Accelerating the Pace of Social Change

At the same time as the Skoll World Forum last week, nearly one hundred marine conservation practitioners were coming together in Cancun, Mexico at the invitation of Blue Solutions, to learn about each other’s work and discover how to adapt what’s already working to new challenges.

Similarly, in Portland, Oregon, USA, students and guests of the Pacific Northwest College of Art will soon be attending a lecture by a preeminent corporate sustainability leader having registered for the event with solutions of their own.

Faced with increasingly daunting social, economic and environmental challenges—at unprecedented scales—we knew it was time for a radical shift in the way the social sector sought solutions and delivered them.

• What if foundations rewarded grantees for discovering what is already working and quickly adapting it to new contexts?
• What if businesses had a place to share ideas they’d tested that worked but weren’t a good fit for their company or were a fit, but could have even more value at a larger scale if someone else replicated the idea?
• What if parts of my solutions could be really helpful in your context? Can we make a deal that rewards me for sharing and makes your job easier?

For over two years a diverse group of civil society organizations, foundations, and private businesses have been collaborating to develop and pilot a cloud-based web app that puts the ability to discover, share and collaborate on solutions at the fingertips of practitioners and organizations. Screening for how the solution contributes to resilience, this platform will be used to break solutions into their component parts and, when queried by those seeking new solutions, recombine them to address new challenges across sectors and geographies.

Incubated for the last three years at Ecotrust, a non-profit organization based in Portland, Oregon, USA, the Resilience Exchange is now being launched as a stand-alone social enterprise.

At two events at the Skoll World Forum in Oxford, we connected with social entrepreneurs, change makers and early adopters looking to test the MVP and commit to this new and innovative form of “positive plagiarism” to accelerate the pace of social change in the 21^st century.

To learn more, visit www.resilience-exchange.org.