Welcoming New Leaders and New Ideas into the NCP Lab
In the sunny atrium of The Rockefeller Foundation’s new convening space in New York City, the NCP logo served as a beacon for members of this growing community arriving to spend two days together in NCP’s economic system change Lab. This was the second, in-person convening where many participants were meeting for the first time, after years of working together virtually. It was also a chance to welcome new members into the Lab as Idea Champions.
The central question underpinning the work of NCP is: How do we build and sustain a space for leaders to come together to work for transformative system change and support them in cultivating a collective portfolio of integrated interventions toward their shared vision? We believe this question is critical to any system change endeavor that focuses on nurturing and weaving an ecosystem of leaders and ideas in more aligned action.
Finding ways to experiment, learn, adapt together--and to build the collective muscle for shifting systems is the Lab’s primary focus. As one leader framed it: “NCP is truly being built as a collective effort that’s about infrastructure for a movement, deeper relationships and collaboration that create a shared identity. It’s about creating the durability to act together.”
Creating the durability to act together…we see this durability as a powerful antidote to the fragmentation and isolation of action in which many organizations and leaders in the change sector operate. We see it as a response to the structural constraints, incentives, and funding mechanisms that perpetuate individual action while hoping for collaborative impact.
This compels us to attend to several threads of activity at once—and to occupy the hard and messy zone of weaving people, ideas, and practice into a powerful tapestry of trust, collective intention and action. It means:
Increasing the quantity and quality of connections among more field leaders throughout the ecosystem.
Nurturing trust among a growing community.
Supporting the group’s aspirations and shared vision for a transformed economy.
Holding the space for bold imagination beyond the urgency of “today fires.”
Exploring the shared value in striking way more coherence, coordination and collaboration in the field.
Wrestling with the types of infrastructure and funding needed to launch system change experiments and hold a community together over time in doing so.
Creating pathways for a much broader set of funders to engage in economic system change—and to see this system as inextricably linked with issues of climate, health, racial and social justice, democracy and others.
In this way, NCP is part of the growing movement of those thinking about Social Sector Infrastructure—the “utility services” to support broader and deeper system change action. The work of NCP itself is an experiment in what it takes to provide that infrastructure. It is our conviction that this field, any field in fact, needs to develop collective infrastructure capacity that defies isolation and silo’ization. We have to work hard to find a productive balance in and navigate the creative tensions between individual theories of change and field-level action. We must recognize that it is only through working together to create greater coherence, coordination, and collaboration that we will make a dent in the wicked problems we face.
This is why May’s convening was an exciting milestone for bringing the first cohort of NCP Idea Champions together to share their emerging thinking and to explore how these ideas can ladder up to a bigger change agenda.
Since that May convening, the NCP Lab has grown further, with the addition of two new Idea Champions: BLIS and the Racial Justice Coalition of Asheville.
Introducing the NCP Lab Ideas & Champions
We think of the set of ideas in development in the Lab as an emerging portfolio, addressing the inter-connected barriers and manifesting the aspired future identified by the NCP Design Team. The work underway is to develop each system change hunch into a set of bold experiments. The work also involves exploring where there might be greater coherence among the ideas; and more impactful opportunities for coordination and collaboration among them.
BLACK-LED NARRATIVE CHANGE STRATEGIES FOR REPARATIONS
An experiment focusing on the impact that narrative change has on the local, Asheville, NC reparations process, a long-term economic system change to reduce the racial wealth gap. While putting it in conversation with other local, state, and national reparations narrative frameworks. To better understand the impact that Black-led narratives have on local reparations processes, as well as processes happening in other localities and states, and connections to national reparations movements and long-term economic change, which is being championed by the Racial Justice Coalition of Asheville.
IMPACT INVESTOR COMMUNICATIONS NETWORK
Unites investors, communications and policy experts to shape public perception of investing to advance sustainability and equity. Through positive narratives and compelling stories, the network aims to inspire a broader understanding and appreciation for the power impact investing has to address our most pressing challenges. This initiative is being championed by the Global Impact Investing Alliance.
FUTURE OF FIDUCIARY DUTY
Focusing on the future of asset manager fiduciary duty, its connections to asset owner and corporate fiduciary duty and experimentation to explore possible pathways for improving investor representation in governance, which is being championed by the US Impact Investing Alliance.
MULTI-MOVEMENT ENGINE (MME) FOR RESPONSIBLE SHAREHOLDER ACTION
Seeks to build overwhelming popular demand for institutional investors to use their voting power to hold corporations accountable for creating a sustainable and equitable economy by combining an open-source organizing infrastructure with an intersectional, multi-issue narrative framework that unites shareholders and communities around a common story. MME is championed by Majority Action.
NARRATIVE CHANGE INFRASTRUCTURE
Discovering, practicing, connecting and resourcing narrative infrastructure that empowers liberatory narratives of the economy and challenges dominant, neoliberal narratives and narrative infrastructure, which is being championed by Liberation in a Generation.
NARRATIVE STRATEGIST INSTITUTE: ECONOMIC NARRATIVE SUMMER SCHOOL
BLIS builds narrative power between and within Black and Indigenous communities to repair, decolonize, and transform societies. To achieve this, they work to strengthen the narrative infrastructure of various justice movements to better align strategies to replace racial capitalism with a new economic system rooted in principles of socialism, democracy, restorative economics, and mutualism. They will be launching an Economic Narrative Summer School in coordination with other partners to reach young BIPOC organizers, policy analysts, researchers, and strategists across a variety of fields and spaces to build their capacity to better understand the theories and practices of narrative change within the context of economic policy.
ORGANIZING STAKEHOLDERS AROUND PUBLIC INVESTMENTS
Creating a model for community-led change that aligns key stakeholders, civic and public leaders around common objectives to ensure large, publicly-held investments not only account for environmental, social and governance risks but support the shift toward a just, sustainable and inclusive economy. Championed by Climate Finance Action and For the Long Term.
PROXY ADVICE FOR SYSTEM STEWARDSHIP
Catalyzing the institutionalization of proxy advice for fiduciaries and others who determine that voting on a systems-first (vs. company-first) basis will optimize long-term returns. Potential initial focus is to highlight stewardship initiatives that prioritize the systemic effects of subject companies, especially regarding the human and ecological systems that support their diversified portfolios, which is being championed by Shareholder Commons
RESET THE RULES OF THE ECONOMY USING NEW INVESTMENTS
Developing a process and model for how to engage communities, CBOs, business leaders, elected officials, policy makers, and other stakeholders to maximize the access and eventual impact of federal and related investments in creating more just, healthy, and equitable communities, which is being championed by Forward Together Wisconsin.
SYSTEMIC INVESTMENT PROTOTYPING
The TransCap Initiative develops financing vehicles which use capital to create place-based sustainable change. The systemic investing approach starts with a real-economy need, and develops funding portfolios which actively deploy different types of capital (philanthropic, market-grade, concessionary, etc.) with a view to addressing that need. As part of its work within the NCP lab, TransCap will design financing prototypes for the scale up of regenerative agriculture practices in Indiana, as well as the greening of social housing in Boston.
We’re excited about the work that each Idea Champion and their collaborators will do as part of the Lab over the coming months to: 1) Sharpen the articulations of how their idea works to manifest the shared NCP Vision and tackle identified barriers; 2) Delineate the experiments needed to make system-level impact; 3) Discover the connections between their idea and other ideas in the Lab in order to develop a robust portfolio of independent by inter-related interventions.
The NCP Lab is one way to support leaders in seeing the necessity for greater levels of “emergent and horizontal thinking around the economic system and the need for change,” as one Lab leader framed it. “To figure out entirely different ways of working together and entirely different ways of influencing a broken system.” We seek to create the space for those leaders to act on that insight and to help harness the momentum that emerges to accelerate participants and the broader field.
This Lab Note was originally published on June 13, 2023. It was updated on September 29, 2023 to include the addition of two new Ideas to the NCP Lab.