Philanthropists aspire to major progress on big, systemic issues like education or public health and most fund individual interventions in the hope that one will break through and scale. But the hard truth is that achieving population-level impact requires changing the underlying systems and structures that have been holding inequities in place. The work is hard, slow, and complicated and it requires working collectively across seemingly insurmountable silos. Fortunately, there is a tool in the toolbox that is built for just such a challenge. It’s called a field catalyst. But research by The Bridgespan Group shows that few funders even know what they are or how to use them.

You probably have never heard of Student Experience Research Network (SERN), a field catalyst that recently sunset after eight years. But if you worked in education, you likely would have heard of the researchers and organizations SERN engaged, including Claude Steele, Carol Dweck, Teach For America, Aspen Institute, Chan Zuckerberg Initiative, and the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, among many others.

SERN brought together people spanning entrenched silos in education research, practice, policy, and philanthropy on the topic of students’ experiences of school, focused on a broad question: How can we use research to help transform an inequitably designed education system in the U.S. into one that supports every student’s learning and well-being by respecting them as a valued person and thinker? In other words, how can school affirm students’ humanity?

Tackling such a big issue requires transforming the inequitable structures in the U.S. education system that shape what is taught and how, who is teaching, what is assessed, and how resources are distributed. It involves research and organizations working on these various aspects of education, in diverse geographies, and at different altitudes within the system. Thus, it requires coordination, connection, and collaboration across them. It needs a nerve center. Otherwise known as a field catalyst.

You can read a detailed assessment of SERN’s impact as one of these “nerve centers” here, but a few key areas were essential to its impact:

  1. SERN carefully created opportunities to learn together with its partners, which increased relationship-building across silos in research, practice, policy, and philanthropy. This led to a larger base of multi-disciplinary knowledge about student experiences, as well as more cross-sector knowledge-sharing and collaboration.
  2. It also shifted whose expertise was centered and invested in. Bias and inequitable practices that advantage white and male scholars have limited our scientific understanding of human development and social phenomena like student experience. SERN had a multi-pronged approach to cultivate a more diverse community of scholars and body of scholarship, and elevate the leadership and research of those from marginalized groups.
  3. As a result of these efforts and more, SERN’s work helped create a new narrative among influential leaders in education. By the time of its sunset, these leaders increasingly understood that student experience matters to academic outcomes and the way to improve student experience is by changing inequitable structures in education. Organizations with wide reach in education had begun making shifts in their work and the research they drew on to inform such efforts.

So, what should funders know about supporting field catalysts?

First, funders at the cutting edge of this work are shifting their assumptions about what it takes to achieve population-level change.

Second, leading funders think differently about measurement and impact.

Third, leading funders understand that a relatively small investment in a field catalyst goes a long way.

Read the full article about field catalysts by Lija Farnham and Lisa Quay at The Center for Effective Philanthropy.