The Grammar of Money in Social Change: What's broken and how we might fix it

re:publica 17 - Politics & Society

Money is a language of power. It translates between forms of value and transforms power into outcomes. The "grammar" of money determines how people can express their values and use their power. It can thus either enable or prevent change. This session explores the current "grammar" of money in social change, particularly where powerful interests currently prevent systemic change, and evolve new ways to "speak the language of money"- including leveraging innovation in digital society.

• Mike Kang

Today, the "grammar" we use in one of our main languages of power, money, is not good at addressing the systemic root causes of the social challenges we face. It does a much better job of addressing the symptoms, but that's not good enough. The rules we assign to our money (both legally and culturally) tend to:

• unhelpfully separate for-profit and non-profit thinking
• overemphasize the value of planning and underemphasize the value of experimentation
• assign too much value to single projects and too little to portfolios
• overemphasize single organizations and underemphasize multi-stakeholder, complex organizations

The result: early-stage, exploratory social enterprises are consistently undercapitalized, and systemic change efforts (such as Social Labs), which aim to challenge power structures, paradigms, and societal prejudices, are difficult to fund at the necessary scale.

Many people in a variety of sectors are finding ways to innovate on this challenge by building a new grammar of money : new ways for us to translate our power into outcomes using money, and new ways to translate our visions into language our current systems of money can understand.

This workshop has two parts. First, we will frame the challenge. Examples of the "grammar" of money in action will be shared along with the preliminary results of an ongoing research project which is documenting the strategies social innovators around the world use to deal with this challenge.

Second, through facilitated discussion, we will brainstorm and evolve new potential solutions to the challenge, including new ways of leveraging digital society to bring resources to systemic change efforts.