By Paul Klein, Image: Screen shot from Amazon website, Stanford Social Innovation Review, April 12, 2022
When businesses have serious problems, they find people who have experience in successfully solving similar problems. When it comes to helping to address important social problems, businesses make decisions about how this will be done based on having no experience with the problems they are trying to help solve. In the first chapter I wrote for Change for Good, entitled “Nothing About Us Without Us,” I explain why businesses need to include people with lived experience and how this should be done.
Today, there is an imperative for corporations to contribute to social change in meaningful ways and opportunities for businesses that make the shift from social responsibility to social change to benefit considerably. However, most businesses decide what social issues to support and how this will be done based solely on the perspectives of internal leaders and managers who, with few exceptions, are people who have no direct understanding of the issues being addressed. This is the case despite overwhelming evidence that solving social problems depends on understanding the problem from the perspective of people with lived experience and creating opportunities for these same people to develop and implement new ideas and approaches.
Solving social problems has never been more important and the reasons why businesses should contribute to social change have been well documented. However, the current approach, which could be described as “everything about us without us,” is one of the reasons that business-based social change programs don’t work well enough. As the imperative for corporations to contribute to solving social problems continues to grow, businesses need to shift from what I refer to as “CSR lite” (the practice of doing as little as possible to be seen as responsible) to taking effective action informed by people with lived experience, that will help solve social problems.—Paul Klein
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