The Fetishization of Scaling Up

It is hard to say what one would do if we found ourselves having to make a choice between secure sources of funding or selling your value to the community. By selling your value, I mean asking for the money you need from the people that appreciate or see the value your organization offers.

I was managing a micro-enterprise program that is very successful. My ED wanted us to apply for government funds, which had criteria that would limit who could participate. I did not want to start screening entrepreneurs or "creaming" practices. Our goal was to increase the number of self-employed individuals in a geographic area, I felt we had to give everyone that had the desire to be self-employed an opportunity to try. In fact our customer service was focused on serving the most in need the best way we could, which is what made the program so successful.

The advantage from the ED's perspective was that government funds were easy to manage and a secure source of funding. I felt we could involve small business owners and raise the funds directly from that market by offering sponsor an entrepreneur opportunities. I felt we could have raised $250,000 a year no problem. This would allows us the liberty to serve our customers in a way that we could meet their needs. But it was too much work from his perspective, this other way felt more comfortable, best practices, scaling up, blah! blah!

Thanks, Carlos. So it's a live issue with people and dollars in the balance however it goes, not just a theoretical question. And some of it happens at the funding interface, which seems to be an area where some kind of thoughtful reconsideration might prove of value.

Hi Charles, good topic.

As you know about me from elsewhere, I see fetishism all over the place in the social capitalism marketplace. Farmer's specific comments on scale are music to my ears in that regard. There is no question that the world's problems are VERY BIG. But we've known that for a long time and there have been innumerable attempts to address them at a VERY LARGE SCALE whether through multi- and bi-lateral agencies, state socialism, or GM and Coca-Cola (lest we forget that big business has always claimed to be doing social good by bringing products to customers). Given that the BIG SOLUTIONS don't seem to have had BIG RESULTS I am skeptical that a new round of BIG PROJECTS is somehow going to be different.

"Going to scale" is perforce to take a cookie cutter approach to change, to model organization on the assembly line of big business. Sure, something good can come from it. After all, for all its problems without the Green Revolution things might have been worse today than they are. But the Green Revolution sowed a new range of problems, as many or more than it might be said to have solved. Large Scale is not a self-evident virtue, rather it is a strategy, that has to be justified in terms of the lasting change that results from the intervention. For example, I have a difficult time seeing how large scale can ever truly be a participatory process in which the citizens of target communities really get much of say in what is done. Real participatory development has to be local and small.

I think partly this is a question of what it is an organization is proposing to address. If it is lack of books in libraries, large scale could be quite effective: more books can be distributed more quickly. If it is overcoming centuries of gender discrimination and establishing the habit of women exercising power, then the work takes time and has to be locally defined and implemented, basically it has to work at the level of the neighborhood. Above all this kind of work requires patience. That is precisely what I see missing from the social capitalist marketplace: capitalism has no truck with patience. And as goes the market so go foundations. Such funding in general does not appreciate the time it takes for some kinds of change to happen. Most grants are for one year, and often they can't be renewed year to year. Foundations are always looking for innovation and don't have patience with the old-hat, even if it is proven to be effective.

The bottom line for me with regard to the value of scale is: it depends on what you want to do. If your goals are simple, discrete and depend primarily on moving products then it is probably a viable thing. Relief services are a good example (though the many stories of food aid being diverted into the coffers of the wealthy and/or violent makes even that problematic). But if they are process focused, concerned with addressing the immediate needs of impoverished communities but with an eye toward transforming social relations so that at least some of those needs can be nipped at the bud (e.g., the under-education of girls; scholarships only ameliorate, what has to change is the attitude of parents towards the education of girls), then there is no replacing the close personal work that goes neighborhood by neighborhood, even house by house. If an organization has the wherewithal to do that across a broad swath of territory, great. But most don't so, if they're going to stick to their mission, they have to stay focused on a few communities and make those deep rooted changes (in which case they can mostly kiss institutional funding goodbye and have to rely on private charity).

One final note then I'll end the ramble: when I have the opportunity to give talks on the work we do at Educate the Children, I talk about what I've taken to calling "distributed sustainability." I draw an analogy with the organics industry in the US. It started very small, very local, ignored by government and the public at large; indeed it was derided as the redoubt of hippies and other "weird" counter-culturals. But those people stuck to their principles, for the most part, and over time did things so well that now everyone wants a piece of the action (well, it wasn't them all alone; history had a role to play too, but you get the point). The sustainability comes from the close work with communities, the distribution comes from many working away at it. I liken the work we do to that: we plug away in our small way, bringing fundamental change to the communities we work with, and we hope that, over time, with others who are also struggling along, thinking long term, refusing to give up on their complex solutions in favor of simpler, more marketable ones, collectively we'll make something bigger.

A fantastic subject & fantastic views as well. I was thrilled by the views posted by cellulator. The system of localising on a global scale could be a meaningful approach for problem(s) solving. The design & development of the system to solve Rural India's health related problems have been in these lines more or less. What we have in mind is like creating a garland - small locality based systems and connected through the ICT Network to give the services locally with close monitoring by the locals and the advantages of scale through the Networked system. Many organizations locally established as partners of an ever growing network. The Network will have its own corporate structure like a corporate giant. Ownership pattern of the Network has been redefined - it will be different from the current existing practices.

I like the sound of that Chris. It's been central to our advocacy for social capitalism from the beginning as something of a mission statement, i.e. - P-CED advocates for the development of localized people-centered economics on a global basis

What we're attempting in Ukraine is national scale, we believe it has to be, otherwise the problems simply relocate. We're talking about a country in Europe where more that $250 million has been poured in to fight the rising tide of HIV and they are losing, which is now a threat to all Europe, as stated recently by the UN.

This is far more than localised poverty or education on risk behaviour. What we have is a generation of children rendered to institutions and disenfranchised to graduate to the streets and a life of crime, drugs and prostitution in 60-70% of cases. With 1.63% population HIV positive in 2007, there will likely be more than one in 50 infected this year.

With a holistic approach engaging social business at the local level to fund a national scale crisis, we believe that a solution can be delivered at nil overall cost. It may well be the only solution because most of all these exploited children need homes and an education to prepare them for something other than taking to the streets and continuing the cycle of despair.

Peicemeal, it doesn't work, as so many effort and so much money demonstrates, with such poor results.

Jeff

Thanks, Christopher. It's always encouraging to read your posts.

Following upon my comment to Carlos, these comments of yours would seem to offer specific topics for reconsideration:

QUOTE: Such funding in general does not appreciate the time it takes for some kinds of change to happen. Most grants are for one year, and often they can't be renewed year to year. Foundations are always looking for innovation and don't have patience with the old-hat, even if it is proven to be effective. :UNQUOTE

Perhaps we should begin to list other aspects where the "funding > need" fit isn't the greatest.

On the main topic of this event, i.e. scale, this strikes me as very helpful:

QUOTE: The bottom line for me with regard to the value of scale is: it depends on what you want to do. If your goals are simple, discrete and depend primarily on moving products then it is probably a viable thing. Relief services are a good example (…). But if they are process focused, concerned with addressing the immediate needs of impoverished communities but with an eye toward transforming social relations so that at least some of those needs can be nipped at the bud (e.g., the under-education of girls; scholarships only ameliorate, what has to change is the attitude of parents towards the education of girls), then there is no replacing the close personal work that goes neighborhood by neighborhood, even house by house. :UNQUOTE

And finally, I'm grateful for what you call "distributed sustainability." John Robb's next book is to be about "resilient community" and he recently posted a pointer to the "very smart" grassroots Transition Towns movement ( see excellent video at http://tinyurl.com/3tnrux ) on his "Global Guerillas" blog. Slowly, slowly we're getting there

Many thanks.

I would be delighted to learn more about the network and "garland" system.

I apologize to both Christopher and yourself for the time it took me to respond. Some of that was thinking time, but quite a bit came from the web or website resolutely refusing to let me post for hours.

About 10 years ago I read a study by some researchers at Brandieus Univesity who were talking about what they learned from a Quantum Opporunities Program that worked with groups of inner city kids in five different cities. One of their conclusions was that you could franchise structure, but not commitment.

Then about two years ago I read a book titled The Spider and the Starfish, which talked about the strengths of decentralized organizations, as well as the support that might be provided by blended organizations.

These two concept come to mind based on reading the comments posted so far. I agree that change takes a long time and donors are too impatient. This results in spending lots of money and getting too little in return. I work with inner city kids and constantly am reminding donors that it takes 12 years to go from first grade through high school, and another 4-8 years before a youth is through advanced education, vocational school, the military, and beginning a job/career. While parents may support this process for that lenght of time, public and private sector funding does not.

Thus, kids born in disadvantaged circumstances often fail to escape those conditions because the support system is too fragmented, and there are not enough commited adults who get involved, and stay involved in their lives.

The Brandieus study talked about the importance of those core groups of adults who make the long term commitment.

However, there are more than 13 million kids in America living in poverty and many millions more spread around the world. How do we "scale up" to serve so many kids in so many places?

To me, this is where the idea of a decentralized organization comes in. Chis and I both work with kids, but in different parts of the world, and this is the first time I've read any of his work. How many other people like Chris, or me, are out in the world, struggling to find the resources to do our work as well as we can, as long as we can?

In the Spider/Starfish book, examples of blended organizations were eBey and Amazon.com. Both use technology to create a platform where millions of people are owners. Thus, they have scaled up in ways that support people all over the world, yet, each person on their platforms is his/her own boss.

I use maps to illustrate ideas and I beleive that maps can serve as a technology platform to connect us. On my http://www.tutormentorconnection.org home page is a guest map. If Chris, or any other youth program leader, adds themselves to the map, they benefit from any traffic I draw to the map from the marketing I do.

If Chris promotes my site, he is helping to draw traffic to his organization. I've I'm linked on his site, or, if we're both using the same map, we have mutual benefit from working together to attract volunteers and donors, who choose which country they want to support.

I have more than 300 Chicago area programs on my web links, and many more in my links library and I organize events to draw us together. We're not "scaled up in one big bureacracy". We're united by the common work we're each committed to doing, where we do it. We're each owners sharing a common vision.

I think with the advances in technology, some people will find ways to make money by hosting such platforms (such as Google), or some people won't worry about making money, they'll be content in supporting the growth of good work in more parts of the world.

It seems to me this is the "doing good" idea that Dr. Farmer was talking about.

Thanks, Daniel.

Well then, let me formalize the introduction between two people I've admired for quite some while: Daniel Bassill meet Christopher London - Christopher London,meet Daniel Bassill.

What a pleasure!

It was E.F. Schumaker who successfully spread the small is beautiful mantra throughout NGO circles some thirty years ago. However, aptly enough, it was Fazle H. Abed, founder of the world's largest NGO (BRAC) who said "Small may be beautiful, but big is essential." I was able to see Dr. Paul Farmer's speech in person, and I agree that there is a "fetishization" related to scaling-- and might I add, rightfully so. Massive scale social problems call for massive scale solutions, so his question of how we can achieve wide scale impact without sacrificing those things which make the small is beautiful approach so effective was right on the money.

From reading all of your comments, I think most (if not all) of us would agree that these the big is essential mentality need NOT be at odds with small is beautiful approaches. Mr. London has observed cases such as the organic food movement that used a "distributed sustainability" strategy/approach to strike the balance between local control and global impact, while Mr. Bassill has observed "decentralized" networks and "blended" organizations strike the appropriate balance. So I don't think the question is WHETHER or not that balance can be struck, but rather HOW it can be struck. As an example (and plug), my own organization created a scaling methodology called Adaptive Blueprinting--- an oxymoron that captures the need to achieve global impact (through replicable "blueprints") while remaining true to the necessity of nurturing and harnessing local knowledge (using adaptable rather than rigid cookie cutter blueprints).

As Mr. London also pointed out, being able to recognize which scaling strategy is called for depending upon the specific nature of a program one wishes to scale is paramount. Greg Dees talks about scaling-up (organizational growth), scaling-out (dissemination of ideas/models to partners), and scaling-deep (making unidimensional programs more holistic in nature). I find this trifurcation helpful in terms of making such assessments. Most social sector orgs tend to use all three scaling strategies simultaneously. However, as our sector becomes increasingly connected, it is my belief that more and more organizations will adopt "open source" principles to guide their work and, therefore, will place an emphasis on a collaborative (scaled-out) approach to widening their impact.

Thanks for the unflinchingly lucid review of the realities. If we consider them in the context of the global financial meltdown and runaway inflation of fuel and food prices, it's hard if not impossible to find salvation without a global OpenSource collaboration that implements an exponential wealth building network system. The Global Community Development Association is a substantially complete example, at: gcdanetdotningdotcom and webjamdotcom/gcda

Until we have a trustworthy vocabulary for talking about scale, we will keep being torn by knowing its importance but being to make useful generalizations. Until we have a proper vocabulary, we will use the word scale for too many observations. To focus on one confound, I see large and centralized getting confused regularly. Large scale gets used to refer to both, often in the same breath.

If a small, local project grows into a large hierarchical institution, we can say that this is now a large scale institution making large scale change.

Alternatively, if a small local project grows so that other small groups sprout up independently throughout an entire region, we can say that this is a large institution that is small scale. Each small groups acts independently, but there are many of them, the model is everywhere, and there can also be large scale change.

So, does scaling up describe the first or the second case? How about grassroots? Growth with centralization, or without? You will get a different answer from everyone, or from the same person on different days, and those aren't the only two choices. When is centralization appropriate for scaling a solution? And how often do we call one scale up by the name of the other? I think the muddle happens because it is not intuitive to think of a small scale institution being a large institution, but you may find that keeping the distinction in mind makes all this just a little less confusing.

I'm sorry, a combination of ill health and problems with the software here have kept me from posting these last three or four days.

Seth --

I think you raise a very important point. and I'd just like to add that "distributed" seems to be a key term for describing the sort of "local plus local equals global" networks you're taking about

in fact "distributed networking" seems to be almost a description of the current zeitgeist.

Charles, thanks for the forum and glad you're feeling better. I agree and like the notion of "distributed" networks. The networks that will evolve organically via the GCDA wealth building system would certainly qualify. It seems other terms may be necessary to better convey their dynamic, evolutionary, self-propagating nature and sustainable functioning. Then there is the "democratic" non-categorical applicability by and for anyone, regardless of socioeconomic status and/or score. I think it may be that the GCDA network program permits complexity, diversity and mutability as great as our own, plus exponential growth rivaling lively yeast cultures. I look forward to your feedback, re: the GCDA Wealth Builders Network program. Michael

Why dignify a negative paradigm with an assumption of validity or integrity? Even financial "winners" are mortal beings, subject to the effects of their own destructive obsessions. The one-to-many model of conventional finance in a realm of essentially heartless, predatory capitalism (where the prime economic value is thought to be personal gain for a few at any cost to the many), is utterly hostile to compassionate culture and, hence, inappropriate for hosting a positive alternative. Right? Kiva's limited many-to-many model is far more effective, yet it does nothing for the nearly poor, the working poor, the soon to be poor and the shrinking middle class. A global, exponential micro-funding network program can and will resolve all the thorny issues that hindered us before, while rescuing the world's essentially self-destructive bubble economy. For more detail and background, see: gcdanet dot ning dot com and www webjam dot com/gcda << Blissings, Michael

Why dignify a negative paradigm with an assumption of validity or integrity? Even financial "winners" are mortal beings, subject to the effects of their own destructive obsessions. The one-to-many model of conventional finance in a realm of essentially heartless, predatory capitalism (where the prime economic value is thought to be personal gain for a few at any cost to the many), is utterly hostile to compassionate culture and, hence, inappropriate for hosting a positive alternative. Right? Kiva's limited many-to-many model is far more effective, yet it does nothing for the nearly poor, the working poor, the soon to be poor and the shrinking middle class. A global, exponential micro-funding network program can and will resolve all the thorny issues that hindered us before, while rescuing the world's essentially self-destructive bubble economy. For more detail and background, see: gcdanet dot ning dot com and www webjam dot com/gcda << Blissings, Michael