Themes

Scale

Debates, discussions, and insights on how nonprofits and social enterprises can maximise their impact and bring about large-scale social change.

Death Valley Landscape_wellbeing
July 11, 2020
It’s time for a new myth of the social entrepreneur
Gary Cohen, founder of Healthcare Without Harm, talks about how the expectations on social entrepreneurs take a toll on their health, why large-scale change requires inner work, and more.
by Skoll Foundation | 2 min read
August 22, 2019
Prioritise talent over targets
Scaling your organisation while staying true to your values, and keeping your team at the heart of what you do.
by Anshu Gupta | 6 min read
A woman looking up at a mountain
August 8, 2019
The path to scale is broken
Why are alternate funding routes closed to nonprofits, and what can funders do to break the cycle of dependency?
by Dhananjay Vaidyanathan Rohini | 6 min read
Children superheroes
August 6, 2019
Big grant, big learnings
Lessons from MacArthur Foundation's USD 100 million grant on funding long-term change.
by Cecilia Conrad | 5 min read
A young Indian girl child standing next to a weighing scale
June 19, 2019
Rethinking participatory development in the context of scale
Redefining what we mean when we say 'participation' could lead us to approach scale in a way that takes into account local realities.
by Naveen Varshan, Sanjay Purohit | 4 min read
Lego people contructing a building_nonprofit scale_pixabay
May 30, 2019
Is size the right metric to measure impact?
An organisation’s growth is easier to measure than the effect it has on the people it serves. If attention and energies are directed towards outcomes instead, size becomes secondary, and not worth worrying too much about.
by Arun Maira | 8 min read
rock climing_pxhere_scale
April 19, 2019
The social innovation paradox: Why it’s hard to be both innovative and scalable
"Many interventions and businesses find themselves in a Catch 22: They need to show that they’re both innovative and scalable – but being scalable makes it harder for them to be innovative."
by Bright Simons | 7 min read
in balance
April 11, 2019
Are social change and scale mutually exclusive?
"As the clarion call for scale increases in volume, it is worth always asking, what is it we want to scale? And how will it enable social change for those who have been kept at the bottom of the pyramid?"
by Arun Kumar | 5 min read
Close-up of computer screen with codes on it
December 20, 2018
Lessons in scaling with the government
Scaling a programme in partnership with governments can take years. It entails changing business models, approaches, cultures, and mindsets. Here are some insights from having done this for 15 years.
by Gautham Ravichander, Viraj Tyagi | 7 min read
the view of a tree from underneath it
December 6, 2018
Questioning scale as we know it
Do we really understand scale, and the trade-offs we make in the pursuit of it?
by Ingrid Srinath | 6 min read
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