The Nine Pillars for Social Change

Social change is about taking action. The Nine Pillars for Social Change are for nonprofit leaders, funders, anti-racists, community activists, and intersectional leaders working toward equity-based change while acting with self-care and sustainability. 

Unlike the David and Goliath parable, most social change heroines are not mythologized in sacred text. The millions of courageous everyday people making sacrifices, encountering retaliation, intimidation, and violence will never be known by name. They live on through their deeds and the waves of social justice activists working for liberation, freedom, and justice.  

My own social change journey began in my teens, inspired by the civil rights movement where names like Angela Davis, Malcolm X, Jessie Jackson, Pedro Albizu Campos, and James Robinson represented action, empowerment, and civic responsibility. I became active in social change through the Pioneer Organization, which was affiliated with the Henry Street Settlement House in New York City’s Lower Eastside. Two of my role models and mentors at Henry Street were James H. Robinson and Frank A. Riley, the Pioneer Organization’s Founders. They dedicated their lives to changing the trajectory for thousands of Black and Brown youth in an era of mass incarceration and a crumbling public education system. 

The Pioneers practice the core principles of preparation, cultivating self-discipline, service, and mentorship. We were encouraged to read works by Marcus M. Garvey, W. E. B. Du Bois and Saul Alinsky. We also read poetry, played chess, become lifeguards, learned to fence, and studied the martial arts. I took away from this experience the idea that social change requires action. And action requires preparation, not just physically, but emotionally and intellectually. Anger and frustration were insufficient for responding to the circumstances and reality in which we found ourselves. In those days in New York City, a single impulsive act could lead to years, even decades of incarceration for poor young men of color like myself.

From those formative experiences, I developed a desire for action-oriented social change built on the principles I learned as a Pioneer. After decades of political and social activism, things have not always gone smoothly. I made mistakes along the way and was fortunate to have the voices and teachings of those early mentors and role models to help guide me. Those early principles: preparation, cultivating self-discipline, service, and mentorship are at the core of the Nine Pillars for Social Change. Tens of thousands of hours of real-world practice, application, and working toward change make them practical, restorative, and potentially valuable for those wanting to bring about sustainable social change in their communities, workplaces, or organizations.   

The Nine Pillars for Social Change:

1. Get clear: know your triggers

When a social or community change movement is led by someone who does not know themselves well — causes lose focus, waste precious time and momentum. Leaders incapable of regulating passion, personal blind spots, unresolved trauma (unmet needs, resolved issues, and unhealed hurts) will inevitably self-sabotage and derail others.  For social change leaders, self-care is essential toward having the capacity and energy to support others.

The approach here is to recognize your own strengths and weaknesses — that means understanding who you are.

What to look for in yourself: 

• Know your motives and triggers and how others experience you.   
• Social causes often involve working with people and places in distress; therefore, change agents must not be at the same level of distress as the people they are working with. 
• Showing up trustworthy, behaving congruently, and being curious.  
• The ability to listen while not joining others’ anxiety. 

What you can do to know yourself better:

• Conduct a non-anonymous 360-degree questionnaire survey of your leadership style and functioning with people in your circles, work, family, play, community, and faith. Ask 10 people in your life how you get in the way.
• Build a support group and ask for help.
• Get a counselor, therapist, coach, or mentor to better understand your blind spots: anxieties, motives, and triggers.
• Work with a coach/mentor that understands social change.
• Cultivate and maintain a nonjudgmental presence and show respect toward others during heated moments.

2. Maintain strength through balance 

Long-range social change is not a fast process. It requires extensive community organizing, relationship building, and commitment. These are not 9 to 5, Monday to Friday jobs, or a few months of effort.  An effective strategy can take years to deliver results, albeit with signs of progress along the way, and the work is physically, emotionally, and mentally demanding. Social activists who push themselves too far too fast — burn out, resulting in negative consequences to their cause, personal lives, and health. Finding ways to retain perspective and making time for rest and rejuvenation is imperative.

What to look for:

• Healthy emotional connections and mutual support outside of work.
• Clear and grounding values and principles.
• Ability to be present in the lives of others, family, and loved ones. 
• Optimism in the face of the abuses, injustice, and tragedy deep social justice work involves. 
• Not making disappointments and setbacks in your work your loved one’s disappointments.   
• Making your work more important than the work or interest of your significant other and family members. 

What you can do:

• When with loved ones, ask them about their day and mean it.
• Leave notes around your home for the people you love.  
• Engage in activities and with people that bring you joy.
• Pay attention to your capacity to acknowledge, recognize, and celebrate what matters to the people in your life.
  

3.  Cultivate the Power of Calm

Look at well-known social change movements; their leaders had something in common, they exuded calm strength. Whether Mahatma Gandhi, Caesar Chavez, Nelson Mandela, Martin Luther King, or Harriet Tubman, all seem to have carried a calm presence that belied the strength of fortitude and determination within. Inner calm requires the consistent practice and cultivation of an activity that provides emotional rest and rejuvenation. This can include meditation, playing an instrument, faith, hobbies, recreation, and time in nature. 

What exactly you do to cultivate a calm mind is not as important as a consistent practice. It is the consistency that builds a deep and internalized calm presence. Developing a deep, unshakable calm also requires that we go further into exploring and identifying the source/s of our anxiety-provoking reactions and triggers. Many methods and traditions exist for growing and strengthening an internal enduring and sustainable power of calm. As an agent of social change, seek one out that works for you. A calm presence should not be mistaken for inaction. The power of calm is about acting in a deliberate, consistent, and effective manner while experiencing fear, threats, and anger.   

What to look for:

• Overly excited, “fire aim, ready” folks who tend not to function from a place of calm, causing efforts to derail, issues to escalate, and reactive and costly actions to be taken.   
• Your team’s and allies’ stories provide insights into their hurts and emotional wounds. Are you able and willing to hear them?  
• Strengthen and develop your team by being consistent and trustworthy in all your deeds and actions.
• Calm workplace cultures tend to have high trust levels, which fuels clear thinking, residual and tacit energy, innovation, and breakthroughs.
• Racism, blaming, judging, and scapegoating do not promote calm functioning within a team. 
• Mistreating, disrespecting, and yelling breed contempt.
• Appearing calm is not the same thing as being calm inside. 
• Passion is emotional fuel, not to be confused with commitment. Passion controlled by impulses lacks discipline, follow-through, and sustainable results. When left unchecked, undisciplined passion can get in the way of strategic thinking and deliberate right action.  

What you can do:

• Learn the history and stories of your team, allies, and adversaries. We are all shaped by our lived experiences, our past, and the stories we tell ourselves about them. Learning and listening to a person’s story and understanding what motivates them allows you to respond authentically and meaningfully; that is the power of calm. 
• Cultivate the Power of Calm, and you will be much more likely to respond to surprises and dilemmas effectively in real-time. 
• If you are not naturally calm, ask for help, feedback, and support from people in your circles that are consistently calmer than you. 
• Find out and learn about the sources of your anxieties, motives, and triggers. I have found therapy, journaling, coaching, and mentors helpful in this area.
• Living within your means will contribute to a calm personal foundation. Social change agents that live beyond their means are susceptible to financial triggers and much more likely to be co-opted or worse.
  

4. Select integrity over passion

While most of the skills needed to push for social change can be learned, some personal qualities and attributes are not easily acquired.  One of those is Integrity. When seeking out members for your cause or team, select based on integrity over ungrounded passion. Passion is exciting and often seductive but not a replacement for trustworthiness, commitment, values, and clear principles. Don’t confuse superficial passion with the dedication and the enthusiasm to follow through on intentions. Integrity resides at a deeper level in a person’s character than passion does. Attract team members with integrity, and you will go much further than you will with a team temporally fueled by superficial passion.

What to look for in change agents:  

• Builds rather than destroys.
• Bias for thinking versus reacting.
• Results over passion.
• Self-responsibility over blame.
• Altruism over scapegoating.
• Forgiveness over bitterness.
• Facts over rumors.
• Congruency over erratic.

What you can do:

• Build, demonstrate, and develop others. 
• Recruit and enroll others based on integrity and ability to self-regulate. 
• Hire, promote, and make assignments based on character.

5. Close stakeholder gaps 

Impactful, sustainable social change work requires two distinct groups, primary and secondary stakeholders. Primary stakeholders can consist of tenants, BIPOC parents, immigrants, disenfranchised voters, public school parents, disabled veterans, former addicts, deaf people, the disabled, elderly, caregivers, and other underestimated people. Primary stakeholders are those directly impacted by the consequences of failed, slow, and inequitable change programs. Therefore, these stakeholders live in the current reality and have the most to gain and lose when social change initiatives succeed or fail.   

Secondary stakeholders are those not directly impacted by the current reality. When change efforts fail or move, slowly secondary stakeholders are not personally affected. They may have observed injustice, insecurities, suffering, and racism but not experienced them. Secondary stakeholders often appear as allies, accomplices, funders, professionals, supporters, drivers, translators, subject matter experts, researchers, etc. They are essential to change movements and often serve as translators and proxies when conditions are too dangerous or impossible for primary stakeholders to represent themselves. Examples would be people being held in detention centers, elderly, non-English speakers, victims of abuse, children, or anyone lacking the resources, technical expertise or agency, and freedom to defend their own interest.

What to look for:

• Successful change initiatives find ways to bring diverse stakeholders together effectively and consistently using evidence-based and culturally aligned methods. 
• Expertise, lived experience, knowledge, and skills exist among primary and secondary stakeholders but are not always explored or revealed.  
• Primary stakeholders bring their own unique lived experiences, traditions, culture, language, knowledge, expertise, and beliefs to the tables of change. These attributes/assets are not always honored or recognized by those inculcated and normalized to the dominant culture. 
• Secondary stakeholders may not have lived the condition requiring change; however, they bring skills, knowledge, support, and resources that are part of a successful change effort formula.     

What you can do:

• Substantively and consistently engage all stakeholders.
• Be sure to have primary stakeholders represent at least fifty-one percent of your decision-making process. 
• Create time and space for trust-building. 
• Structure opportunities for stakeholder groups to learn from one another.  
• Take caution to not use language and literacy differences between stakeholder groups to divide and rank the value of ideas, content, and sharing. 
• Discuss similarities, share interests, and explore differences. 
• Pay attention to power dynamics and imbalances.
• Use evidence-based and experimental collaboration methods.
• Make the work fun; it binds people and helps lower the temperature.
• Create a clear set of guiding principles for the effort.

6. Prepare for sabotage  

Equitable social change work can become a tangled web of good intentions, conflicting interests, motives, and competing agendas.  And while the work is noble, the credibility of a movement rests in its capacity to impact its primary stakeholders’ lives. Social change work is riddled with setbacks and disappointments; therefore, it is essential to see and accept the reality of the challenge going in. During the change journey, you will experience highs and lows, which is expected. 

The dynamic environments in which social change work occurs are strewn with pseudo allies who hide malicious intent behind practiced polite, superficial language and support. These pseudo allies engage in non-committal behaviors intended to misguide, distract, and derail the change effort, particularly when they perceive the change as a threat to their power, funding/money, and prestige. Pseudo allies often foster division between primary stakeholders by raising seemingly significant but disingenuous concerns over process, legal and financial matters. This is intended to slow down or derail the effort’s momentum, as demonstrated by their lack of interest and follow-up in finding solutions to the issues they raise.

Recruiting and enrolling members/allies into a change effort based on integrity and congruent behavior will help inoculate your work from sabotage. A well-defined set of principles representing a group’s core values also protects hard-earned wins and gains from known and unknown saboteurs.    

What to look for:

• Racism is ubiquitous throughout society, within movements, and among allies. Awareness is its antidote. When diverse, inclusive causes thrive and succeed, racism, privilege, and unconscious bias are acknowledged, confronted, and mitigated. 
• Not all nonprofits are allies. Competition for funding, lack of equity-based commitment, and the inability to discuss White privilege, and systemic racism can get in the way of forming authentic partnerships. 
• When creating a coalition made up of nonprofit advocates, some will not be ready for an equity-based vision.   
• The impulse for revenge has likely sabotaged many community change initiatives. It is not always possible to see where this impulse lurks. Still, it can be helpful to acknowledge the feelings and emotions triggered during periods of meaningful social change.    
• Most seasoned elected officials are not inclined toward courageous social change. If their involvement is needed or useful, give them something clear to follow, not lead. The ones that get it will appreciate this approach and are happy to assist or remain neutral.  

What you can do:

• Inoculate yourself and your team from change killers by steadfastly following the principles of your cause.   
• Be watchful of passive-aggressive racists cloaked in progressive language and platitudes.   
• Don’t be judgmental or impatient of those in the same boat with you; they will be ready when they are ready.
• Treat everyone, including adversaries and those you disagree with, with respect and dignity always. 

7.  Avoid quick fixes 

Quick fixes and superficial solutions tend to undermine community change initiatives. Quick fixes in racial justice work are especially detrimental, often causing more harm and disappointment when they ultimately fail. Big problems such as poverty, systemic racism, and healthcare disparities require commitment, resources, and measurable action over long periods.  

What to look for:

• Efforts pushing for symbolic solutions due to inexperience, undisciplined passion, and undefined goals typically lack sufficient primary stakeholder engagement.  
• If it is easy to do, it is not likely to be sustainable, meaningful, or to have a systemic impact. 
• Solutions that have defined stages, small wins along the way, defined measurable goals, and a systemic approach to change is worth the effort.
• Thoughtfully crafted solutions that avoid win-lose outcomes between stakeholder groups are far more likely to produce sustainable results and have a longer-lasting impact. Create scenarios, tactics solutions that solve a problem while meeting multiple parties’ needs. In healthcare, for example, long waiting room times and clinician burn-out go together. Some solutions reduce wait time and clinician burn-out while also improving patient care. However, it takes thoughtful, researched evidence-based solutions to find and implement them, not reactive, temporary quick fixes.     

What you can do:

• Be cautious about implementing quick fixes, particularly when they are not clearly connected to building sustainable long-range solutions. 
• For every quick-fix idea proposed, create an alternate sustainable one. 
• Don’t confuse a short-term reaction to a crisis with a long-term sustainable solution. All the aspirin in the world is not going to fix a broken leg.
• Identify all possible quick fix recommendations, post them, and make them options of last resort. Modify and consider them only after vetted by stakeholders for unintended consequences. 

8.  Fail early, small, and fast

Social change is not a linear journey from start to finish. Whatever the adopted strategy, or cause, there will be highs and lows along the way. For some, the low points become emotionally draining dark holes due to fatigue and trauma. For many change agents, fueled exclusively by passion, the idea of failure is overwhelming and can become debilitating. 

Early, small failures can help teams coalesce and learn to solve problems together. Lots of small early failures can help a team learn and figure what does work. Scientists refer to failure as experiments. Failed experiments are not deficits. They are precious assets to be tapped for learning and improving tactics. Effective change agents must form and have their own experiences. Early experiments that build confidence allow them to keep going.

What to look for:

• Opportunities to fail small with your collaborators as you learn to work together and get things done. 
• Collaborators committed to learning and continuous improvement.  
• Adapting and accepting progress over perfection. 
• When your strategy is losing momentum, support, and credibility, it may be time to adjust. 
• Low coat areas to practice fast failure.
• Opportunities to learn fast by failing fast (The Human-Centered Design Process: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Human-centered_design).

What you can do:

• Move fast, make mistakes, learn, and remember that it is about progress, not perfection.
• Learn fast by making many small mistakes early in the deployment. Squeeze as much insight and learning out of each failure by conducting formal debriefs and After-Action Reviews.
• Make feedback and asking for help a standard part of meetings. 
• Stop at crucial stages of the work to ask what has been learned?
• When people are trying, failing fast, learning, and improving – recognize their efforts, promote them, and invite them to take on more responsibility.  

9. Obtain and sustain essential capital(s)  

Successful social change efforts need four sources of capital: personal, intellectual, social, and financial. However, they often focus on passion, good intentions, outrage, and a desire to right wrongs as short-term flashpoints for engaging their most devoted supporters and media in search of the current hot button issue. Unfortunately, emotional fuel alone is insufficient to sustain the long-term effort required for impactful systems and social change. 

Community-based change initiatives need several things to succeed: right strategy, right people, and intelligent funding, the four elements for sustainable social change will get you there. It is not news to anyone that many worthwhile causes lack the financial resources they need to sustain themselves. What may be less understood is the personal, intellectual, and social capital required to maintain successful social change efforts over the long haul.   

What to look for:

• Personal capital: is comprised of mental, physical, spiritual, emotional health, self-awareness, character, and integrity. This is about a leader’s capacity to take on the intensity and stressors associated with social movements. It’s about a leader’s ability to stand on principle, behave congruently, and sustain clarity, objectivity, and discipline through the challenges, hardships, relationship dynamics, and setbacks of meaningful social change work. 

Other words and language used to describe personal capital: discretionary, tacit & residual energy; temperament, self-awareness, self-regulation, wellbeing, privilege, personality type, intense, calm, passionate, thorough, easy-going. 

• Intellectual capital (IC): knowledge, expertise, lived experience, data, and information essential in vetting ideas, deploying tactics, and designing strategies. High-performing change agents become adept at tapping into the lived and technical expertise of all stakeholders. It is essential to understand what has been tried before and ask, “what was learned?” History, data, and context are part of a movement’s foundation. Intellectual capital is knowledge, lived experience, and expertise surrounding a group through its members, employees, followers, board, and funders. IC can include lived experience, skills, formal education, and data needed to make informed decisions. Intellectual capital is all around us and potentially available; however, it is not always harnessed as organizations grow and become more complex. Those groups capable of tapping into the intellectual capital that surrounds them will enjoy the wealth of tacit, discretionary, and residual energy that comes with it.   

Other words and language used to describe Intellectual Capital: learned, life lessons, lived, and observed experiences that lead to insight and understanding.  

• Social capital (SC): this is about your ability to tap into and form the relationships your organization/movement needs to succeed. A first step in building a movement is figuring out the number of people required to sustain a viable effort. Too many people early on, you may have trouble keeping them engaged and informed, leading to confusion and disengagement. Too few, and the necessary work won’t get done.

Social capital is about developing the relationships necessary to build, operate, and sustain a cause. SC is also the conduit for accessing the other forms of capital. Building trust and being trustworthy are at the center of high-value relationships. Social change organizations with deep-seated and broad social capital inoculate themselves from insular thinking and operating in silos.   

Other words and language used to describe Social Capital: colleagues, family, friends, friends of friends, reputation, membership and alumni organizations, clubs, and personal and professional networks.

• Financial capital: In the context of social equity can mean a place to sleep, access to space, stipends, funding, grants, donations, patrons, employment, contracts, an endowment fund, or investment income. The source and strings attached to financial support matter — proceed with clarity about the source’s influence on your strategy, tactics, and core values. The moment you ask, what will the funder think, or how will this reflect on the funder, you are no longer leading — you are following.  Be transparent and work with funders as an equal; negotiate toward mutual and clearly defined aspirations. 

Clearly, financial resources are required to grow, sustain, and carry out a nascent or established community-based organization’s mission. Many well-intentioned organizations experience brief moments of impact and success. A select few continue to succeed beyond the generosity and sweat equity of their founders. Those that last beyond their initial conception and short-term notoriety figure out how to build impactful, financially viable social enterprises for the long term.

Other words and language used to describe Financial Capital: Money, sponsors, property, brand value, assets, in-kind, volunteer work, unrestricted and restricted funds, fees, products, services.

What you can do:

• Set aside time for discovery and community building through each of the four elements for building sustainable social change. This will ensure that you are tapping into all the assets that surround your effort.
• Be deliberate in exploring each area of sustainable capital. Most community change efforts are severely underfunded for the scope and breadth of the issues they take on. Despite this, some succeed and have an impact disproportionate to their size.   
• Build a diverse, high-performing team as a way of fully leveraging each of the four capital areas. 
• One example of fully leveraging the four elements is an addiction rehabilitation program based in North Carolina called TROSA. They have figured out how to build financial sustainability by tapping into their clients’ intellectual capital throughout much of the treatment and rehabilitation process. https://www.trosainc.org/social-enterprises.

The Nine Pillars for Social Change agents can be used and applied in any order. The first two rules apply to leadership functioning and serve as foundational for the other seven, keep that in mind as you explore which of these rules most closely align with the needs and gaps you are experiencing. The bulleted prompts at the end of each rule can stimulate dialogue, group discussion, and action.

• Author: John Rodríguez, MA
• Website: JohnRodriguez4Change.com
• Email: [email protected]