Movement of movements | Saïd Business School

Today’s problems are interconnected. Movements must join forces to solve them.

Mobilising a Movement of Movements

Movements of change that are focussed on mobilising system change will go further and faster by joining their resources of relationships, talent, finances, intellectual capacities and theories of change. A collaborative approach will avoid fragmentation, and instead create the conditions to mobilise the critical mass needed to make big change happen.

But how do we foster the conditions needed to build actionable partnerships between movements and support collaborative projects as they progress?

The Movement of Movements project is an initiative currently being incubated at the Skoll Centre with the support from the McConnell Foundation and in partnership with researcher and author, Derrick Feldmann from Influence SG.

Project goals

The community’s goal is to create a movement of movements that mobilises the collective impact needed to drive meaningful systemic change. This will expand the agency of an entire ecosystem of movements – including clusters of social, environmental and new economic movements – toward a common outcome.

What’s happened so far?

The intention of this project is to foster the conditions needed to build actionable partnerships between movements, then support collaborative projects as they progress.

In order to facilitate this, the following materials have been created:

The Movement of Movements Primer
A series of Movement of Movements maps

The Movement of Movements Primer

This learning tool summarises key definitions and frameworks to help provide a ‘crash course’ on movement theory. This Primer document also includes case studies and facilitation tools that can be used to create conditions for collaboration between movements.

Download Primer

Movement of Movements Maps

The movement of movements maps are designed to visualise where movements are currently focused and – where there is clear alignment - identify where movements could benefit from working together.

Download maps

Ultimately, through this work, the team aims to enable intensive and deliberate mobilisation of movement organisations to build critical mass and enable deep and lasting transformation, resulting in change at the system level.

What’s next?

The team are currently moving into the second phase of the project, which will involve mobilising regional-level collaborations on system challenges including those related to new economics. They are also developing partnerships which will enable them to create an open-sourced ‘Movement of Movements’ Wikipedia page, which will be updated with the help of a community of citizen-researchers.

Listen to Charmian Love discussing movement of movements and systemspreneurship as a way of conceiving how to mobilise systems change on the New Agreements podcast.