The Grammar of Money in Social Change: What's broken and how we might fix it

Mike Kang Today, the "grammar" we use in one of our main languages
of power, money, is not good at addressing the systemic root causes
of the social challenges we face. It does a much better job of
addressing the symptoms, but that's not good enough. The rules we
assign to our money (both legally and culturally) tend to:
unhelpfully separate for-profit and non-profit thinking
overemphasize the value of planning and underemphasize the value of
experimentation assign too much value to single projects and too
little to portfolios overemphasize single organizations and
underemphasize multi-stakeholder, complex organizations   The
result: early-stage, exploratory social enterprises are
consistently undercapitalized, and systemic change efforts (such as
Social Labs), which aim to challenge power structures, paradigms,
and societal prejudices, are difficult to fund at the necessary
scale. Many people in a variety of sectors are finding ways to
innovate on this challenge by building a new grammar of
money : new ways for us to translate our power into outcomes
using money, and new ways to translate our visions into language
our current systems of money can understand. This workshop has two
parts. First, we will frame the challenge. Examples of the
"grammar" of money in action will be shared along with the
preliminary results of an ongoing research project which is
documenting the strategies social innovators around the world use
to deal with this challenge.    Second, through
facilitated discussion, we will brainstorm and evolve new potential
solutions to the challenge, including new ways of leveraging
digital society to bring resources to systemic change efforts.