Making Good Ideas Go Viral (ssir.org)

A less-traveled path to education reform: The Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation is catalyzing three social forces to create an epidemic of best practice.

Ashoka founder and CEO Bill Drayton recently wrote about his vision for a “changemaker world”—a place where problems can’t outrun solutions. He told a story about Ali Raza Khan, an entrepreneur in Pakistan, who tasked 6,000 poor students with starting successful ventures. He explains how, with little more than hearty encouragement, the students managed to develop the necessary skills and resources to achieve an 80 percent success rate. 

Imagine what would happen if we were to replicate Ali’s changemaker spirit among the 3.2 million American teachers in the United States. At the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, we have been wrestling with how philanthropy might help individual, effective teachers spread their changemaker spirit and best practices to other classrooms. Is the answer systemic reform, or is there an alternative way?

 Typically, philanthropists rely on the following strategies to carry out their work:

1. Policy change. Whether from a new law or legal decision, policy often drives shifts.
2. Direct implementation. Through pilot projects, proof points, or replication, funders make specific investments in places or systems.
3. Technical assistance. Funders invest in high-capacity providers that can support the shifts broadly.
4. Tool development. Funders support new tools to meet new demands.

But there’s an important fifth strategy that gets less attention: “contagion” or “viral spread.” In the philanthropic context, this is when good ideas or practices take on a life of their own, and spread widely from person to person. Viral spread is more likely to happen organically when it begins with individuals or informal networks—the #BlackLivesMatter and Occupy Wall Street movements are good examples. Philanthropists don’t use this strategy as often as others, because we typically want more control over and accountability for outcomes, but our foundation has been experimenting with how to work with teachers to create viral spread of best practices as part of our K-12 strategy. 

For the entire article written by Carina Wong, please click here