Giving Compass' Take:

• Tara McGuinness and Anne-Marie Slaughter at Stanford Social Innovation Review discuss four ways to advance public good that a new class of innovators are practicing. 

• Many policy makers are well aware of the deficits and difficulties of the traditional public-problem-solving model. How will this new method work instead?

• Here are 4 ways to propel social problem solving. 

Does your policy or solution work for the people it is intended to help or serve? This is the fundamental question that today’s problem solvers and policy makers must ask themselves. It is remarkable how often the answer is no.

Even impactful national policies often do not comprehensively deliver for those who need them the most. According to the Brookings Institution, as many as one in seven students eligible for financial aid for college do not complete the federal form required to access that aid. More than half of the nine million children ages 2 to 4 who are eligible for the US Department of Agriculture’s supplemental food assistance program do not receive the immunizations and nutrition support and other benefits it offers, according to statistics from 2015.1  Six states and the District of Columbia have passed family leave policies, but California, despite having had this benefit for over a decade, has yet to reach a majority of those eligible.

Innovators in and out of government are using a combination of tools to change the way problems are identified and solved. They are responding to an urgent need to achieve dramatic impact, to eradicate social and economic ills, rather than just manage them, and to draw on a variety of new tools and approaches that were not available to their predecessors. Their many different efforts and approaches herald a new practice that can be distilled into four common elements, as follows:

  • People-centered
  • Experimental
  • Data-enabled
  • Designed to scale

Read the full article about the new practice of public problem solving by Tara McGuinness and Anne-Marie Slaughter at Stanford Social Innovation Review.