When it comes
to social change, start with
.
Solutions journalism is a valuable way to interrogate responses to problems, help society learn from success and failure, and spread awareness about new possibilities for advancing a better world.
Journalists are not the only people who seek these insights; social change agents do as well. They need to examine the intricate “how-to” details of social change work and search for common themes across a range of examples.
That’s why we launched the Solutions Insights Lab.
When the solutions journalism approach is applied in a targeted and dedicated fashion, it can uncover valuable insights and patterns about how social change efforts are working in a particular thematic area — and what can be learned to explain success or failure. As a mode of research, it can surface real-time insights across broad areas of work — insights that can inform innovation, adaptation or course correction.
The Solutions Insights Lab is an initiative of the Solutions Journalism Network (SJN). It employs interviewing techniques drawn from the solutions journalism approach, but is not a work of journalism and is appropriately separated with a firewall from SJN’s core journalism work.
Solutions Framework
The Solutions Insights Lab integrates the four core elements of the solutions framework:
- Response: Focuses on a response to a social problem — and on how that response has worked, or why it hasn’t
- Insight: Shows what can be learned from a response and why it matters
- Evidence: Provides data or qualitative results that indicate effectiveness (or lack thereof)
- Limitations: Places responses in context; doesn’t shy away from revealing shortcomings
Recent Projects
Leading social change organizations have enlisted the Lab to support the work of social entrepreneurs, funders, investors, policymakers, NGOs and more. Here are a few examples of what that looks like in practice.
‘What’s Working: Solving the World’s Most Pressing Problems’
With support from the Skoll Foundation, the Lab created “What’s Working,” a searchable portal that combines published solutions journalism and interviews with a wide array of leaders whose work has been supported by the Skoll Foundation over the past 20 years to uncover insights that can help address social problems around the world.
The Future of Wellbeing
The Rockefeller Foundation is supporting a partnership between the Lab and the Wellbeing Economy Alliance to help find and connect people working to envision the future of the “wellbeing economy.” The idea of such an economy is one that prioritizes quality of life over the quality of the economy, offering a very different vision of progress.
Eyeglass Initiatives
The Livelihood Impact Fund engaged the Lab to study pilot initiatives working with community health care workers and pharmacies to deliver reading glasses to those in need. Our analysis has already uncovered insights that can help scale these efforts, with the eventual goal of enabling access to over 800 million people globally.
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