How we responded: social change strategy during Covid

A lot of organizations made it through the “fog of 2020” by the skin of their teeth, first scrambling to adjust to Covid and then trying to keep their work going in one way or another. The pandemic still rages in most of the world, even as privileged pockets with high vaccine access and uptake roll back restrictions. But increasingly, we’re lengthening our planning horizons as we emerge from peak uncertainty into something like moderate uncertainty.

I’ve spent the last few months working with several teams on strategy refreshes. In addition to the external moment, each had internal reasons—ranging from leadership transitions to shifts in their sectoral focus—to take a deliberate step back from their work and iterate on their strategies.

Despite their differences, I’ve noticed a few common themes among the teams I’ve worked with and others I know. (If you follow me on twitter, you may recognize some of these ideas from a recent thread; this post remixes and expands on that thread.)

Five ways we responded

Every team adjusted its work last year in ways unique to their mission, strategy, and context. But everything I’ve seen can be grouped into five big categories (with the caveat that these aren’t totally exclusive—some organizations do one with a bit of another).

1. Recommit

Recommitting means looking at a big, world-changing event like Covid and saying: “We’re not changing what we do. It’s still critical, and we need to maintain focus.” It’s not ignoring how the world has changed (who could do that?) but deliberately choosing to stay the course.

I saw this with a coalition working on corporate transparency and tax justice. Searching their website for “Covid” finds few hits. They’ve taken on new campaigns, but those new campaigns are direct extensions of their existing mission and areas of focus, rather than responses to Covid.

2. Reframe

Second, “reframing” means changing the way you talk about your work and about Covid so people see how your work more fundamentally connects.

While the coalition I mentioned above didn’t fundamentally change their work, they did a bit of reframing: e.g. talking about the need to stop corruption in Covid relief spending, or the importance of increasing corporate tax revenue in the face of budget shortfalls.

I think the first big reframe I saw was from climate and environmental organizations, which emphasized how destruction of natural habitats was bringing humans into closer contact with zoonotic diseases like the novel coronavirus. In those reframings, I didn’t hear a change in the goals or the work, but rather different messaging.

3. Reorient

Many organizations went beyond talking about their work in a different way and instead “reoriented”: they actually shifted something in what they’re trying to achieve, though without fundamentally changing what they do. For example, that might mean starting a virtual events series or adding programming around stopping evictions.

Reorienting involves real changes in the work, even as the bulk of the work stays the same course. For many advocacy organizations, reorienting and reframing are similar, because so much of what an advocacy organization does is about messaging and communicating anyway. The big difference is whether an organization is still trying to achieve the same objectives but talks about them in a different way (reframing) or has actually changed what it’s trying to achieve (reorienting, or possibly even rethinking — see below).

4. Rethink

Rethinking is like the stronger version of reorienting. It’s where you consider throwing out everything you do and taking on a completely different set of goals and strategies.

Few in the professionalized, grant-funded social change space have the wherewithal to do this, as they’re held on course by the legacy of commitments made to funders and partners, and investments in organization-building and brand-building. Where I’ve seen organizations doing what looks like a more radical rethink, it seems to remain grounded in a core set of principles or a community/constituency being served, rather than starting from a complete blank slate.

5. Reimagine

Reimagining goes farther by one step—or even one order of magnitude: not just rethinking your own work, but what the whole world could be. If a pandemic is a portal from the old world to a new one (per Arundhati Roy) then the reimaginers are designing what’s on the other side, beyond the boundaries of any given organization or sector.

But as my friend and frequent collaborator Panthea Lee has described: we’re in a liminal moment, where big organizations and institutions could be leaning into the reimagining, but risk drifting toward the siren call of a return to “normal”. That drift partially comes from the privilege of those working at big and powerful institutions, buffered from accountability to the communities that have faced (and are still facing) the worst of the pandemic, while often living in places with easy vaccine access.

Beyond Covid

Reimagining and the other four responses aren’t limited to Covid. They characterize the way we respond to any big shift in the world: disinformation, climate change, authoritarianism, inequality, you name it.

The difference with Covid was that we went zero-to-sixty so fast that every organization was forced to respond in some way: even recommitting to your current work was an active choice. The slow-burn shifts don’t demand responses in the same way, so an organization is more likely to ignore crises that are tangential to their main focus.

But of course that’s a problem, especially when it comes to reimagining. There’s not much point in reimagining our way out of one crisis without reimagining our way out of them all.

So where does that reimagining — about Covid and about all of it—happen? It’s hard for any given organization to do it: staying true to your mission might mean one of the first four responses, and that’s okay. We need whole sectors devoted to this: what Lina Srivastava calls “industries of reimagination” and “industries of hope”. We especially need funders (who have the autonomy to move beyond the first four responses) to support those spaces for reimagining as they emerge.

So I write this as a plea for holding the liminal space. Don’t let this window close. Don’t let anyone talk about the light at the end of the tunnel without remembering what we’ve lost, that others are still deep in the tunnel, and that it’s a dark day even outside the tunnel. Keep reimagining.