This is the first article in a three-part series. Part Two examines the sources of resistance to network approaches—and why many of them are legitimate concerns rooted in real experiences of networks done poorly. Part Three explores the enabling conditions that separate networks that transform systems from networks that disappoint.

This article is based on the resource “How Networks Support Systemic Impact,” developed in collaboration with Adrian Röbke, Brendon Johnson, Carri Munn, Dominic Stucker, Ifeyinwa Egwaoje, Jeanne Hamilton, Jennifer Atlee, Jennifer Berman, Jessica Conrad, Kate Trompetter, Katy Mamen, Laurie Tochiki, Léna Borsoi, Rebecca Petzel, and Ruth Rominger.

Most of us working in philanthropy and systems change already know an essential truth: a complex, adaptive system—a community, an economy, a supply chain, a climate—cannot be fixed the way you fix a clock. You can’t diagnose the broken part, design a solution, and contract out the repair. Living systems can only be healed from within, by the people who are part of them.

We know this. And yet, if we’re honest, our strategies, funding models, and behaviors haven’t fully caught up with that knowledge. We still commission expert-designed interventions. We still seek “buy-in” after the strategy is set. We still fund three-year projects aimed at problems that have persisted for generations.

Part of this may be that we simply lack a compelling enough case for a better approach. Part of it may be that we haven’t yet metabolized our own fears—about loss of control, about the messiness of genuine co-creation, about what it means to fund something whose outcomes we can’t fully predict. And part of it may be that we just don’t know yet what reliably good network practice looks like and what conditions it requires.

This article is an attempt to address the first part: to make the case as clearly and compellingly as possible. The key to meaningful systems change lies in building networks—not loose affiliations or temporary coalitions, but intentionally cultivated groups of diverse leaders and organizations united by a shared imperative. These networks possess four unique superpowers that traditional, top-down approaches cannot replicate.

A second article in this series will take on the fears and the resistance—because they are legitimate, rooted in real experiences of networks done poorly, and worth addressing directly.

And a third will explore the enabling conditions that separate networks done well from networks that disappoint. But we begin here, with the case for why networks are worth believing in.

Superpower #1: Forging Ownership, Not Buy-In

For decades, the goal of many leaders and funders has been to secure “buy-in” for their strategies. But the need to seek buy-in is itself a symptom of a failed process. It’s an admission that the strategy was developed by an inside set of actors, and now those outside that set must be persuaded to get on board.

We’ve made progress beyond the most egregious versions of this, but subtler forms persist. Consider what might be called the “Program Officer as Architect” model, where a funder decides who will be part of a network and then leaves the groups together in a room to figure out why they’ve been assembled—an arranged marriage, without the courtship. Equally problematic is the “double ask,” where grantees are contracted for their individual deliverables while also being expected to collaborate, forcing them to choose between their own clearly-defined work and the messier, emergent work of collective strategy. The result is compliance, not commitment. People participate because they need the funding, not because they genuinely co-own the intent.

A network mindset flips the script. Here, the funder or lead organization acts not as an architect but as a gardener. They don’t arrive with a blueprint; they start by preparing the soil—convening a small, diverse group, building trust, and creating the conditions for shared intent to emerge. From that foundation, the strategy and the network itself grow organically, from a seed of shared interest or intent. This is the difference between the disempowering experience of being handed my part in a plan and the electric feeling of co-creating a future.

The Amazon Gold Alliance (AGA) is a vivid example of what this looks like in practice. Launched in 2024 to transform the gold value chain and stop the destruction it drives across the Amazon Basin, the AGA now brings together 90+ leaders from across 17 countries—Indigenous community leaders, civil society organizations, government officials, academics, and industry players who don’t always agree and don’t always trust each other.

Amazon Aid, the nonprofit that initiated the network, began as its primary funder and visionary. They could have stayed in the architect role, designing the strategy and managing execution. Instead, they made the harder and more generative choice: evolving into a backbone organization that works alongside the network to continuously define and adapt its goal, analysis, and strategy. Amazon Aid became the gardener. The result is a network that owns its own direction—and the responsibility, legitimacy, and distributed capacity to pursue it. When a network develops its own analysis and strategy, we don’t need buy-in. We have something far more powerful: deep, genuine ownership.

Superpower #2: Driving Multi-Level, Multi-Faceted Action

A single organization, no matter how well-resourced or effective, can only pull a few levers of change at a time. A sufficiently diverse network can pull many levers at once, simultaneously, across levels, sectors, and geographies.

This is what distinguishes network-driven systems change from even the most ambitious programmatic approaches. Change happens at the individual level, as leaders develop new capacities and perspectives. It happens at the organizational level, as members carry new insights and practices back into their own institutions. It happens at the community level, as relationships and trust build across historical divides. And it happens at the larger, whole system level, as the network’s collective weight shifts norms, standards, and structures that no single actor could move alone. Networks don’t sequence these levels; they cultivate them in parallel, allowing them to reinforce each other.

The Bioregional Weaving Labs (BWL) collective, active across multiple European bioregions, demonstrates this multi-level logic with unusual clarity and ambition. BWL brings together cohorts of 60 to 80 stakeholders per bioregion—farmers, landowners, investors, policymakers, educators, conservationists, and community members—in a three-to-four year multi-stakeholder process aimed at regenerating land, water, and local economies simultaneously. The goal is breathtaking in its scope: mobilizing one million changemakers to restore, protect, and regenerate one million hectares of Europe’s land and sea by 2030.

What makes BWL a compelling illustration of this superpower is that the change it drives cannot be located at any single level. Local farmers shifting their practices, investors developing new financing instruments, policymakers revising land-use regulations, and communities reimagining their relationship to their landscape—all of this is happening at once, woven together by the network’s relational fabric and shared purpose.

Crucially, this cascade of action isn’t dictated by a rigid, pre-set theory of change. Networks at their best are intelligent, learning ecosystems. They gather, share intelligence from diverse vantage points across the system, and adapt their strategy in real time—driven by the collective insight of people on the ground, not by outside experts with necessarily partial views.

Superpower #3: Building to Last

Perhaps the most compelling superpower of a well-built network is its resilience. Programs end. Funding cycles close. Leaders move on. A network with deep roots—in relationships, shared purpose, and genuine ownership—can endure for decades, long after any single initiative would have concluded.

The Healthcare Anchor Network (HAN) is a powerful illustration of this staying power. A group of over 70 health systems committed to building more inclusive and sustainable local economies, HAN has sustained and deepened its work over many years by operating simultaneously across every level of change. Member health systems share best practices on local hiring and procurement through peer learning groups, even as they compete for talent and patients at times, while the network as a whole shapes leadership standards and advocates for policies on affordable housing and workforce development that no individual health system could advance alone. HAN persists not because of an external grant or a mandate, but because its members have built something they genuinely own and believe in.

For an even older proof point on longevity, consider the Solar Circle, which, now in its 24th year, may be the longest-running multi-stakeholder “impact network” in the systems change field. When it launched in 2002, its founders set a goal that seemed almost delusional: 50% of global energy from solar by the year 2050, at a time when the total global output of solar energy was less than one mid-sized nuclear power plant. This was a more-than-generational commitment. Many of the founders knew they might not live to see it achieved.

The network held together not through funding or formal structure alone, but through two acts of design that proved durable over time. First, the group forged a genuine shared imperative early on, when the gap between the tipping points of climate change and the inadequacy of solar’s growth trajectories at the time became undeniable to everyone in the room. Their goal transformed shared interest into a shared imperative. Second, the network was built on a foundation of deep trust, curated over more than a year by its conveners, my mentors Alisa Gravitz and Susan Davis, who selected members not for their titles but for their integrity, generosity, and proven commitment to collaboration.

When Solar Circle set its goal in 2002, it was considered wildly optimistic. In their latest April, 2026 research report, LUT (Lappeenranta University of Technology in Finland) now projects that installed solar PV capacity could reach 30–70 terawatts by 2050, covering the majority of all energy demand globally. While LUT consistently produces the most bullish projections on solar growth as a percent of total energy, they have a track record of being right when mainstream forecasters were too conservative.

Superpower #4: Becoming a Microcosm of the Future

There is something that well-designed networks can do that no program, initiative, or campaign could ever replicate: they can make the desired future present, right now, in the room.

A microcosm, in this sense, is a network whose membership actually reflects the system it is trying to change, where the people, institutions, and relationships that would need to comprise a healthier version of that system are already present and already working differently together. When that happens, something profound occurs. Participants don’t just work toward the future; they experience it. The future, experienced directly in a network, stops being an abstraction on a theory of change slide and becomes something people have already felt, already lived inside. And that changes what they believe is possible.

Not every network achieves this. An advocacy coalition working to change a harmful industry may do vital and courageous work, but if it comprises only advocates and allies, it remains outside the system it seeks to shift. It is pushing on the system rather than embodying the new system. A true microcosm does something different: it brings the new system’s diverse actors into direct relationship with each other, under conditions of genuine trust and shared purpose, so that a new way of being in that system becomes something people can point to and say: we’ve already experienced this. We know it’s real.

The Clean Electronics Production Network (CEPN) is a clear example of this distinction. The electronics supply chain has a deep and documented history of harm for the workers who manufacture its products through exposure to toxic chemicals. CEPN brought together the actors who would need to co-create a healthier version of that system: technology suppliers, major brands, labor and environmental advocates, academics, and government representatives. Competitors sat at the same table. Advocates sat alongside the industry players they had long hammered from the outside. And together, they began to experience what it felt like to work on this problem collaboratively rather than in opposition, to share data, develop shared standards, and build trust across lines historically defined by opposition.

That experience doesn’t just produce better outcomes. It produces different people—leaders who have felt in their own bodies that a more just and collaborative version of their industry is not a utopian dream but a practical reality they’ve already participated in. That is a superpower no single organization or program can offer.

The Gardener’s Invitation

These four superpowers are not theoretical. They are visible in networks operating right now, across continents and issue areas, working on problems that have resisted every attempt at program-based approaches.

But realizing them requires something of us. It requires funders and leaders to step out of the architect role and into the gardener role. Not to abdicate strategy, but to understand that the most durable and powerful strategy is one that emerges from and with the people who will carry it. It requires patience with emergence, and the kind of trust in others that can feel uncomfortable when we’re used to being the ones who design the solution.

This is not a lesser role. It is, I’d argue, the more interesting and more consequential one. The architect builds something. The gardener cultivates a living system that can grow, adapt, and enact the future we’re all working toward, long after any single program or plan would have expired.

The networks are there to be built, and thousands of active, alive social change networks are already working around the world. The problems are urgent enough. The question is whether we’re ready to become the gardeners they need.

Beyond the Four Superpowers: Four More Reasons Networks Work

The four superpowers above are the most distinctive advantages networks hold over traditional program-based approaches. But they don’t tell the whole story. Research and practice in the network field point to at least four other reasons why well-designed networks outperform other approaches to systems change:

Truth-telling and accountability. When the people most harmed by the current system are in the room, it becomes harder for positional leaders to deny the reality of their experiences. Strong networks don’t just pool expertise—they surface truths that expert-only rooms consistently miss.

Reach and trusted influence. A well-designed network includes leaders held in high regard across very different communities. When those diverse leaders carry the network’s learning and strategy back to their own constituencies, they do so with the framing, language, and relationships that make it land. No communications campaign can replicate that.

Visibility and healing around power. Networks help participants see more clearly how power operates in the system—who holds it, who lacks it, and how those dynamics shape outcomes. Well-supported networks create conditions for addressing that directly: moderating unhealthy power differences, creating more equitable pathways for participation and leadership, and in some cases advancing healing from historical harm.

“Epistemic humility” as a learning accelerator. When leaders see that their own perspective is just one small piece of a much larger, more complex landscape of knowledge, perspectives, and truths, something shifts. Our grip on our preferred analyses and solutions loosens. We enter a productive not-knowing. And from that place, genuine learning becomes possible in ways it rarely is when we’re certain we already have the answers.

Free resource from CoCreative (and friends): How Networks Support Systemic Change

Russ Gaskin is founder and co-owner of CoCreative, a consulting and training organization specializing in network weaving, systems change strategy co-design, and facilitation of multi-stakeholder collaborations.

Early in my practice as a facilitator, I noticed a pattern that I couldn’t quite shake. We might ask people to do some specific work in small groups, and then people would talk. And talk. And keep talking—as if talking was the only way to collaborate.

I understood the impulse. Conversation is generative, and so human. It has real value. But I also kept noticing what it cost: the person who needed a moment to think before sharing, the idea that got edited out before it was voiced, the five minutes spent on one thread when twenty (possibly more interesting) possibilities were waiting. Talk, it turned out, was being used for many tasks that it just didn’t do well.

To be honest, I got annoyed. I thought we were wasting not just time, but creativity and wisdom. And that annoyance turned into a question that has informed how our team at CoCreative approaches collaboration: What if everyone could contribute their best thinking at the same time?

The answer, it turns out, is silence.

What We Get Wrong About Silence

Most facilitators know that silence has value. They use it at the start of a meeting as a moment to settle in, to breathe, to leave the last meeting behind. That kind of grounding silence is helpful. But it stops well short of where silence becomes truly powerful.

There are actually two other kinds of silence in collaborative work, and most of us only use one of them.

Sensing Silence is inward-facing and contemplative. It’s the quiet we create when we want people to notice something in themselves or in the system they seek to change: where they feel energy or resistance, what resonates and what doesn’t, what they’re actually feeling about a shared goal or a analysis. It’s reflective. It slows us down so our awareness can deepen and expand.

Generative Silence is outward-facing and active. It’s the quiet space we create when we want people to produce something: ideas, perspectives, possibilities, questions, thoughtful feedback. It’s active and, especially for those of us who tend more introverted and intuitive, more inclusive.

The call to action in this article is simple: don’t just use silence to settle the room or to deepen reflection. Use it to open up new perspectives and possibilities.

Why Silence Outperforms Discussion

It may be obvious, but it’s important to say that when a group discusses something, one person talks at a time. This takes a lot of time. While taking the time to hear everyone speak can be valuable and important, it’s often counterproductive.

When people speak about perspectives or possibilities, the conversation tends to stay on a thread. We can spend five minutes on a single theme, circling and debating, with most people either waiting their turn or just watching the “main” people talk. The ideas that get voiced are often shaped by who speaks first, who speaks most, and who speaks with the most authority.

When a group works in silence, each person generating independently, something very different happens. Ten people working concurrently for five minutes can put ten to twenty times more ideas on the table than the same group talking for the same amount of time. That means not just more possibilities, but likely better ideas and a fuller picture of the group’s best thinking.

Part of this is simple arithmetic: concurrent work is more productive than sequential work. But there’s something else happening too. In discussion, we edit ourselves. We listen to what others say and adjust our contributions accordingly. We stay safe, often not sharing our more divergent and creative take on things.

In silence, the self-editing and circular referencing soften, and we’re freer to put forward the thing we weren’t sure anyone else would support or care about. This is where new, more diverse perspectives and ideas are given room to breathe and grow.

We’ve also noticed something about how groups develop solution concepts together (if that term doesn’t make sense to you, see below). When people work primarily through discussion, they tend to spend 90% of their time talking and only start putting things on paper in the final five minutes. By generating elements of a solution concept concurrently and in silence, groups get tangible results far faster. The concepts they produce are richer, fuller, and more developed than those that emerge primarily from talk.

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There’s also what silence does to power dynamics. In most group conversations, the person who speaks first sets the frame. Others respond to that frame, agreeing, pushing back, elaborating, but now there’s a single reference point for the whole conversation. This narrows both our perspectives and our possibilities.

Silence sidesteps this entirely. When people contribute independently, in writing, on sticky notes or a virtual whiteboard, there is no first mover. And when those contributions appear anonymously, it’s hard to tell which idea came from the most senior person or the most junior in the room, so the ideas have to stand on their own. This is also often when we start to see clusters of ideas emerge, which point to things that multiple people found important and offer insight about possible places to focus our attention first.

Silence is also more inclusive. Introverts and intuitive thinkers, who often don’t generate their best thinking in the heat of live discussion, contribute equally. There’s no penalty in silence for needing a moment to find the right words.

Silence Across the Collaborative Innovation Process

At CoCreative, silence isn’t a single technique. It’s woven through the full arc of Collaborative Innovation, the structured process we use to help groups co-design strategy for systems change. (For a deeper walk through that process, see When Strategy is Shared Meaning Making.)

The table below shows where we use silence—and which kind of silence—at each stage of the process.

A few of these are worth saying more about.

When groups are working with the Landscape Map, sitting with a complex picture of the system they want to change, silence is essential. People need space to digest what they’re seeing, to digest the complexity, to notice what draws their attention before anyone else tells them what to think about it. We typically move from individual silent reflection into sharing those reflections in small groups and then sharing highlights with the whole group.

At the Ideas stage, silence becomes its most generative. When teams begin generating ideas for how to make a critical shift happen, we ask people to first work silently for five minutes, generating ideas individually before any group discussion. Then we introduce what we call an intuition pump: a deck of cards, each bearing a name, like Gandhi, Oprah, Bugs Bunny, or Your Neighbor. We ask people to choose a card and generate three more ideas as that character—still working silently at this point. What would Gandhi’s version of this intervention look like? What might Bugs Bunny do? This method, in effect, doubles the number of people generating ideas in a group and often results in the most groundbreaking ideas of all. Silence enables people to access and channel these new perspectives.

At the Pilots stage, silence takes a different form. The generative work is largely behind us. What’s needed now is deep listening, attending carefully to what people who are experiencing the pilot solution are actually experiencing. This is silence as receptivity, as the discipline of not filling the space before we’ve really heard what’s there.

Thinking Inductively

Underlying all of this is a particular logic of how groups can work best together, one that’s different from the default mode of most meetings.

Most group discussions are dialectical. A few ideas compete. People argue toward a winner. Whoever is most persuasive, most persistent, or most powerful often shapes the outcome or determines what gets adopted as the solution, whether it’s the best one or not.

Generative Silence supports something different: an inductive process. We diverge widely, expanding perspectives and possibilities, before converging on what’s most valuable and important. We spread things out first, getting everything on the table, from everyone, without evaluation. Then we stand back and look. We notice what has energy, what keeps drawing our attention, what feels alive in the room. Resonance, rather than argument, does the filtering.

This only works when everyone has been able to contribute their best thinking. Which only happens when we’ve created the conditions for it.

Silence is one of those conditions. Perhaps the most important one we consistently underuse.

Russ Gaskin is founder and co-owner of CoCreative, a consulting and training organization specializing in network weaving, systems change strategy co-design, and facilitation of multi-stakeholder collaborations.

To learn more techniques, like how to use silence effectively in collaboration, sign up for training with CoCreative.

What seemed impossible in 1983 has now become inevitable. When Green America (then Co-op America) launched to “change the way America does business,” the idea that business could be a driver of sustainability was dismissed as naive—even dangerous to the credibility of social movements. Today, “green” business practices aren’t alternative, they’re expected (present US administration excluded).

Consider the following figures of green market growth in the U.S. from 2002 to 2011:

• The organic food market grew 238% while the overall food market grew just 33%

• Green building exploded from 2% to 38% of all new construction starts, even as the overall construction market contracted by 17%

• Fair trade food imports surged 1,442%

• Renewable energy consumption increased 456% while fossil fuel use declined

These weren’t isolated trends. Across industry after industry, “green” market segments were systematically capturing share from conventional competitors. The 2013 Big Green Opportunity report documented this remarkable shift, revealing that what were once considered fringe “alternatives” had become significant—and in some cases dominant—market forces.

But this transformation didn’t happen by accident. It required decades of intentional movement building, strategic relationship cultivation, and persistent infrastructure development—work that began in a far less receptive environment.

“It might be an understatement to say that, at that time, funders didn’t embrace economic strategies for social change,” recalls Alisa Gravitz, who has led Green America since 1986. “They believed that anything involving the private sector should be paid for by businesses. So basically, only individual donors funded us at first.”

The journey from that inauspicious beginning to today’s embrace of green business practices and policies offers crucial lessons for anyone seeking to build powerful, intergenerational movements for systemic change.

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Seven Elements of Movement Infrastructure

Around 2002, about 20 years into Green America’s life as an organization, I facilitated a strategic review of our movement-building work to that point. In reflecting on those two decades of work, we identified seven core strategies that we and our allies had employed that proved essential to catalyzing the green economy movement:

1. Show What the Next System IS

From the beginning, the team at Green America understood that people needed to see tangible examples of what a green economy could look like. They created the National Green Pages—a directory of green businesses that grew from a modest publication to a comprehensive resource showcasing thousands of companies. Green Festival events brought together green businesses, consumers, and advocates in major cities, creating vibrant marketplaces that demonstrated the breadth and vitality of the movement.

“We weren’t just talking about theory,” Gravitz explains. “We were showing people: this is what it looks like in real life when businesses prioritize both profit and planet.”

2. Show What It Is NOT

Equally important was drawing clear contrasts with harmful business practices. Green America’s Boycott Action News highlighted companies engaged in destructive social and environmental behavior, mobilizing consumers to vote with their dollars. The Responsible Shopper platform provided detailed ratings of major brands, helping consumers understand the real impacts behind their purchasing decisions.

This work accomplished two goals: it created market pressure on laggard companies while also helping consumers understand that “green” meant something substantive, not just clever marketing.

3. Show That It’s Already Here

As green market segments began to emerge, documenting their growth became crucial for attracting more participants and investment. The Big Green Opportunity report itself exemplifies this strategy—marshaling comprehensive data to demonstrate that green isn’t coming; it’s already here.

This strategy is consistent with research conducted by the American Council on Renewable Energy in the early 2000s, in which typical Americans were shown 13 ad concepts and asked how each influenced their support for renewable energy. One concept dramatically outperformed the others. It showed a city skyline lit up at night with the headline, “The US already produces enough renewable energy to power the city of Chicago…and New York, Los Angeles, and Dallas.” Surprised by the results, the researchers asked focus groups why that panel so appealed to them. Their response: Because it showed that renewable energy was already real, not just science fiction. After all, if it wasn’t real, then all the arguments about environmental, economic, and human health benefits would be irrelevant.

4. Socialize New Language and Narrative

The language we use shapes what’s possible. Green America and its partners worked deliberately to shift their language from “alternative” (which implied marginal) to terms that emphasized benefits: “Alternative Energy” became “Clean Energy.” “Alternative Trade” evolved into “Fair Trade.”

“We were socializing new language that expressed a new paradigm,” notes Gravitz. Joel Makower, now a recognized authority on sustainable business and chair of the Trellis Group, coined the term “green business” in his column in an early Co-op America publication. At the same time, the organization systematically socialized the language of “socially responsible investing” while actively countering false narratives—particularly the persistent myth that social investments necessarily underperform financially or lack real impact.

5. Build Field Infrastructure

Perhaps most critically, Green America recognized that a thriving movement needs robust institutional support, so the organization played a catalytic role in launching or rebooting several key organizations:

US SIF (The Forum for Sustainable and Responsible Investment): After this trade group, then known as the Social Investment Forum, had shut down in the early 1990s due to internal infighting, former board members approached Green America to restart it. The Green America team helped relaunch the organization, now the key organizer of the sustainable and impact investing space.

Business for Social Responsibility (BSR): Green America’s more grassroots culture wasn’t well-suited to engaging leaders at large corporations, so Gravitz served on BSR’s founding board and Green America hosted the organization and ran its operations until it could spin off independently, filling another key gap in critical movement infrastructure.

Fair Trade Federation: I and my team, who supported the then 3,000-member Green Business Network, assumed management of this network of organizations committed to fair trade principles and practices, building both its programs and membership to position it as a leading force in the fair trade movement.

Beyond helping launch and relaunch these key organizations, Green America extended practical support to dozens of smaller specialty trade associations—groups like the Eco Dentistry Association, Green Cleaners Council, and Sustainable Furnishings Council. Having negotiated discounted credit card processing, shipping, telecommunications, and other services for our 3,000 Green Business Network members, we partnered with these specialty associations to extend the same benefits to their members. This helped the smaller organizations attract and retain members while building the broader movement’s capacity.

The explosion of green certifications and trade associations documented in the Big Green Opportunity report—with two-thirds of current green industry certifications launched since 2001—reflects the maturation of this infrastructure strategy.

6. Facilitate Tensions into Generative Forces

The greatest threat to any movement is often the movement itself, the tearing at the seams that happens when people who seem to have aligned visions of the future deeply diverge on how to get there. Green America became known for its facilitation skills, particularly its ability to help groups navigate a central tension in any change movement.

“There were often two camps that were at odds,” explains Gravitz. “I called them the System Reformers and the System Changers. The System Reformers wanted to advance change through many small, incremental steps. The System Changers wanted to completely transform systems head-on.” This tension could be productive or destructive, and it was too often the latter. When US SIF first collapsed, it was because these two factions could no longer work together. But when properly managed, the tension created a healthy, generative dynamic.

Rob Michalak, then Global Director of Social Mission at Ben & Jerry’s, once remarked that “the only time the fair trade community had productive meetings was when [Green America] was in the room.” Green America’s own consensus-based governance gave the organization deeper facilitation skills than people from more hierarchical organizations tended to have. But the key insight was recognizing that movement health requires both camps—the systems tweakers AND the system changers—and needs spaces where they can work together productively toward a greater shared purpose.

7. Educate and Organize Funders

In 1983, philanthropic funders simply didn’t understand economic strategies for social change. The resistance wasn’t ideological—funders genuinely believed that work involving the private sector should be funded by businesses themselves.

Shifting this view required patient education and invitations to experimentation. Green America and its partners demonstrated the harmful impacts of business-as-usual practices, documented strong environmental and social outcomes from economic change strategies, and built relationships with progressive funders—particularly progressive funders who embraced the centrality of building a “new economy” and using economic levers for change.

Over time, this work influenced the broader field of philanthropy. Today, entire funder collaboratives are dedicated to economic change strategies and building the new economy, with frequent funding of “new economy” initiatives.

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Key Lessons for Movement Builders

Reflecting on 30 years of movement building, several crucial insights emerge:

We Can’t Control How Things Scale—But We Can Move the Goal Post

Green America was disciplined about defining a “green economy” as one that’s both socially just and environmentally sustainable. But when mainstream actors began embracing the new language and paradigm, they primarily adopted the environmental dimension, leaving the critical social justice element on the table. In our analysis, this was in part because environmental sustainability offered clearer economic benefits: companies could easily see potential cost savings from waste reduction and could cater to rising consumer interest in sustainability. The social justice aspect didn’t translate as clearly into profit.

While Green America couldn’t control how the work mainstreamed, they and their allies could certainly choose what to do next. Rather than viewing this as static failure, the larger movement has continued to push toward the more holistic vision of an economy that’s both sustainable AND just, leading to the emergence of frameworks like Just Transition, which has now been formally adopted into international agreements (Paris Agreement, ILO Guidelines, UN declarations at COPs), national laws, and EU policy. When things start going mainstream, we don’t abandon our fuller vision but instead keep moving the goal post.

Productive Tension Requires Intentional Management

The System Tweakers versus System Changers tension appears in virtually every change movement. Failure to manage it well leads to polarization and paralysis, as with US SIF’s initial closure. Success comes from recognizing that we need both perspectives over time, then creating structures and practices that leverage the tension productively.

This requires skilled facilitation, shared commitment to a larger purpose, and planning approaches that favor productive, integrated action over ideological debate.

Effective Movements Need Diverse Leaders Leading in Their Own Contexts

While today Green America engages large companies in supply chain transformation through its Center for Sustainability Solutions, in its early days, the organization wasn’t positioned to effectively engage senior executives at Fortune 500 companies. That’s why helping launch BSR was a strategic imperative. Similarly, specialty trade associations could reach practitioners in specific industries more effectively than a general business network could.

Movement building isn’t about one organization doing everything—it’s about cultivating an ecosystem where different organizations and leaders can reach different constituencies in contextually appropriate ways.

Build Trust Among Movement Leaders

Perhaps the most subtle but crucial element is building trusting relationships among the people leading various parts of the movement. Without this, competition and polarization can undermine collective progress. With it, the movement can work in sync even as different organizations pursue different strategies. Green America’s role in convening, facilitating, and supporting other organizations in the ecosystem—not just building its own organization—proved essential to the movement’s cohesion.

The Continuing Opportunity

The continued growth and evolution of green market segments seem to validate the movement-building approach that Green America and its partners employed. But the work is far from complete.

The social justice dimensions of a truly regenerative economy remain underdeveloped. The question of fundamental purpose—whether businesses exist primarily to maximize shareholder returns or to serve broader stakeholder interests—is still contested. And the infrastructure needed to support millions of small green businesses globally is still being built.

Yet the transformation over four decades is undeniable. What seemed impossible in 1983—that “green” would become not just accepted but expected, that sustainability would be a competitive advantage rather than a cost center, that entire market segments would flip from conventional toward regenerative—has happened.

For those working to catalyze other systemic transformations, the lessons are clear: Build infrastructure intentionally. Show what’s possible while naming what’s harmful. Provide language that makes new realities visible. Create spaces where diverse camps can work together productively. And play the long game, knowing that movements are built over decades, not years.

The green economy didn’t emerge spontaneously from market forces. It was cultivated, deliberately and strategically, by people who understood that changing how we do business requires changing not just individual companies but the entire ecosystem in which they operate.

That’s the real Big Green Opportunity—and it’s a roadmap for anyone serious about building movements that transform systems.

Russ Gaskin is founder and co-owner of CoCreative, a consulting and training organization specializing in network weaving, systems change strategy co-design, and facilitation of multi-stakeholder collaborations. Russ previously led the business membership program at Green America, where he co-founded Green America’s Center for Sustainable Solutions and co-developed the collaborative innovation approach that CoCreative uses today.

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At CoCreative, we’ve noticed something curious in the feedback from our training courses and network convenings. The word “joy” keeps appearing. Not just satisfaction or engagement, but joy.

This surprised us. Systems change work is daunting and notoriously difficult. It involves confronting entrenched problems, shifting complex power dynamics, and sustaining effort over years or even decades. We know the work can be deeply meaningful, but joyful? That made us curious.

What were people experiencing? And more importantly, what conditions were enabling this experience of joy amid such challenging work?

Why Joy Isn’t a Just Nice-to-Have

Before we explore those conditions, let’s acknowledge that burnout is rampant in system change work. Many of us have witnessed brilliant colleagues leave the field, not because they stopped caring, but because the work wasn’t emotionally sustainable. Or we’ve witnessed the fall-off of participants from otherwise meaningful and important work, often because they weren’t in some way nourished by the work.

This matters because systems change isn’t a sprint—it’s an intergenerational ultramarathon. The polycrises we face—climate change, structural inequality, democratic erosion—won’t be solved in a year or even a decade. They require sustained collaboration across organizational boundaries, patient work to shift entrenched patterns, and the capacity to maintain effort even when progress feels maddeningly slow. We need to build ecosystems of change that can endure across generations, and that means creating conditions where people can thrive, not just survive.

This is where joy becomes strategically essential, not merely nice-to-have. Joy functions differently from motivation or engagement. Motivation can be generated through pressure or incentive; engagement can be sustained for a time through sheer willpower or obligation. But joy—the satisfying happiness that comes from meaningful connection, purposeful action, and seeing our contributions matter—is what keeps people coming back year after year, even when the work is hard.

As my mentor, Susan Davis, who developed over 40 social change networks before she passed away in 2024, used to say: “If you want to change the world, throw a better party.”

She wasn’t suggesting frivolity. She was expressing a much deeper truth: we can’t browbeat people into sustained systems change work. We can’t bribe them into staying at the table. The only way to build movements and collaborations that endure over decades is to create spaces where people actually want to be—where they can bring their whole selves, where the act of weaving their gifts with those of diverse others generates its own renewable energy.

The strategic advantages of joy are concrete. Collaborations characterized by joy retain talented participants who might otherwise burn out or drift away. They attract new participants through positive word-of-mouth rather than recruitment campaigns. They generate creativity and innovation because people experiencing joy are more willing to take risks and experiment. They build the kind of deep trust across differences that allows groups to navigate inevitable conflicts productively rather than destructively.

Perhaps most critically, joy creates resilience. When the work gets difficult—and in systems change, it always does—groups bound together by joyful experience have reserves to draw upon. They’ve built emotional capital that can be spent during hard times. They remember why they started, and they remember it not just intellectually, but emotionally and spiritually.

This isn’t about making the work easy or pretending that systems change isn’t demanding. It’s about recognizing that the human beings doing this work need more than a compelling problem analysis and a theory of change. They need conditions that nourish them as whole people—conditions where spirit, heart, head, and hands are all engaged. When we create those conditions, joy emerges naturally. And that joy becomes the fuel that sustains the intergenerational work ahead.

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When Process Becomes Personal

I recall a corporate executive who joined one of our collaboratives with visible skepticism. “I’m just going to tell you up front, I don’t do that process stuff,” he declared during a round of introductions, eyeing the stacks of colorful sticky notes on the table with apparent disdain. “That isn’t real work, and I’m here for results.”

By the end of our second session, this same executive was animatedly moving notes around a systems map and, later, actively prototyping an innovative solution for funding local collective impact initiatives alongside a community activist who, in any other context, might not have even spoken to him.

Later, he pulled me aside. “Okay, this was fun,” he admitted, “...and really productive!”

What had happened? He had experienced what happens when we create spaces where people can bring their whole selves to the work—not just their analytical minds, but their hearts, spirits, and creative capacities.

Four Dimensions of Joyful Collaboration

Through our work with 60+ multi-stakeholder collaborations, our team at CoCreative has observed that joy emerges naturally when four dimensions of human experience are fully engaged:

The Spirit: Connecting to Transcendent Purpose

A form of personal liberation happens when we truly commit to something larger than ourselves. The moment we connect to that greater shared purpose, it creates a context in which our egos, limitations, and personal agendas become relatively small. In a sense, we are released from ourselves.

Consider Ted, a veteran campaigner who had spent decades fighting toxic chemicals in electronics manufacturing. When he joined the Clean Electronics Production Network, he was initially wary of collaborating with the very corporations he had been campaigning against. But as the group aligned around a shared intent—protecting workers from harmful chemical exposures—something shifted.

“We’re all here for the same reason,” Ted reflected. “We have different perspectives, different contexts, but underneath it all, we share a commitment to worker health that’s much bigger than our jobs.”

Connecting to a powerful purpose doesn’t happen by serendipity. It requires intentional space and process for people to connect to their deeper values, share their highest hopes, and find the “rising resonance” among their differences.

The Heart: Building Trusting Relationships

Lasting, resilient systems change requires us to work across organizational, sectoral, cultural, and political boundaries. These boundaries mean real differences in perspectives, priorities, and power. Navigating them requires trust.

In the Clean Electronics Production Network, joy emerged as corporate executives and labor advocates gradually built relationships that transcended their professional roles. They shared meals, told stories about times they took risks based on their values, and revealed the personal experiences that had led them to this work.

“I didn’t imagine this,” one participant admitted, “but I really look forward to these meetings now. Not just because the work we’re doing is important, but because of the people. It’s NOT my usual experience to work alongside people who care so deeply, and put that care into action.”

This kind of trust doesn’t erase differences or eliminate conflict. Rather, it creates the conditions where conflict can be productive rather than destructive—where differences become a source of deeper insight rather than separation.

The Head: Engaging in Shared Learning

Humans are naturally curious creatures. We derive satisfaction from understanding complex situations and figuring out challenging puzzles. But in many change efforts, learning is siloed—experts work in isolation, leaders withhold critical information, and the full picture remains fragmented.

Joy emerges when we create conditions for genuine shared learning—where diverse perspectives combine to weave a richer tapestry of understanding than any individual or organization could develop alone. Coming face to face for the first time with the daunting complexity of a system, we’re overwhelmed, yet in that overwhelm is a kind of liberation. We’re free from that one certain opinion that we needed to convince everyone else was true; we’re released from our favored solutions because now, in the light of this complexity, we know that that single solution is woefully inadequate to the challenge before us.

In our collaboratives, we’ve seen the excitement that builds when people from different parts of a system begin to see how their pieces of the picture fit together, building a much greater whole understanding. There’s an almost palpable energy in the room as new insights emerge and previously intractable problems suddenly appear solvable.

This isn’t just about intellectual stimulation. It’s about the powerful and very human joy of creating shared meaning in a world that can feel chaotic and overwhelming.

The Hands: Building Momentum Through Co-Creation

While purpose, relationships, and learning are essential, joy also requires hands-on progress. We need to see that our collective efforts are making a difference, however incremental, and that our individual gifts are making a meaningful contribution.

This is where many collaborations falter. They can get stuck in circular planning, analysis, and discussion, unable to bridge to action. The energy dissipates, and participants begin to disengage, taking their gifts of wisdom, capacity, and energy with them.

In contrast, collaborations that generate joy tend to find ways to create momentum through early wins and ongoing experimentation. They don’t wait for perfect solutions; they prototype, learn, and iterate.

When the Clean Electronics Production Network had developed its first set of system interventions—an industry-wide commitment for eliminating worker exposures to specific chemicals, a practical and effective qualitative chemical risk method that any factory could implement, and a framework and toolset for assessing and replacing the most hazardous chemicals—the sense of accomplishment was palpable. After years of deadlock on this issue, they had created a mix of solid interventions that would directly improve workers’ lives.

Cultivating the Conditions for Joy

So how do we create these conditions in our own work? It starts with recognizing that joy isn’t a luxury or a byproduct—it’s essential for sustainable change.

This means deliberately designing processes that engage people as whole human beings. It means creating space for human connection before diving into content. It means drawing on the knowledge in the room, not just outside experts, so that each person sees their knowledge and their truth reflected in the larger picture of what’s going on and where we want to go. It means checking in on how people are feeling about the work, not just what they think of it. It means really taking time to celebrate small wins along the way to bigger systemic change.

Most importantly, for conveners of these efforts, it means adopting what we might call an “outside-in” perspective—stepping into the shoes of the people in our networks or collaboratives and asking: What might make this experience not just meaningful but joyful for them? What would help us all feel more connected, inspired, and alive?

When we lead from this perspective, we create spaces where people can bring their full selves—their spirits, hearts, heads, and hands. We create conditions where joy can emerge naturally from the work itself.

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The Better Party

Susan was right: changing the world ultimately requires throwing a better party. We are only really attracted to work, especially over time and especially when it gets really tough, because it brings joy and meaning into our lives.

In a world facing multiple overlapping crises, this isn’t just nice to have—it’s necessary. We need ecosystems of change that can endure for the long haul, and that means creating conditions where people can thrive, not just survive.

So the next time you convene your team, network, or collaborative, ask yourself: Am I throwing the kind of party people will want to keep coming to over time? Am I creating conditions where joy can emerge? Am I engaging people as whole human beings?

Because ultimately, the quality of change we create in the world reflects the quality of experience we create together. And if we want that change to be transformative and enduring, we need to make the journey itself worth taking.

Free resource from CoCreative: The Four CALM Agendas / Las Cuatro Agendas en la Inovación Colaborativa

Russ Gaskin is founder and co-owner of CoCreative, a consulting and training organization specializing in network weaving, systems change strategy co-design, and facilitation of multi-stakeholder collaborations.

We’re in a meeting room, and after hours of wordsmithing, we finally land on a purpose statement for our collaboration. It’s clear. It’s technically sound. It’s grammatically correct. We nod, relieved to have the task done, and move on. But a month later, can anyone remember it? More importantly, does anyone feel it?

Too often, the work of crafting a purpose for a network is treated as a transactional step—a task to check off so we can get to the “real work.” But based on CoCreative’s experience supporting many diverse collaborations, this gets it wrong. A shared, powerful purpose isn’t prologue; it’s the engine. It’s the primary source of energy that will fuel the entire journey, especially when the road gets rough or unclear. For ambitious, complex efforts (like the work many of you are leading), a purpose that merely scopes and clarifies isn’t enough. We need a purpose that attracts, that energizes, and that holds us together when everything else threatens to pull us apart.

Not only is purpose a critical engine for powerful collaborations, it is a form of power itself. In any given system, whoever has the clearest intent disproportionally determines what comes next, especially in times of disruption and uncertainty. Having a clear intent, especially when others don’t, focuses our attention and work, attracts support from others, makes openings for change more visible, and builds momentum, all of which are especially powerful forces in complex and chaotic contexts.

From Coffee Shop Clarity to Keynote Success

About 15 years ago, I met a friend for breakfast at a busy DC cafe. He had recently lost his job and was really unhappy. Having just involuntarily launched his consulting practice, he needed to rebuild both his brand and his confidence. I was consulting part-time with similar aspirations of striking out on my own.

As we talked, we discovered a shared commitment to helping others learn a powerful framework called Polarity Thinking—a valuable tool for turning conflict and chronic tensions into sources of deep innovation. We identified a promising market, the systems thinking community, and, rather than create a complex strategy with plans and timelines, we drafted a simple intent that morning: to position ourselves as top experts in polarity thinking in that space.

From that intent, we generated a straightforward list of what we intended to make happen: submit a conference proposal, get it accepted, deliver a concurrent session…and knock it out of the park, write an article for the Systems Thinker newsletter…and knock it out of the park, lead a webinar…and knock it out of the park, secure client work…and, you get the idea, and finally deliver a plenary keynote at the main Systems Thinking in Action conference. Two years later, we delivered that keynote alongside our teachers Peter Senge, Margaret Wheatley, and Peter Block, and we knocked it out of the park, with the conference’s highest-rated keynote in many years. That simple shared intent, born over breakfast and cultivated over 18 months, resulted in several key client relationships and years of major training work.

As this story illustrates, a powerful intent isn’t just words on paper. It’s a living commitment that generates momentum and attracts opportunity.

Fuel for the Heart and Gut

Think of the last time you were truly inspired. It wasn’t just a thought; it was a feeling. It resonated in your heart and stuck in your gut. That’s the quality we’re after in a purpose. The work of systems change is not for the faint of heart. It is a journey into the unknown, fraught with difficulty, overwhelm, uncertainty, and the very real fear that our efforts might fail.

Here’s a key distinction: most purpose statements are crafted as goals—conceptual, rational, coming from the head. But genuine intent comes from the gut. It’s visceral, physical, invigorating. Consider the difference between “clean the house” (a goal) and “make my home a sanctuary” (an intent). The first is transactional. The second carries meaning that can fuel sustained action over time.

A technical purpose statement, constructed like a goal, offers no comfort in the hard moments and no clarity in the face of uncertainty. But a purpose that is alive—that speaks to our deepest aspirations for our communities, our children, our world—becomes a renewable source of energy. It’s the touchstone we return to when we’re lost in the weeds of a logistical snag or navigating a tense disagreement among partners. It’s the “why” that reminds us that the struggle is worthwhile. It’s what we carry with us, not just in a strategic plan on a shelf, but in our bones, fueling us through the inevitable challenges of deep, systemic change.

The Humility of the “Impossible” Goal

If your goal is entirely feasible, and it’s something you basically already know how it can be achieved, then it’s not big enough. A truly powerful purpose is audacious, a moonshot. It’s a future that is so compelling and so far beyond the capacity of any single organization that it immediately changes the conversation.

When a goal feels just a little bit impossible, it works a kind of magic on a group. First, it breeds humility. The sheer scale of the ambition—and the overwhelming complexity of the challenge of achieving it—force us to let go of our assumptions, our pet projects, and our favored solutions. Why? Because it’s glaringly obvious that “what, and who, got us here won’t get us there.” The old ways of working, with the same voices at the table, are insufficient for the new future we’ve declared. This humility opens the door to genuine curiosity and innovation. We stop defending our turf and start asking, “What might be possible if we truly worked together in new ways?”

But here’s what’s crucial: powerful leaders don’t simply balance humility with confidence. They embrace both deeply. They have high confidence in their intent AND a deep sense of humility in how it might be achieved. They are assertive, knowing the importance of their purpose, yet often yield to the wisdom of others. This isn’t about finding the middle ground between two extremes—it’s about standing fully in both at once. When a purpose is audacious enough, it demands this paradox of us.

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A Container for Creative Conflict

In any diverse coalition, disagreement is not a risk; it’s a guarantee. We will not always agree on the nature of the problem, the most strategic leverage points for change, or what actions will make a meaningful difference. At times, it might even feel like the group is pulling itself apart, with people’s differing analyses and favored solutions pulling us in a dozen different directions.

This is where a powerful shared purpose serves one of its most critical functions: it bounds divergence, providing a container that holds everything together. Think of a river. The river’s banks don’t stop the water from flowing; they give its powerful energy direction and force. Without the banks, we’d have a swamp. A shared purpose acts as the banks for your collaboration. It creates a space where turbulent but productive conflict can happen. We can argue about the “what” and the “how” precisely because we have an unshakeable, shared commitment to the “where” and the “why.”

This allows for a dynamic interplay between alignment and autonomy. The powerful shared purpose provides the direction and enabling constraints, while giving each of us the autonomy to experiment and innovate around the strategies to get there. It ensures that even when we diverge in our thinking, we are all still held within a coherent whole, moving in the same ultimate direction.

The Transcendent “We”

There is a moment in the life of a great collaboration that many people will remember for the rest of their lives. It’s the moment the diverse people truly commit, together, to a purpose that is bigger than any of them. It’s a transcendent experience, a letting go of individual ego and organizational agendas in service of something greater, possibly the greatest, most meaningful something I’ve embraced in my life and work. This is the point where the conversation shifts from “what’s in it for my organization?” to “what will we create together for the world?”

This is not a small thing. It is a profound shift in identity from “You” to “We.” When a group of leaders makes this leap, they unlock a new level of collective intelligence, creativity, and resilience. They become a force.

But here’s what’s easy to miss: although sharing a clear intent with others is an act of personal courage, it is not selfish. You are sharing your own specific vision for making the world a better place, yet doing so in a way that invites others to engage and offer their desires and experiences as well. The key is creatively integrating your own intent with the needs and aspirations of other stakeholders.

This is where we seek “rising resonance” and avoid the least common denominator type of goal. We’ve too often observed a pattern of conveners trying to get the most powerful actors in a system to join their collaborative and diluting the strength of the draft purpose to accommodate concerns and reservations. This is often a sign that the people and groups you’re talking to don’t actually want to change the system, possibly because they are too far invested in the system as it is. Instead, find those people who are energized by your draft goal and have ideas to make it clearer, stronger, more meaningful. Crafting this together to build energy rather than dilute it is the art of creating powerful shared intent.

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Making Your Purpose Powerful: Four Critical Qualities

So how do you know if your purpose statement has the power to be an engine of change? Here are four attributes that our team at CoCreative have observed in the goals of lasting and resilient collaborations:

Meaningful. The goal needs to matter deeply to the people involved. It should connect to their values and inspire commitment, possible by bringing greater meaning into their lives and work. After all, if people don’t truly care about the goal, they won’t stick with the hard work of collaboration over the kinds of timeframes that systemic change requires.

Audacious. The goal should be bold and ambitious, big enough that it requires multiple organizations and diverse stakeholders working together. It’s that “stretch” goal that one entity simply can’t achieve alone that makes collaboration not just nice to have, but essential.

Specific. The goal should be specific enough to provide direction and focus. It helps people understand what they’re working toward and what falls outside the scope. This keeps the collaboration from trying to boil the ocean or getting lost confused in a vast, ultimately unachievable purpose.

Timebound. Setting a timeframe puts a hard “edge” on the goal and our intention, creating urgency and helping people understand the pace and scale of work needed. It’s also a way of calibrating the tension between what’s meaningful and what’s achievable. Have a huge goal? Push that year back because you’re going to need a long runway to learn, test, and grow your strategy. For small goals with more urgency, a timeframe of 5 years out might be just right.

These aren’t prescriptions and there is probably no set formula to crafting a powerful intent for your collaborative. In the end, the only real test is whether it provides the fuel we need to take on tough work over time.

A Living Inquiry

As you continue your work on whatever challenge or opportunity is before you, hold the question of purpose not as a task to be completed, but as a living inquiry. Is your purpose an engine? Does it fuel your heart and gut? Does it humble you into new ways of thinking and working? Can it hold a truly diverse group together? Is it personally important to you in a way that gives you courage when the path gets difficult? If your goal isn’t doing these things, maybe pull it out, dust it off, and craft a next version with real power.

Free resource from CoCreative: Designing a Powerful Shared Intent

Russ Gaskin is founder and co-owner of CoCreative, a consulting and training organization specializing in network weaving, systems change strategy co-design, and facilitation of multi-stakeholder collaborations.