Your Questions Answered: Does an Ecosystem Need Every Role?

Hi everyone. This is Deepa Iyer and I’m sharing the second part in my video series on the most frequently asked questions I get about the Social Change Ecosystem framework. Please check out my website for books, free worksheets and conversation starters, and more information about how to apply the framework individually and organizationally.

Last time, we talked about the characteristics of strong social change ecosystems and answered the question: Is it me or the Ecosystem?

Today’s question is:

Does an ecosystem need every single role to be effective? Or in the spirit of this summer, if social change is like a team sport, what positions need to be on the field?

And the answer is that it depends on our responses to four questions:

1. What do people most directly impacted need?

2. Who else is already meeting those needs, and where are the gaps?

3. Given those gaps, what roles should our ecosystem play?

4. How do we recruit people, organize ourselves, and build the infrastructure needed to play those roles?

These questions can help us get in right relationship between our roles and our community’s needs. When using the Social Change Ecosystem framework, we don’t begin by asking, “Who do we have and what do they want to do?” We begin by asking, “What does our community need?”

Otherwise, we risk organizing around our own assumptions (which could be distant from the lived experiences of communities), or we prioritize our own sense of urgency, or our preferred ways of acting and responding.

Let’s explore two different ecosystems to see this in action.

First – let’s look at an ecosystem that is responding to crisis – for example, a surge of immigration enforcement is sweeping across a city, and people want to respond by supporting immigrant youth. They create a committee (our ecosystem) that includes parents and teachers in a school district.

Imagine that the committee conducts informal listening sessions and a ton of issues come up. The committee then maps other groups in the school district who are also supporting immigrant families. Through this process, the committee learns that while many needs are supported, one area remains unaddressed - access to Know Your Rights information in multiple languages and immediate legal support.

This awareness helps the committee identify which roles are needed within this ecosystem. In this case – that could be Frontline Responders, Weavers to connect lawyers and impacted community members, and Builders to create systems for intake and referral.

Once the ecosystem knows which roles are needed, it can recruit people into those roles, strengthen existing capacities, provide training, and build the infrastructure that helps those roles succeed. It could also reach out to an ecosystem that’s playing the role of a caregiver to see how to collaborate.

Let’s imagine another ecosystem that’s not responding to a crisis but has a long-term goal in mind: an affinity group at a university that’s supporting LGBTQ community members. (Happy Pride Month by the way!)

The affinity group, after doing a more extensive survey since they have time, understands that the most important needs are finding connection, raising awareness on campus, and advocating for resources to support LGBTQ students. The affinity group decides that it could be most effective when it plays the roles of a storyteller (to share information), and a weaver (to make connections with school administrators and young people).

After recognizing these key roles for the affinity group, the next step is to figure out which of these capacities already exist within the group. Maybe the group already has people with strong communications skills and relationships that make the Storyteller role easiest to activate first.

And six months later, the roles might shift to include different ones to respond to an opportunity, a new partnership, or an emerging need.

The lesson here is that effective ecosystems don’t start with roles. They start with discovering community needs and mapping who’s doing what. The right roles emerge from that cycle of discovery and responsiveness, a feedback loop that should happen over and again as we organize.

Thank you for being here! Please let me know if any of this sparks additional questions. Below are a set of additional prompts that you can use when you’re organizing your ecosystem.

• Who are the people most affected by the issue you’re trying to address?

• How do you know what they need?

• What roles should your ecosystem play, that could address those needs without

  duplication and redundancy?

• What capacities already exist within your ecosystem to address those needs?

• What roles are you willing to try out?

• How can you collaborate with other ecosystems that work with the same communities or the same issues?

• How will you ensure evaluation, feedback, accountability and transparency with affected communities?