Today’s nonprofit landscape is full of social impact networks– but not all of them are effective. Even if a network is making a difference in their community, there is always room for growth. In a landscape saturated with networks addressing a plethora of wicked problems, communities want to see impacts that are beneficial and substantive. When a network engages in high-impact practices, their operations thrive. High-impact networks have strong theories

Every day, we are confronted with problems–small and large scale. Design thinking provides a systematic approach to solving these problems. Formally, design thinking refers to the diverse and interrelated approaches, techniques, and tricks to scientifically addressing the problems we face individually and collectively.  This blog is dedicated to understanding the connection between design thinking and wicked problems. Wicked problems are problems without a singular cause or an immediate solution. They

We all care about our health, and when things go wrong, we typically blame some combination of bad genetics, risky lifestyle choices, and limited access to medical care or medical resources. Our social environment is a major factor in the relative outcome of our health.  Environmental factors and social factors that influence health outcomes are called the social determinants of health. The link between the state of our social environment

Volunteering may look different now than it did before the pandemic. After being forced to continue operations remotely for the better part of 2020 and 2021, some organizations are now leaning into the use of virtual volunteering as a way of gathering volunteers regardless of physical location. But how does this influence the ways that volunteers give their time? And how does this affect the “why” behind volunteering? Volunteering rates

Rethinking Evaluations:Navigating services related to health– housing, employment, transportation, etc.– can be extremely difficult. That’s why state leaders in North Carolina created NCCARE360, a network that provides public access to resources and aids organizations in collaborating on referrals. As the first statewide coordinated care network, NCCARE360 has onboarded over 2,500 organizations and helped over 42,000 users. But how can state leaders even get started creating a network like NCCARE360? Medicaid

Accepting Tradeoffs:Effective coordinated care networks require numerous moving parts to work together. Managers of these systems must acknowledge the inevitability of issues in their systems. When things go off course, it’s essential to recognize tradeoffs. Some metrics can be optimized at the expense of others. One of the main tradeoffs discovered by researchers in the IBM report is the interplay between accuracy versus efficiency. For coordinated care networks, better accuracy leads