In a time of tumult, a moonshot makes terrible problems seem solvable.

The good news? They are.

The bad news? Most of the world’s most intractable problems have not gone unsolved because of a lack of ingenuity. They’ve gone unsolved because they exist within complex, interlocking systems that must be healed concurrently over generations. Most likely by the people who are most affected by them, not kite surfers and aerospace engineers. Those most affected by climate change are likely to have some of the best ideas for solving it, though they’ll need the resources and cooperation of the whole dang world.

Failing American high schools, for example, are not just the result of a failure of imagination or even a lack of funding (though more money, more equally distributed, would do a hell of a lot of good in public education). They are the result of underpaid educators, too few of whom look like the kids who are performing most poorly; decades of redlining that has created pockets of poverty where property taxes don’t begin to approximate the real costs of running a school; the result of whole communities of people given subpar healthcare, living in food deserts that don’t support them in getting their kids nutritious food ...

The kind of social change we most desperately need right now is less about invention and more about integrity. We have to look soberly and collaboratively at the systemic inequality that has been made even more entrenched by decades of neglecting public institutions. We have to admit our environmental limitations and acknowledge the ways in which those of us with the most are making life perilous for those with the least. We have to admit that we live on a single polluted, politically polarizing planet and reckon with that reality.

Read the full article about the problem with philanthropy moonshots by Courtney Martin at BRIGHT Magazine.