Billy’s recent blog series on Share Our Strength’s exponential growth highlights 11 key ingredients that can be applied to any organization looking to solve a social problem.

Like Share Our Strength, many social sector organizations have effective solutions to the problems that challenge communities. What they don’t always have are the strategies and resources needed to scale and sustain these solutions to address the problems at the magnitude at which they exist.

For more than a decade, we have been partnering with change agents to think differently about how to scale and sustain solutions to the most pressing problems. Collectively, we have learned a tremendous amount.

And we are now embarking on a journey to take our inquiry a step further. We’re asking ourselves and others:

What does it take to scale and sustain a solution to the level where the effort eradicates the social problem—or at least makes dramatic improvement on it? What does it take to create this kind of transformation?

In the interest of beginning to answer these questions, we are currently investigating major transformations that have occurred at all levels of society: from the civil rights movement, to global efforts to eliminate deaths from malaria, to the dramatic reduction of crime in New York City, to the reduction of chronic homelessness in Denver.

By conducting research and in-depth interviews with those individuals at the forefronts of these movements, we’re seeking to “decode” these efforts. We aim to identify the common elements across these initiatives and share them for the benefit of those change agents working every day to create a society where all people have an opportunity to thrive.

Over the next couple of months, we look forward to sharing key insights from these interviews with some of the most accomplished and fascinating change agents in the social sector.