It's All About Relationships: Systems-Based Changemaking

Abstract

The PACE mission is to serve as a “philanthropic laboratory for funders seeking to maximize their impact on democracy and civic life in America.” PACE member John Esterle of The Whitman Institute, along with Malka Kopell and Palma Strand of the non-profit Civity, speaks directly to this mission in “It’s All About Relationships: Systems-Based Changemaking.”

Esterle, Kopell, and Strand highlight the systemic nature of current intractable challenges such as COVID, racism, and political polarization. Understanding our society, our democracy, and our civic life as complex adaptive systems provides new insights into how change can happen.

Relationships are the interactions that drive complex adaptive systems — the energy that animates them. Relational change can begin anywhere in the system. Leadership and initiative are de-centered.

Investing in relationships, according to Esterle, Kopell, and Strand, “is a systems-savvy strategy” because “building relationships — relationships of respect and empathy — has the capacity to neutralize the relationships of exploitation, marginalization, and oppression that lie at the core of our social challenges.”

Influencing systems, rather than attempting to control them, calls funders to a new and promising approach to maximizing impact on democracy and civic life. This approach calls for directly investing in relationships, engaging relationally with grantees, and partnering with grantees in the enterprise of joint learning and growth.

Keywords: relationships, complex adaptive systems, civity, philanthropy, racism