Ahistorical and amoralistic: that’s how we might describe social innovation. Innovation has a built-in positive bias. It assumes new things are good things—that is, until the shadowside of the new things become hard to ignore. The corollary to social innovation’s positive bias to new things is its casual disregard of old things. The push for novelty can leave little room for understanding or appreciating history. Book us for a conversation about why we’re talking less about social innovation, and more about how to stretch the social sector towards different ends. Learn about the 12 stretches that we believe can fundamentally reshape the social sector.

Systems change isn’t about new programs and services, tools and apps, strategies and plans. It’s about dismantling dogmatic beliefs and rigid logics. These are beliefs about needs, bodies, risk, harm, truth, rightness, compassion, and help. These are logics about professionalism, managerialism, social and economic value. So what’s the alternative? Spoiler alert: we don’t think it’s about swinging to the other extreme. Book us for a conversation about what it means to reject either/or thinking and embrace value tensions. Let’s talk about what it looks like to build capacity for nuance and discernment so that we can stop reproducing the same oppressive relationships, power dynamics and staid outcomes.

The modern welfare state is organized around one, largely uncontested, idea that we must address basic needs -- for food, sleep, shelter -- before we can address higher order needs for meaning, purpose, and beauty. We argue that transforming the welfare state will require us to collapse the presumed hierarchy of needs. Book us for a session to explore why tending to souls is as critical as caring for bodies -- and what it looks like to co-design social support from this different premise.

We dedicate The Trampoline Effect to partners and partnerships. That’s because we keep re-learning that transformation takes deep organizational and personal engagement: a commitment to shared purpose, vulnerability, constructive conflict, and near constant iteration. Book us for a conversation on how to set-up partnerships for change. Let’s debunk some of the hollow rhetoric on coordination and collaboration, and honestly explore the relational basis for experimentation.

So much of our welfare state is about passing the buck: people pay taxes, government contracts organizations, organizations hire workers, workers deliver care. In The Trampoline Effect, we argue that our most bedeviling social challenges won’t be solved by outsourcing care to paid workers. They can only be addressed by re-imagining community roles, relationships and boundaries. Book us for a conversation about what future roles, relationships and boundaries can look like. Let’s swap stories and examples, and consider the implications for our services and systems.