A Commitment to Deep Change in 2025 - Launching a Philanthropic Toolkit for Transformational Systems Change
By: Lian Zeitz, Tad Khosa, and John Kania, Collective Change Lab
“If we could use money in a different way, towards a healing, reparative purpose, then money actually can be sacred, something that could be used as medicine.”
Edgar Villanueva, Decolonizing Wealth Project
Grounding
Many of the actors in the philanthropic industry who are engaged in the work of collective change are looking to move beyond incremental approaches to transformational approaches and wish to engage in more meaningful collaborative processes that positively impact a range of social issues.
Many are unsure of where to turn.
Despite an increase in philanthropy’s orientation toward systems change, the know-how and direction of what it takes to achieve transformational change remains nascent. This nascency is characterized by:
- the language of systems change being used without the collaborative and systemic orientations required to truly move systems into new ways of addressing social and environmental problems,
- philanthropy still operating in issue-specific siloes that do not acknowledge the interwoven nature of compounding societal challenges, and
- an unmet yearning for more relational ways to bridge increasing polarization and uplift ways of working that center people’s interconnection and common humanity.
While shifts toward trust-based philanthropy are underway, we believe that more work to educate and engage donors on how to support transformational systems change is needed so that many more systems oriented efforts can emerge in the coming years.
By strengthening philanthropies' orientation toward systems change we can catalyze a new era of giving that works to address the root causes of social issues rather than laying band-aid solutions on broken systems. The result will be deeper forms of giving that support long-term healing for communities most impacted by systemic injustices and inequalities.
A Path Forward
In January 2025, the Collective Change Lab is launching a Philanthropic Toolkit for Transformational Systems Change to help the giving sector engage in deeper, more relational approaches to addressing entrenched societal challenges. The toolkit will cover four areas of practice rooted in experiential learning and insights from work over the last three years with leading systems change practitioners and community leaders:
Collective Healing: For system change efforts to truly support equity and justice they must be healing-centered in their approach, actions, and outcomes. For philanthropy practitioners, collective healing is essential to dismantling the root causes of social issues. By supporting healing at the individual, community, and systemic levels, funders can contribute to more sustainable and impactful systems change. To explore what collective healing for systems change looks like in different contexts, CCL produced a series of five case stories of collective healing.
Glimpse into healing: The Rural Opportunity Institute (ROI) demonstrates how systems mapping, grounded in collective storytelling, can catalyze healing from intergenerational trauma. By engaging educators, law enforcement, and other community stakeholders in shared storytelling, ROI facilitated the identification of systemic patterns perpetuating cycles of harm, such as inadequate social support and punitive responses to trauma. This process allowed participants to shift from blame to collaboration, fostering trust and collective ownership of solutions. Notable initiatives stemming from this work include biofeedback breathing programs and trauma-informed training, which improved emotional regulation and resilience among educators and students alike. These efforts exemplify how community-driven systems mapping can serve as a powerful method for disrupting harmful cycles, enabling healing, and advancing systemic change.
Explore our Collective Healing Case Stories
Collective Power: Alongside global social change leaders through a community of practice (image below), we've examined how they transform power dynamics to address complex challenges. Confronting power dynamics is not easy; it is riddled with misconceptions and an entrenched tendency toward control. But we view power not as something to possess but as a living current flowing through human connection. Our toolkit will provide useful practices for philanthropy on how to engage with collective power and how to live into natural tensions that exist when working to transform the role of power in social change.
Throughout 2024 CCL convened and engaged in dialogue, practice exchange, and learning sessions with 16 diverse systems change leaders and practitioners to explore how to transform power dynamics. The collective learnings from these leaders will be documented in the toolkit.
Systems Storytelling: Systems Storytelling highlights the critical role of storytelling in collective systems change efforts. This practice focuses on expanding the capacity of leaders and organizations to use non-dominant, inclusive storytelling methods that foster collective meaning-making, deepening shared understanding within groups and between funders and grantees. Over the second half of 2024, Collective Change Lab, with support from Robert Wood Johnson Foundation, has been working with Learning for Action to demonstrate how systems storytelling practice builds the capacity of partner organizations to map and tell stories about their systems change efforts and draws upon these stories to measure progress over time. Insights from these efforts will be in the toolkit.
Emerging Insight: Storytelling serves as a powerful tool for understanding how a system is evolving by fostering relational sense-making with grantees. This bottom-up, emergent approach contrasts with traditional top-down methods, where funders often dictate what systems change should look like and how it must be achieved. By centering grantees' perspectives and lived experiences, storytelling shifts the dynamics of systems change work toward greater inclusivity and shared understanding.
Sacred and Spirituality: Philanthropy often operates within rational, academic frameworks, while spiritual experiences and wisdom can feel far removed from these spaces. Prioritizing spirituality and the sacred in philanthropy can acknowledge the valuable and life-giving aspects of this core facet of the human experience, opening space for divine wisdom, serendipity, and emergence to arise. In a time where philanthropy is being called to strengthen its ability to release control and open deeper levels of trust, sacred and spiritual practices offer a pathway for philanthropy professionals to create spaciousness for new ways of being and showing up. Our toolkit will elucidate thoughtful and practical ways for philanthropic practitioners to engage the sacred in their work.
Insight into spirituality: This work is not just about addressing a problem at the level of the intellect or emotion, but about nurturing the soul—a space that holds the potential for deeper healing and transformation. Spirituality and sacred practices challenge us to move beyond trauma-bonding, attachments and reliances borne out of systems of harm, and into relationships built on genuine connection and shared purpose.
Our Invitation
In a time of profound societal transformation, philanthropy stands at a pivotal crossroads. As custodians of resources and influence, the call to action is clear: to move beyond incremental change and embrace a bold approach to transformational systems change.
We invite you to join us in this collective exploration of what it means to engage deeply, act courageously, and reimagine philanthropy as a force for healing and systemic renewal.
We have a beautiful, unprecedented opportunity to approach this time of collective uncertainty with grace and relational care.
The journey begins now. Will you step forward with us?
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Please be on the lookout for the launch of our Philanthropic Toolkit for Transformational Systems Change launching in January 2025.