There is a parable I heard years ago that I have never quite been able to shake.

A group of people are standing alongside a river when they notice a baby floating downstream. Someone jumps in, pulls the baby to safety and, before they can catch their breath, another baby appears. Then another. Soon, everyone is occupied pulling babies from the water.

Eventually, one person starts walking upstream.

“Where are you going?” the others ask. “We need you here.”

“I’m going to find out who keeps throwing babies in the river.”

The nonprofit sector is extraordinarily good at ‘bailing babies’ from the proverbial river. Organizations are built around meeting immediate needs, improving individual lives and helping people overcome challenges created by circumstances they often had little role in creating. The harder question for leaders is how far upstream they are willing -- or able -- to go.

I heard that analogy years ago and got religion around it. It disrupted what might otherwise have remained a perfectly nice management consulting firm helping organizations become stronger one at a time. Once you begin seeing the systems around the organizations, it becomes difficult to unsee them.

Lately, though, I’ll admit there are days when I would happily forget the whole thing. Systems change is difficult, slow and increasingly girded by institutions, politics and incentives that resist movement. There is something appealing about focusing on the organization in front of you, helping it get better at what it does.

Through The Work in Progress, I wondered whether I would encounter other founders wrestling with that same tension. I didn’t have to wait long.

When Programs Meet Systems

Henry Rock founded City Startup Labs to advance entrepreneurial opportunity, particularly for populations that have historically been excluded from it. Over the years, that work has increasingly focused on justice-involved people, helping individuals build the skills, confidence and economic agency necessary to create a more durable future.

But Henry has spent enough time doing the work to recognize where a program’s influence ends.

Funders understandably want to invest in programs and services, and nonprofits are then held accountable for the outcomes those programs produce. The challenge is that participants eventually leave those programs and re-enter systems that may have changed very little. For justice-impacted people in particular, barriers related to employment, capital, policy and institutional practices can quickly overwhelm even the strongest intervention.

“We can build a great program and prepare someone incredibly well, but at some point they have to step back into the larger system,” Henry told me. “If the institutions around them aren’t prepared to create pathways for their success, you’re asking the program to produce an outcome it can’t own by itself.”

Changing the Frame

That observation is helping reshape City Startup Labs. Henry described the organization as having functioned as a laboratory, experimenting and learning in the middle of Charlotte’s response to economic mobility challenges. He is now transitioning CSL from primarily a program provider towards an advisory model, centered in what the organization calls the Economic Citizenship Framework, so that other communities can benefit from a dozen years of work in the field.

The emphasis shifts upstream.

“Municipalities, philanthropy, employers, law enforcement, the justice system -- they all have a stake in these outcomes,” Henry said. “We can’t outsource responsibility to a nonprofit and expect it to solve the problem alone. The institutions that shape the system have to be invested in changing it.”

Hardly a revelation from a guy who, as he noted, “has been around the block a time or two.” But perhaps the work occasionally requires relearning what we already know: Programs can prepare people for opportunity, but systems determine whether that opportunity exists in the first place.

The Bigger Picture

For Carrie Christian, that realization has emerged somewhat differently.

Carrie founded Families Forward Charlotte after becoming more aware of the barriers facing families experiencing economic insecurity in her hometown. The organization developed a model centered on helping families gain stability through relationships, resources and guidance. Nearly a decade later, Carrie has watched enough families navigate those systems to recognize patterns that extend far beyond any one participant.

“We’re seeing the same barriers over and over again,” she told me, pointing to affordable housing, childcare, transportation and access to living-wage employment. Her question now is how Families Forward Charlotte can help “change the conditions” so more families can see a path forward, including families who will never participate directly in its program.

That has Carrie thinking about the edges of her organization — what Families Forward Charlotte can reasonably own, where another institution needs to lead and where someone needs to serve as connective tissue between them.

“We’ve learned so much by walking alongside families about where access breaks down,” Carrie said. “Our role increasingly feels like helping bring the right organizations together, carrying what we are hearing from families into those conversations and asking how all of us can make the system easier to navigate.”

Connecting the System

That instinct is already shaping what she describes as the organization’s “next big thing”: convening other organizations doing this work, problem-solving around systems navigation and building stronger community support.

There is maturity in that evolution. Carrie told me that after more than a decade doing this work, the organization now has a strong team and board that give her room to ask a different question: “How can we do it even better” and truly move the needle?

“I think there comes a point where success can’t just be measured by how many people come through your own program,” Carrie said. “You start to see all of the other organizations and institutions that touch the same families, and you realize the bigger opportunity is getting that whole ecosystem working better together.”

Going Upstream

Maybe that is one of the benefits of staying close to a problem for a long time. You eventually learn where your organization ends.

That knowledge can be frustrating. It means accepting that some of the variables determining your success sit outside your control, and that accomplishing more may require engaging institutions with different incentives, language and measures of success. Collaboration introduces complexity -- working alone can feel simpler.

But Henry and Carrie both seem increasingly interested in that complexity. Their organizations began by addressing needs they could see and touch. Years of doing that work have given them a clearer view of the conditions continually producing those needs -- and a growing conviction that their accumulated knowledge has value beyond the boundaries of their programs.

There is something encouraging in that for me. At a moment when my own determination around systems change has wavered a bit, I find some renewed confidence in seeing leaders like Henry and Carrie lean further into it -- helping to shape what is possible by imagining a new way forward.