narrative to drive stakeholder capitalism—an economic system that is inclusive, equitable, and regenerative. The founders of Skoll Awardee organization B Lab have seeded and nurtured Imperative 21 to scale the concept of economic inclusion across its growing network to influence policy and business practice.
As The Bridgespan group has noted, system orchestrators are routinely underfunded and the critical role they play is often overlooked. By nature, system orchestrators are less visible than many other kinds of social innovators—they are often most effective outside the glare of the spotlight.
Our intent in this series was to unpack the approach of EYElliance to better understand how system orchestrators can have an outsized potential for impact. We hope that more funders will join us in supporting these types of system-shifting innovators with unrestricted, multi-year funding, and consider funding in ways that foster collaboration and cultivate an environment where more system orchestrators might emerge.
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