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Why Strategic Planning Can’t Wait: Preparing for Social Good’s Greatest Challenge

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It is now 2026. A new year. And with it comes no shortage of uncertainty about how social good will fare in the months and years ahead.

With so many variables at play, you may be asking yourself: Is now really the time to embark on a strategic planning effort?

Pardon the colorful language, but hell yes.

Organizations that elect to take a “wait-and-see” approach — or focus only on the next calendar year without considering what comes after — are likely to be unprepared when the worst of the disruption arrives in early 2027.

Revisiting the One Big Beautiful Bill

I hate to do this so early in the new year, but some may need a reminder: a tsunami of epic proportions is approaching. Federal policy change in the form of the One Big Beautiful Bill (OBBB) will disrupt everyone. It feels like watching a car wreck in slow motion. We know the outcome, and yet there is very little we can do to stop it.

But maybe your area of human services wasn’t mentioned in the bill. Maybe you think this doesn’t apply to you. Maybe you believe you’re the one organization that can rest easy.

Think again.

While the impact of the bill to date has been largely administrative, in early 2027, people will roll off Medicaid in large numbers — and they will lose much more than just access to healthcare.

Medicaid is one of the largest funding mechanisms for addressing the social drivers of health, which include food access, housing stability, and transportation. And when people lose Medicaid coverage, the burden for meeting those needs will not disappear. Instead, it will shift to state governments, local municipalities, nonprofits, and philanthropy, and the challenge that creates is sobering. In our home state of North Carolina, NC DHHS estimates that nearly $50 billion in federal Medicaid funding will be lost over the next decade. No state can absorb that level of loss and continue operating as before. Simply put, there is no realistic way for the gap created by federal spending cuts to be made up elsewhere. It is too large a shortfall to backfill. 

At Next Stage, we believe this represents the single greatest challenge to social good in our lifetimes — one that will manifest in predictable ways:

  • Increased competition for resources. Everyone will be competing for a much smaller pie, forcing painful decisions for boards, executives, and funders alike. The desperation this creates will likely produce false choices about what matters most in sustaining healthy, safe, and affordable communities.
  • Surging need as services shrink. As resources contract, need will continue to grow. When people experience unmet needs — food insecurity, housing instability, untreated health conditions — those pressures do not stay contained. They ripple outward. Families across income levels will feel the consequences of communities under strain, and the calls for solutions will intensify even as capacity declines.
  • Continued politicization of settled assumptions. All this is unfolding in a moment when there is deep disagreement about what it means to be an American. Ideas that once felt broadly shared — that people deserve access to health, opportunity, and dignity — are increasingly contested. Addressing barriers to access becomes more difficult when the language of equity itself is under attack.

That’s why the work in front of us should not focus on overcoming this disruption — that is not where we are. Going forward, the social good sector must work to minimize harm, manage contraction, and make hard choices as thoughtfully as possible.

But without a shared internal framework to create alignment, clarity, and discipline in decision-making, institutions may risk their own sustainability moving forward.

So what does this mean for your nonprofit, government agency, or philanthropic organization? Strategic planning.

A Passionate Argument for Strategic Planning

Strategic planning differs from annual planning or budgeting exercises. And especially in uncertain times, it can be a powerful way to help your organization make intentional operational choices.

The most effective versions of strategic planning include:

  • A focus on external data. Strategic planning forces organizations to look outward — at policy shifts, demographic trends, funding trajectories, and community needs — rather than relying solely on internal performance or historical success. In moments like this, intuition and gut feelings are not enough.
  • Greater clarity on perception and reality. Many organizations believe they understand their position in the ecosystem. Strategic planning creates space to test those assumptions. What role do you truly play? Where are you indispensable? Where are you replaceable? These are uncomfortable, yet necessary, questions.
  • A multiyear horizon. Annual planning keeps the lights on. Strategic planning prepares you for what’s coming. A multiyear horizon allows organizations to scenario-plan, sequence decisions, and avoid reactive whiplash as conditions change.

Strategic planning matters in moments like this because it creates shared discipline when instinct pulls leaders in different directions. It gives boards, executives, and staff a common set of assumptions to work from, a clear understanding of tradeoffs, and an agreed-upon rationale for difficult decisions. Without that alignment, organizations drift into reactive mode — chasing funding, protecting legacy programs, and deferring hard conversations until options narrow. 

A strong strategic plan does not eliminate uncertainty, but it does provide a stable platform for making choices grounded in reality as conditions continue to change.

Our Commitment to You

While we will continue to track and share updates on the impacts of federal spending cuts throughout the year, our central focus will be on supporting you, your organizations, and the communities you serve by highlighting tangible ways social good leaders like you can get actionable.

Because we believe informed, intentional efforts are the best — and only — way forward.

Our collective legacy, as organizations, as communities, and as people, will be defined by how we respond to this moment. This is an eyes-wide-open period. The decisions made now will shape what survives, what adapts, and what is lost.

We stand ready to support you as you navigate the future. Reach out to set up a call today. 

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Undeniable Support for The UnFundable Project

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The UnFundable Project

Last week, we closed the application period for Next Stage’s first grant process, The UnFundable Project.

We set out to celebrate our 10th Anniversary by granting $10,000 to a nonprofit for a project that has typically been viewed as “unfundable.” This initiative allows us to go beyond expressing our belief in trust-based philanthropy to actually demonstrate how it works. Next Stage, a small company (with less than 10 full-time employees!) is setting an example of how profit and purpose, trust-based philanthropy, and community embeddedness can be done.

What We’re Learning

We’re proud to share that we had 44 applicants for the grant. All are small-to-midsize nonprofits that reported annual operating budgets between $0 and $4.5 million. Some requests include funds for staff wellness and professional development while others are looking for support for general facility maintenance that is long overdue. We are learning that these projects have been considered “unfundable” because the organization is new or traditional grantmakers exclude certain types of expenses.

As a company deeply embedded in the social good workings of our region, we were happily surprised to see several organizations we’re not familiar with turn in applications. It reminds us that there are layers to nonprofit work. We may more frequently hear about and see the activity of several well-known, larger nonprofits, but there are all sizes and types of nonprofits that matter to their communities. 

Next Steps

Our team will spend the next three weeks reviewing the applications and identifying the top 10 finalists. Our distinguished panel will then be determining the winner, to be announced in early 2024. We’ve never been so excited to give money away. Make sure you follow along to get updates on the process. 

 The UnFundable Project Panelists:

Addressing a Growing Community Threat: Diminished Referral Pipelines

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Have you noticed Next Stage looks different than it did a few years ago?

For one thing, we’re larger. We’ve doubled in size since the onset of the pandemic, adding new service lines, digital tools and approaches to our work. We recently moved into a new office because our team simply could no longer thrive in a co-working environment.

When I describe the history of our company, one of the demarcation points was the addition of Helen Hope Kimbrough to our team. Added as a Consultant in 2021, she recently got a new title that is so fitting – Senior Director, Community Voice.

It is apropos because her addition signaled a change in how our company does its work. Most of our engagements with nonprofits include a discovery phase where we gather insights to inform a Current Condition Assessment deliverable to support the process of strategic planning. In the past, that process tended to focus on ‘grasstops’ stakeholders – business executives, philanthropists, system leaders and elected officials – with interviews designed to capture their perspectives toward shaping forward progress.

Missing from the analysis was a critical component – the perspective of the people the organization hopes to engage with its programming. It was an absence that Helen called out and rectified through a modification to our qualitative data-gathering methodology. Now every engagement includes it.

The process of collecting insights from target populations for services now has language to describe it – community voice – and it is at the center of our work.

If you missed Helen’s stellar piece from last week, I encourage you to read it. She defines the concept of community voice and makes such a compelling argument for why trust is at the heart of forming lasting partnerships in the communities local nonprofits aim to serve.

And boy, do we ever need it.

We believe we have arrived at a community-wide proof point for trust, and it requires immediate action.

‘Where are the people for our nonprofit’s services?’

Organizations across Charlotte are experiencing a unique challenge. With ARPA funding and renewed investment from philanthropic sources ready for deployment, area nonprofits are flush with resources.

But for many of the nonprofits Next Stage has spoken with of late, what had once been a steady stream of program participants has slowed substantially. At first, the natural assumption was that the pandemic was having lasting effects. But as time has gone on, there is concern that something else has happened as well – a significant loss of trust.

We believe there are a number of factors contributing to this trendline. Chief among them is poorly-constructed outreach efforts that pre-date the pandemic. The championing of quarterback community-based organizations (CBOs) has led in some cases to an overreliance on them, with services concentrated on the economically-vulnerable populations in a handful of historic neighborhoods around uptown – ‘the Crescent.’

And yet, decades of displacement through development and gentrification have forced many people further out into apartment homes in Steele Creek, Mint Hill, Pineville, Northlake and University City. Still others have moved over the border into nearby counties where resources are even more scarce. Many in our region who are one crisis away from economic catastrophe live in micro-geographies that have historically featured relatively little dedicated outreach. And as opportunity corridors and redevelopment take hold, these are the communities where even more displaced residents will be moving.

We believe building infrastructure to reach these populations is imperative for area nonprofits. We at Next Stage are committed to addressing this challenge head-on through community voice efforts designed to spark engagement, build buy-in and activate programming through a listen-first philosophy designed to bridge community through trust-building.

Going where others are not

Next Stage has always focused on the bleeding edge for social good. It is the role of provocateur that we are uniquely positioned to play.

Back in 2017, we launched an incubator for emerging nonprofit organizations – many of them CBOs led by people of color – at a time when most philanthropists and civic leaders were loath to engage them. ‘Not another new nonprofit’ was a common refrain as we worked with founder-led organizations on the outskirts of social impact.

Skip ahead a few years and the disruption of the pandemic mixed with a renewed fight for racial and social justice has made CBOs not only fundable but a civic imperative. Corporate foundations and community-giving organizations that once created barriers for smaller, early-growth organizations are now making them a centerpiece of their work.

As a result, we dismantled our brick-and-mortar incubator, moved it online, and now give it away for free. Our job is not to compete where there are robust resources, but instead to think ahead and go where others aren’t.

We probably read Blue Ocean Strategy a few too many times, but somehow it works for us.

That is the energy we are taking into our next social impact venture – Community Voice-Enabled Demand Generation.

The process of building referral pipelines

Acquisition is a significant challenge facing nonprofits. It has been a barrier on the resource development side for years, where organizations struggle to tap into new networks or pioneer relationships with those who relocate to our community. And now it is impacting their programs.

That is due in part to a system of supports that trace the origination of relationships back to systems and safety net organizations. A first-time relationship with a resident is most often to come reactively, as someone reaches out for support in a crisis – e.g. access to housing, food, transportation or health services. The act of a resident, often in desperation, starts a chain of referrals to not only help that person in the moment but also to help ensure that the crisis is not experienced again.

But what about people who never reach out for that sort of support? If economic mobility is the Charlotte region’s central challenge as a community, how is that being addressed if the primary entry point to services is through crisis?

We believe there are many people who are under-employed and under-resourced in our communities who may never be reached because they do not step foot in a safety net provider organization. If we are to address our signature challenges, we must be willing to not just be reactive to need but proactive to opportunity, pioneering relationships that build demand for local services.

Next Stage’s Community Voice-Enabled Demand Generation is a four-step process:

  • Step 1: Constituent Modeling – The first step is to identify ideal characteristics of your target audience and map to micro-geographies using available tools like census data, Claritas and the Charlotte-Mecklenburg Quality of Life Explorer.

    The premise of this service line is that there are many residents throughout Charlotte who could benefit from a nonprofit’s programming, but they are unknown, unmapped and, as-of-yet, unreached. The first phase of Next Stage’s work aims to build an understanding of the organization and its ideal client population, identify neighborhoods with residents who match those traits, and design a plan for community voice engagement.
  • Step 2: Community Listening – With geographies selected for engagement, we conduct relational outreach and community listening to build understanding and spark relationships.

    We believe that every voice matters – and that diverse perspectives belong at every table. Our team engages community members and gathers data to provide clients with actionable insights into the needs of their community. We see community engagement as a two-way street – constituents must be given an opportunity to inform the programming that will serve to intervene in their lives to make for a better future.
  • Step 3: Program Aligning – Feedback from community listening efforts inform an effort of aligning programming and services to match needs and leverage community assets.

    It is a fallacy to assume that the absence of knowledge about your programming is the missing ingredient holding economically-vulnerable Charlotteans back. The absence of trust in systems is a decades-long trendline that will not be overcome through digital marketing or one-time efforts. We utilize community-voice research as a jumping-off point for aligning programming and determining a pathway forward.
  • Step 4: Neighborhood Linking – The last step in our process is to link neighbors to service providers through informed marketing and engagement efforts that lead to new relational networks and an ongoing pipeline.

    With a strong, community-informed plan for programming deployment and neighborhood-level communication in place, we partner with our nonprofit clients to onboard the organization to the communities engaged. This includes brokering key relationships and implementing neighborhood-level events and activities that will launch the organization’s services.

We aim to be a catalyst for these activities and make no assurances that these efforts alone will ignite resident demand for services. As Helen wrote last week, “people need staying power with intentionality and action,” and becoming a mainstay in these communities will be essential to realize positive outcomes.

But we believe it will never happen if we don’t prioritize it as a need and do something about it.

Our vision is the creation of new referral pipelines constructed through trust-building, where service providers originating relationships in new parts of the county can serve as an entrypoint for other nonprofits with reinforcing programming.

We are piloting this service line in 2023 with the goal of expanding it in 2024 and beyond. If your organization would like to learn more, we welcome the opportunity to discuss.

Together we can activate a new approach to winning the trust of the communities our missions call us to serve.

The Moneyball of Social Impact

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This month we are celebrating Next Stage’s ninth anniversary. Nine years?! Are you serious? It astonishes me how much time has passed. And yet in the same breath, it feels like only yesterday I was sitting at my old kitchen table, trying to figure out what it meant to own a company.

I think I’m proudest of having lost the Next Stage pub-style trivia Haley designed for our team meeting this past week, with questions culled from the nine years of the company’s existence. That others on our team know more about Next Stage’s history than me? That’s pretty special.

Another anniversary? It was 20 years ago that Michael Lewis published Moneyball, a book that in some ways contributed to laying the core philosophies for what would become Next Stage. I was reminded of it multiple times this past week, and it serves as inspiration for this essay.

We Are Family

Moneyball is one of the first books post-college that I can distinctly remember not just reading, but obsessing over. Some of that relates to my lifelong love of baseball. Or rather, my lifelong passion for a specific baseball team – the Pittsburgh Pirates. I was born into a family with Pittsburgh connections and ever since I could hold a baseball, I have been a bit fixated on the Battlin’ Buccos.

And yet, the Pirates are a very bad baseball team. They have been most of my life. As a small market franchise with an owner unwilling to invest what it takes to compete, I am relegated to cheering for victories that are sort of random – where the team picks in the draft, the development of players in the minor leagues, and incremental improvement as demonstrated by statistics. Where others root for pennants, I tend to geek out on analytics.

That love of statistical analysis was forged with Moneyball, a book that followed the 2002 season of the Oakland A’s and highlighted the unique approach to winning led by the team’s general manager, Billy Beane. Rather than go after players who had classically strong performance attributes, the A’s sought those who were undervalued in the marketplace, and yet performed in ways that made for a successful team.

It is an asset-based approach, of finding the competitive advantage that is often hidden from view, that felt so fresh and inspiring. The applicability to social good is obvious – like the Oakland A’s, most nonprofits are cost constrained and have to find system hacks to make progress.

They would go on to make a movie from the book with Brad Pitt in the GM’s seat, but back when it was published, I pictured someone else. Someone… more like me.

The Art of Winning an Unfair Game

I realize now that my love of the hapless Pittsburgh Pirates has fully informed much of my life. I am forever a fan of the underdog. No matter the situation, whether in sports or life, I find myself almost always choosing the side with the least opportunity to succeed. My compass has been wired for social justice in this way, of believing that an unequal playing field is just wrong.

And while I am an advocate for system change – like a salary cap in baseball or a change to public policy to assist disinvested people – there is also something I love about the challenge of overcoming great odds. Like Billy Beane, I enjoy that outsider status, of finding ways to be competitive even against the backdrop of an unjust system.

It is certainly the mindset that caused Next Stage to launch Cultivate as an incubator for emerging nonprofit organizations in 2018. Pre-pandemic, it was incredibly difficult to get local leaders of social impact to make time for small nonprofits early in their founding. “Too small, too little experience, too inconsequential.” And yet, we knew the founders of these organizations as true disrupters, often with lived experience, who offered new ways of doing things that deserved to be recognized. They also had the trust of the people they sought to serve. They were so worthy, in our eyes, and the lack of an onramp to the systems that support nonprofits was, we felt, unjust.

So, we built a curriculum to help “the little guy” get a leg up, find the marketplace where they could be competitive despite their size, and grow a plan for increasing their impact. It was in keeping with the work Next Stage has done since its humble beginnings, of identifying strategies to help level the playing field by looking to grow impact, resources, capacity and trust in places where others don’t.

The Hidden Side of Everything

I was reminded of Moneyball while listening to one of my favorite podcasts, Freakonomics Radio, based on the musings of its host, Stephen Dubner. The original Freakonomics book was another seminal influence on the founding of Next Stage, published in 2009, soon after my arrival in North Carolina. In it, co-authors Steven Levitt and Dubner uncover “the hidden side of everything,” turning conventional wisdom on its head.

Rejecting conventional wisdom is right up my alley. It is certainly the energy fueling our Profit & Purpose series, examining the intersection of the private sector and nonprofits. We are publishing our next report at the end of this month – Profit & Purpose: The ESG Addendum – and pitching it to Freakonomics Radio is something I hadn’t even thought to do until writing this very sentence.

In a recent podcast, Dubner revisited Moneyball to explore its continuing impact even two decades later. While Lewis would go on to write many great books, including The Blind Side and The Big Short, one could argue none had the cultural or industry impact of Moneyball. The title itself has been often aligned to other domains (like the title of this essay), with the goal of getting a leg up on the competition. It also transformed Major League Baseball, where the principles outlined in the book have gone on to be considered best practice.

The concepts themselves may have been revolutionary to find in a book on the New York Times bestseller list, but it turns out, they were not exactly new. Israeli economists Danny Kahneman and Amos Tversky had previously pioneered research into the field of behavioral economics. As noted by Dubner:

“One big takeaway from their research was that we all use mental shortcuts to make decisions, even important decisions, and those shortcuts can create cognitive biases.”

Mental Shortcuts and Cognitive Biases

My journeys have shown me that most people are essentially good. As a humanist, I believe strongly in people and communities, and that what leads to injustice is most often a combination of factors – economic limitations, limited data, a lack of intellectual curiosity, and yes, cognitive bias.

It turns out, trusting your gut is a really bad way of making decisions. And yet, people do it all the time. When it comes to the world of social impact, there are a bunch of wrong directions and missed opportunities that come from mental shortcuts that do harm. Here are a few of our least favorite:

  • “Low overhead for a nonprofit is good.” – Paging Dan Pallotta! Add his must-watch TED Talk to your list of to-dos if you are unfamiliar. Speaking of anniversaries, this year also marks a decade since Pallotta dropped a mic on “the overhead myth” that suggests a moral victory for organizations that talk about low overhead as a virtue, about driving your contribution primarily at their direct services. That is a great way to make sure your nonprofit never grows its impact! And yet we still find nonprofits every day bragging about their low overhead, feeding into a cognitive bias that does active harm to other nonprofits. What misguidedness!
  • “The largest nonprofits are best equipped to create positive impact.” – Not so fast! While there is no question larger nonprofits have more resources to serve more people, the pandemic taught everyone that ‘might doesn’t make right’ when it comes to effectiveness. In fact, it is more often the smaller, community-based organizations that have trust built with the people in their communities. Many large “agency” organizations proved wholly ineffective at getting services to the people who needed them most throughout COVID-19. The time has come to recognize that a new supply chain of social impact is needed – one that recognizes the needs of both large and small nonprofits alike.
  • “Need to raise money? Host an event!” – Uh, what? Even if the abundance of rubber chicken fundraising lunches in your city or town hasn’t reached a saturation point, certainly the pandemic laid bare the reality that event-centric fundraising is no longer sufficient. Organizations overly dependent on event revenue found themselves unable to host their galas, golf tournaments, 5Ks and breakfasts. Younger generations are far less inclined to participate in the events made so popular by their parents (and grandparents!).
  • “There is little a nonprofit can teach my private sector company.” – Ugh! We still run into this mindset, of thinking of nonprofits as children, benefitting from the largess of the grown-up private sector companies that provide “corporate gifts.” In truth, companies are looking more and more like nonprofits these days, with purpose statements and employee engagement strategies designed to create an increased sense of belonging. Nonprofits have been winning in this space for years. In fact, we tend to think of it as a competitive advantage for nonprofits that succeed at creating true partnerships with companies.

Reframing My Point of View

Our ninth anniversary finds Next Stage at the precipice of some amazing opportunities. Our company has grown as a result of finding ways to work with bigger clients featuring more complex challenges than ever before. We now talk about “working at the intersection of social good,” where nonprofits, companies, government, philanthropy and residents come together to make a more lasting change.

Critical to this shift was a personal reckoning, of no longer seeing myself and the company our team has built from a purely outsider perspective. The strategies we have been pioneering for years are now ways of thinking that intrigue large institutions and systems as well. Everyone has been disrupted in some way over the last few years, and leaders at all levels are realizing that “getting back to normal” may not ever be possible.

Embracing new realities means also wrestling with the truth that what once worked is no longer a go-to. It is an environment in which Next Stage can thrive. It’s in our name, after all. Working towards the collective next stage for our communities has always been our raison d’être.

And that has meant starting a new chapter personally as well.

I’m ready. Because nine years in, Next Stage isn’t just me anymore. It’s a team. And our team is amazing.

Happy New Year.

Vulnerability and the Power of Impact Networks

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“Wow! That was awesome!”

My colleague Helen Hope Kimbrough and I spend a lot of time together working on behalf of our nonprofit clients. She leads our community voice work, surfacing insights and wisdom from community stakeholders, which we in turn summarize and publish for our clients as a deliverable we call a Current Conditions Assessment. With it we create a content platform for our clients to understand our research, much of it captured qualitatively through interviews, focus groups and surveys.

Of late, our findings on behalf of clients have been fairly wide ranging. The challenges facing nonprofits are myriad in this post-pandemic timeline, with an unrelenting workforce shortage crisis, continued downstream disruption from COIVD-19, and a looming economic Recession as just a handful of the cheery topics that serve as the backdrop to planning. Our assessments are meant to be an inspirational jumping off point for planning, but sometimes (often?) our findings are downright challenging – asking our nonprofit partners to contemplate substantive change to the status quo.

Such was a most recent facilitation. Helen and I have been serving as the ‘out-of-town consultants’ to a sizable nonprofit agency in another metro. We have learned a lot about this agency’s area of focus, and in truth, what we’ve learned has scared us quite a bit. The road ahead for our largest and most influential nonprofit organizations is bumpy, to say the least.

This is not work for the faint of heart. It takes really bold, courageous leadership, which we saw on clear display as a part of this recent facilitation. The team we met with was driven to embrace change and give voice to what they had long been thinking. Nothing we were sharing was altogether new, but delivering it in a comprehensive package was truly a call to action, a call to leadership, and the task force rose to the occasion. They embraced new ways of thinking and challenged themselves to lean into challenge. They acknowledged risks but would not allow them to halt forward progress. They worked creatively. They what-if’d. They dreamed.

It was amazing. And so exhilerating.

Near the end, the CEO of the organization said: “the stakeholders you met with have encouraged us to think this way, they’ve challenged us to center the big potential impact in our planning, and it feels liberating to have that reinforced.”

It was an extraordinary comment that provides such insight into barriers faced by social impact leaders.

Taking the Pulse of a Community

We at Next Stage are really students of leadership. We have the rare opportunity to embed ourselves with nonprofit and corporate changemakers who are leading the way through their bold planning and actions.

We also know what a lonely road it can be for so many – one fraught with pitfalls and unforeseen barriers. Just accomplishing today’s tasks would be hard enough, but these leaders are being asked to think increasingly more expansively, calling out systemic inequities and finding ways to overcome them. It’s hard work, and getting some positive reinforcement can make all the difference.

Our process helps our clients benefit from the wisdom of an organization’s stakeholders including staff, board members, partners, volunteers, philanthropists, and most especially, the people the organization aims to serve. They are an organization’s most important stakeholders. Aggregating this feedback helps our clients understand what their constituencies think about them, what they hope they will accomplish, and how they want to be involved.

Lately, we’ve been wondering whether there might be a better way of working. We do all of this work for our clients, conducting countless hours of interviews and focus groups, and document it for what is often an audience of just a handful of people. Is that really equitable? Might there be a better way to work?

What if our nonprofit leaders had access to a network of both their own stakeholders and others who could provide real-time feedback? What would it look like to build and implement a powerful network like that? How would it help people make better decisions, and gain confidence that their ideas have validity?

What We’re Reading: Impact Networks

The Next Stage team has a book club, and right now we are all-in on Impact Networks by David Ehrichman, which

makes a very compelling argument for why we need “diverse combinations of people, organizations, and sectors to coordinate actions and work together even when the way forward is unclear.”

Impact networks “bring people together to build relationships across boundaries; leverage the existing work, skills, and motivations of the group; and make progress amid unpredictable and ever-changing conditions.”

Inherent in the building of impact networks is vulnerability – a willingness to ‘be real’ with others, to say what isn’t being said, and to say what absolutely must be said. It is a space that welcomes leaders like our recent client CEO, who gained strength from the wisdom of community voice, who in fact felt liberated by it to get creative and think outside the box.

It is the ideal book to inspire our next steps as a company. Next Stage is on the precipice of great change as we harness the potential of our Cultivate platform to help us implement our new theory of change. Janet Ervin will be sharing more about that on our blog soon, including how we see building and managing communities of practice as a new method of supporting impact-making.

Because it is clear we need new networks now more than ever. The world of social good has arrived at a critical crossroads after several years of disruption. Never have we been more attuned to the ways government, the private sector and nonprofits are linked together in service to addressing the needs of all people in our communities. And whereas silos of services were a dominant feature of the past, that approach is no longer sufficient.

We have arrived at a moment of understanding, that success can only be accomplished collectively. The ‘social determinants of everything’ we coined earlier this year suggests that outcomes are not achieved in the vacuum of a single provider of services, but rather as a result of layered collaboration that leads to effective programming, optimized operations, effective use of resources and increased brand awareness.

Next Stage believes this new ‘era of mutuality’ requires rewiring how people and institutions work together to achieve a shared goal.  It requires a new supply chain of social good – one that brings together everyone involved to share ownership, design and responsibility for outcomes.

It also requires new frameworks for working together that lean in to the principles of trust-building to achieve buy-in and collective effort.

It is work we feel uniquely called to do. We look forward to sharing more in the weeks and months ahead.

The Social Determinants of… Everything

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Determinant (noun): a factor which decisively affects the nature or outcome of something; serving to determine or decide

Why are things the way they are?

As a strategist, it is often my job to identify leading factors influencing outcomes. I do this typically to help a group of people – a nonprofit organization or a company – come up with a set of activities to influence those factors to create a more favorable outcome. So as a rule, I’m usually trying to pick apart the underlying drivers of outcomes.

This can make it difficult to be around me sometimes. I am accused of making leaps of logic when really I’m just playing out scenarios in my head. And while that works pretty well when playing board games, it can get a little annoying half-way through a movie.

Some of this is about intuition and ‘a gut feeling,’ but most often it is a function of data. And when it comes to the underlying drivers affecting disinvested communities, the data is pretty clear – the deck is stacked against people experiencing poverty. Following more than two years of the pandemic, these factors have never been more pronounced or wide-ranging. That is why we’ve taken to calling it ‘the social determinants of everything.’

Risk Factors Influencing Health

If you are familiar with the term ‘social determinants,’ it is likely through its connection to health. The concept of the social determinants of health (SDH) existed more than 100 years before the World Health Organization’s Commission on Social Determinants of Health convened in 2005. The resulting report focused on the social factors that lead to ill health and health inequities globally.

One of the oft-quoted statistics from the report is that activities inside a clinical setting, like at a doctor’s office or hospital, only account for 20% of one’s health outcomes. Fully 80% of what influences a person’s health are factors unrelated to receiving medical care – things like food access, housing, education and environmental factors. As an example, if someone has mold in their home, that person will continue having respiratory issues a physician can only do so much to address.

SDH are a big part of the future of healthcare in America and are essential for driving down the cost of healthcare, particularly for disinvested populations. As Medicaid undergoes transformation in North Carolina to a managed care model, health systems are working to drive more community-based approaches that attempt to work upstream of health complications, tackling preventative care that avoids costly health interventions that lead to poor outcomes. It represents a costing model that aligns with the best interests of patients.

In short, we can’t just focus on healthcare if we want people to be healthier. We have to look at the whole picture, to understand that there are other factors affecting health. It requires thinking outside of silos.

It means talking about systems.

Determinants vs. Drivers

Some have begun using the term ‘social drivers’ instead of ‘social determinants,’ or else use them interchangably. A recent report by Ann Somers Hogg with the Christensen Institute makes a strong and well-reasoned argument for replacing the term ‘determinants’ with ‘drivers.’

Determinants do suggest a pre-determined path based on a set of factors. We stand behind the phrase ‘social determinants’ because systems have been built and perpetuated that produce these outcomes – they are not merely drivers but social constructs. Many of the risk factors that lead to poor health outcomes are the same for educational success, employment and economic mobility. And the reality is that many of these factors are driven by systemic frameworks.

That is not to say that self-efficacy is not a significant influence on outcomes – it is the most important factor determining an individual’s success. But it would be unfair to lift up individual achievement in the face of such overwhelming odds and suggest that the underlying social factors that made it so difficult were just part of the equation. It shouldn’t be this difficult, and acknowledging that decisive factors were in place makes that achievement all the more significant. And too rare.

As we take stock of not only our community but the global consequences of the recent pandemic, we can see that a myriad of pre-conditions led to a weakened system of care and slow responses. We can see how everything is connected.

We’ve written about this before, this notion of overlap and ‘mutuality.’ With COVID-19, we now understand how community health affects commerce, for example. We can see the complexity of the systems in which we operate and how every social issue has a likelihood to impact you personally – your family, your work and your community.

Today, we’re asking you to apply that same understanding of mutuality to those who are least well-positioned to thrive when times are tough. If the factors influencing your own success over the last 2+ years were complicated and layered, can you fathom what it must be like for someone experiencing poverty even in the best of times?

The Future of Mutuality

At Next Stage, we believe we are at an incredibly important juncture in history. Our recent experiences as a society have the potential to create a rare moment of empathy. Not only can we see ourselves in the struggles of others, we also have had a glimpse behind the curtain and know that our systems are fallible.

What will we do with this knowledge? Of late, we have noticed in some a desire to ‘get back to the way things were’ before disruption was a part of the daily grind. This is a missed opportunity to use our newfound empathy and systemic awareness to rebuild stronger and more equitably. But to do that, we’re going to need to address some things:

Increased Collaboration – We all need to be working together, now more than ever. Nonprofits accustomed to operating in a sector like health, education or housing need to see that other program providers are not just creating wrap-arounds on your programming – their work is as important as your own. But nonprofits are just the most visible frameworks for collaboration. The much bigger need is for our municipalities to work in concert with the private sector to get to the root causes of inequity. Nonprofits, government and businesses have never been more aligned than in the climb back from the pandemic – it is time to demonstrate a new model in practice.

Stronger Advocacy Efforts – It has been amazing to see the repositioning of advocacy in society. Everywhere you look, efforts to drive ‘community voice’ and ‘trust-built philanthropy’ have renewed energy and context. Institutions that may have seen ‘flexing their voice’ as a risk are now building advocacy plans, and it heartens us at Next Stage. We believe this moment of empathy and system awareness will fade if it is not kept alive through advocacy efforts. We cannot afford to forget what we have learned together and we need more human-centered ways of unpacking how our systems create the inequity we are committed to overcoming.

Investment in Data & Analytics – The overlapping factors influencing someone’s success are myriad and complicated to map. As a people, we prefer simple equations that make it easy to understand how to move forward. A general lack of real-time data and analytics is partly to blame, with disconnected databases throughout our community unable to build a more complete picture for us all. We are living at a time of incredible computing and data access – it is time we pointed that innovation at helping us understand how these risk factors are linked.

Last year, we rebranded our firm ‘to work at the intersection of social good.’ The concepts of mutuality and social determinants suggested that our narrowed focus on strategy for nonprofits was only one part of the bigger story. That realization, a growing one over our eight years as a firm, led to an important juncture – either we accept it or do something about it. We chose the latter, and it has led to a new journey for us as a firm and for me as a professional. I’ve never felt more determined and purpose-driven in my life.

How have you been affected by all that we’ve learned together? How is it changing how your nonprofit, company or municipality operates? Are you similarly feeling called to ‘a different way of being?’

I sure hope so. The future of many people is depending on it.