Overview

The issues of poverty, inequality, racial injustice, and climate change have never been more pressing or paralyzing. Current approaches to social change, which rely on linear thinking and traditional power dynamics to solve social problems, are not helping. In fact, they may only be entrenching the status quo. Systemic social challenges produce bewildering results when we try to solve them due to their complexity, scale, and depth. While strategies to tackle complexity and scale have received significant attention and investment, challenges that arise from deeply-held beliefs, values, and assumptions that no longer serve us well have been largely overlooked. This book draws on stories of committed social changemakers to uncover a set of principles and practices for social change that dramatically depart from the industrial approach. Rather than delivering solutions or being lured by grander visions of systems change, these principles and practices focus on the process of change itself. Simple yet profound, these stories distill a timely set of lessons for leaders, scholars, and policymakers on how connection, context, and power sit at the heart of the change process, ensuring broader agency for people and communities while building social systems that are responsive in a rapidly-changing world.

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Cynthia Rayner is a researcher, writer, and lecturer affiliated with the Bertha Centre for Social Innovation at the University of Cape Town Graduate School of Business. Her research focuses on how organizations and communities work to shape social systems in collective ways. Her work in social change began when, as a recovering management consultant, she joined the LGT Impact Fellowship which brought her to South Africa for more than a decade. She has served in several organizations, including Generation Ubuntu, an afterschool program educating children in Cape Town; mothers2mothers, an African social enterprise employing women to guide other women to good health; and the Starfish Greathearts Foundation, a nonprofit supporting children and families in South Africa. Cynthia holds a BA from Georgetown University and an MBA from INSEAD. Dr. Francois Bonnici is a public health physician, professor, social change practitioner, and foundation leader. His career is rooted in front-line medical and humanitarian practice and evolved to advance social change work across sectors. He serves as director of the Schwab Foundation for Social Entrepreneurship and head of social innovation at the World Economic Forum. Previously he was the founding director of the Bertha Centre for Social Innovation at the University of Cape Town, where he is adjunct associate professor. He teaches the no.1 MOOC on Coursera on Social Innovation, enrolling over 100,000 people worldwide. He has been recognized as an Archbishop Tutu African Leadership Fellow, Rhodes Scholar, and was a founding board member of the Tshisimani Centre for Activist Education. He attained his medical degree from the University of Cape Town, MBA from the University of Oxford, and MSc from the London School of Hygiene. Zoleka Vundla is an audiobook narrator who received her BFA in acting from SUNY Purchase College. She loves narrating YA fiction, children's fiction, and nonfiction self-help books. Originally from Johannesburg, South Africa, she currently lives in New York City.

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