Driving Social Change

Strategies for long-term social impact This important new book illustrates how to create the social breakthroughs needed to solve urgent global threats such as poverty, disease, and hunger. It then turns to three alternative, but complementary, paths to social breakthrough: social protecting, social exploring, and social advocacy, providing a detailed map of the journey from initial commitment to a world of justice and opportunity Examines the current condition of the social impact infrastructure Offers strategies for how to remedy the steady weakening of our social-impact infrastructure Provides tactics to build strong social organizations and networks Illustrates dynamic methods to respond to constant economic and social change Author Paul Light believes we should be less concerned about the tools of agitation (social entrepreneurship, social protecting, social exploring, and social advocacy) and more concerned about the disruption and replacement of the status quo. Timely in its urgency, this book describes the revolutionary social impact cycle, which provides a new approach for framing the debate about urgent threats.

Could Wal-Mart offer a better solution to healthcare than Medicaid? Could GE help reduce global warming faster than the Kyoto protocol? Social Innovation, Inc. declares a new era where companies profit from social change. Leading corporations like GE, Wellpoint, Travelers and Wal-Mart are transforming social responsibility into social innovation and revolutionizing the way we think about the role of business in society. Based on four years of measuring the social strategies of America's leading corporations, Jason Saul lays out the five strategies for social innovation and offers a practical roadmap for how to get started. Explains the fundamental shift in the role of business in society, from social contract to social capital market Identifies the 5 social innovation strategies: submarket products and services, social points of entry, pipeline talent, reverse lobbying, and emotive customer bonding Offers step-by-step guidance for creating economic value through positive social change Social Innovation, Inc. is about making social change work for the business, and in turn staying relevant in the new economy.

The issues of poverty, inequality, racial injustice, and climate change have never been more pressing or paralyzing. Current approaches to social change, which rely on linear thinking and traditional power dynamics to 'solve' social problems, are not helping. In fact, they may only beentrenching the status quo.Systemic social challenges produce bewildering results when we try to solve them due to their complexity, scale, and depth. While strategies to tackle complexity and scale have received significant attention and investment, challenges that arise from deeply-held beliefs, values, and assumptions thatno longer serve us well have been largely overlooked. This book draws on stories of committed social changemakers to uncover a set of principles and practices for social change that dramatically depart from the industrial approach. Rather than delivering solutions or being lured by grander visionsof 'systems change', these principles and practices focus on the process of change itself. Simple yet profound, these stories distil a timely set of lessons for leaders, scholars, and policymakers on how connection, context, and power sit at the heart of the change process, ensuring broader agencyfor people and communities while building social systems that are responsive in a rapidly-changing world.

Research on social entrepreneurship is finally catching up to its rapidly growing potential. In The Search for Social Entrepreneurship, Paul Light explores this surge of interest to establish the state of knowledge on this growing phenomenon and suggest directions for future research. Light begins by outlining the debate on how to define social entrepreneurship, a concept often cited and lauded but not necessarily understood. A very elemental definition would note that it involves individuals, groups, networks, or organizations seeking sustainable change via new ideas on how governments, nonprofits, and businesses can address significant social problems. That leaves plenty of gaps, however, and without adequate agreement on what the term means, we cannot measure it effectively. The unsatisfying results are apple-to-orange comparisons that make replication and further research difficult. The subsequent section examines the four main components of social entrepreneurship: ideas, opportunities, organizations, and the entrepreneurs themselves. The copious information available about each has yet to be mined for lessons on making social entrepreneurship a success. The third section draws on Light's original survey research on 131 high-performing nonprofits, exploring how they differ across the four key components. The fourth and final section offers recommendations for future action and research in this burgeoning field.

Discover how those who change the world do so with this thoughtful and timely book Why do some changes occur, and others don't? What are the factors that drive successful social and environmental movements, while others falter? How Change Happens examines the leadership approaches, campaign strategies, and ground-level tactics employed in a range of modern social change campaigns. The book explores successful movements that have achieved phenomenal impact since the 1980s—tobacco control, gun rights expansion, LGBT marriage equality, and acid rain elimination. It also examines recent campaigns that seem to have fizzled, like Occupy Wall Street, and those that continue to struggle, like gun violence prevention and carbon emissions reduction. And it explores implications for movements that are newly emerging, like Black Lives Matter. By comparing successful social change campaigns to the rest, How Change Happens reveals powerful lessons for changemakers who seek to impact society and the planet for the better in the 21st century. Author Leslie Crutchfield is a writer, lecturer, social impact advisor, and leading authority on scaling social innovation. She is Executive Director of the Global Social Enterprise Initiative (GSEI) at Georgetown University’s McDonough School of Business, and co-author of two previous books, Forces for Good and Do More than Give. She serves as a senior advisor with FSG, the global social impact consulting firm. She is frequently invited to speak at nonprofit, philanthropic, and corporate events, and has appeared on shows such as ABC News Now and NPR, among others. She is an active media contributor, with pieces appearing in The Washington Post. Fortune.com, CNN/Money and Harvard Business Review.com. Examines why some societal shifts occur, and others don't Illustrates the factors that drive successful social and environmental movements Looks at the approaches, strategies, and tactics that changemakers employ in order to effect widescale change Whatever cause inspires you, advance it by applying the must-read advice in How Change Happens—whether you lead a social change effort, or if you’re tired of just watching from the outside and want to join the fray, or if you simply want to better understand how change happens, this book is the place to start.

Transportation research has traditionally been dominated by engineering and logistics research approaches. This book integrates social, economic, and behavioral sciences into the transportation field. As its title indicates, emphasis is on socioeconomic changes, which increasingly govern the development of the transportation sector. The papers presented here originated at a conference on Social Change and Sustainable Transport held at the University of California at Berkeley in March 1999, under the auspices of the European Science Foundation and the National Science Foundation. The contributors, who represent a range of disciplines, including geography and regional science, economics, political science, sociology, and psychology, come from twelve different countries. Their subjects cover the consequences of environmentally sustainable transportation vs. the "business-as-usual" status quo, the new phenomenon of "edge cities," automobile dependence as a social problem, the influence of leisure or discretionary travel and of company cars, the problems of freight transport, the future of railroads in Europe, the imposition of electronic road tolls, potential transport benefits of e-commerce, and the electric car.

This book explores new forms of democracy in practice following the 2011 global uprisings; democracy that comes from below, by and for the ‘have-nots’. Combining theories of social innovation and collective leadership, it analyses how disadvantaged communities have addressed the effects of economic recession in two global cities: Barcelona and New York.