Rethinking Scale in Climate Solutions: How grassroots movements create durable and transformative impact

"The ecological crisis requires urgent, coordinated, and impactful solutions on a level unprecedented in human history. Yet, philanthropy has often taken too narrow of a view of “scale” when it comes to climate change, focusing on scaling particular strategies, with the goal of creating quantity quickly. In particular, tech donors often prefer fast distribution to the highest number of beneficiaries while overlooking methods that capture complexity and dismantle homogeneity.

However, scale needs to be about more than how fast something can grow or how many people a solution reaches, more than mere numbers. And grassroots movements have sophisticated approaches for scaling impact, which ensure that a multiplicity of strategies will be relevant, resilient, adaptive, and equitable. Because grassroots movements are interconnected groups, led by those most impacted by a problem, they shift power and change culture: Instead of tethering scale only to a result or fidelity to the original template, grassroots movements use methods of scaling that ensure the depth and durability of impact, multi-solving across social, political, and economic challenges." READ MORE