(highlight:: Social Change Strategy: Focus on Solving the Problem, Even When Trying to Scale
Transcript:
Speaker 1
So it was just a practical decision to say, if your job, if our goal is to solve the problem rather than to grow our organization, then you start thinking differently. And for me personally, my North Star has always been to try to solve the problem because it's a problem that has real consequences, that we see children falling out of school every day Because they can't see the blackboard. We see adults who are living at the bare minimum of subsistence who are falling out of the workforce and whose farms are failing because they can't detect the right pests on their leaves. And so there's real consequences to us not scaling. And so we wanted to accelerate the ability to scale and we wanted to keep that North Star of solving the problem front and center rather than our particular solution or in growing our Slice of the pie.)
- Time 0:11:50
-

(highlight:: Acquiring Funding for Eyeglass Distribution By Framing How The Problem Affects Existing Issues
Transcript:
Speaker 2
Well, if you talk about that a little bit, the global development system, in a sense of how do you then concretize that and turn that into something that's achievable, a vision, a set Of objectives, and actually dimensionalizing the system that you want to change, how it would look like?
Speaker 1
Yes, it's a great question. So there you have to be quite strategic because there are some points of influence that we identified that we thought would be particularly helpful. And again, our goal was to move governments and private sector. And so one of the first things that we did was we wrote a paper called eyeglasses for global development, bridging the visual divide. And we framed our issue area as not a health issue, but as an issue of global development. And we made a very compelling case based on great research and studies that were out there and collating all of that information to the fact that uncorrected vision leads to $227 billion Of lost economic opportunity, has a huge impact negatively on education when kids can't learn, or rather when kids can't see they can't learn. And we showed all the research around that. We showed all the research around the link between vision and productivity and how when someone gets a pair of glasses, it can double their working life and it can increase their productivity By 30%. We looked at the research around vision as an influence on road traffic safety and how 59% of road traffic accidents had a visual component to it. So we framed our issue area as not a health issue, but as an input to other critical global development goals that had already been addressed and already recognized on the global development Agenda. And then we wrote that paper with a strategic partner in the World Economic Forum. So it was published by the World Economic Forum. We got to present it at Davos and we were able to provide this information to leaders in both the public and private sector. So that was really a critical strategic move for us. That paper when it became published then enabled us to present it at other places. For instance, we presented it at USAID. We were invited to present it there. In our presentation there with other efforts, the other big area of concentration was to influence the US government because if we could move the US government and signal attention To this issue area through recognition by the US government, as a leader, we felt other governments would follow suit. And so a big court of our work has been trying to influence the US government in recognizing this issue area as important. And I'm pleased to say that within two years of working with them, we were able to get language in this state and foreign appropriations bill around the importance of eyeglasses to education. And over time, that led to just this year for the first time actual line item in the state and foreign appropriations bill. And so for the first time ever, we now have a line item. It's two and a half million dollars. And once the line item gets in there, it gets in there for good. So we've anticipated being there for a while.)
- Time 0:15:03
-

(highlight:: Trust: The Currency of System Change
Transcript:
Speaker 1
Well, we often talk about the currency of system change work is trust. Without it, you're not going to get anywhere. All the organizations you're bringing together and the systems that you're trying to change have to deeply believe that your efforts as the secretary, if you will, are in line with What they're trying to achieve and additive and with what they're trying to achieve and not working across purposes. And one of the reasons why we rolled Alliance out of Vision Spring pretty early on was that it became very clear that in order to have trust, you had to have sort of that neutral broker stance. You couldn't be embedded representing one organization in an effort of many. So yes, trust is the currency and it's something that is only built by open communication, consistent action and often leading from behind and putting the members out in front. For instance, we were instrumental in getting a front page New York Times article placed about a year ago.)
- Time 0:24:17
-

(highlight:: Social Change Strategy: Focus on Solving the Problem, Even When Trying to Scale
Transcript:
Speaker 1
So it was just a practical decision to say, if your job, if our goal is to solve the problem rather than to grow our organization, then you start thinking differently. And for me personally, my North Star has always been to try to solve the problem because it's a problem that has real consequences, that we see children falling out of school every day Because they can't see the blackboard. We see adults who are living at the bare minimum of subsistence who are falling out of the workforce and whose farms are failing because they can't detect the right pests on their leaves. And so there's real consequences to us not scaling. And so we wanted to accelerate the ability to scale and we wanted to keep that North Star of solving the problem front and center rather than our particular solution or in growing our Slice of the pie.)
- Time 0:11:50
-

(highlight:: Acquiring Funding for Eyeglass Distribution By Framing How The Problem Affects Existing Issues
Transcript:
Speaker 2
Well, if you talk about that a little bit, the global development system, in a sense of how do you then concretize that and turn that into something that's achievable, a vision, a set Of objectives, and actually dimensionalizing the system that you want to change, how it would look like?
Speaker 1
Yes, it's a great question. So there you have to be quite strategic because there are some points of influence that we identified that we thought would be particularly helpful. And again, our goal was to move governments and private sector. And so one of the first things that we did was we wrote a paper called eyeglasses for global development, bridging the visual divide. And we framed our issue area as not a health issue, but as an issue of global development. And we made a very compelling case based on great research and studies that were out there and collating all of that information to the fact that uncorrected vision leads to $227 billion Of lost economic opportunity, has a huge impact negatively on education when kids can't learn, or rather when kids can't see they can't learn. And we showed all the research around that. We showed all the research around the link between vision and productivity and how when someone gets a pair of glasses, it can double their working life and it can increase their productivity By 30%. We looked at the research around vision as an influence on road traffic safety and how 59% of road traffic accidents had a visual component to it. So we framed our issue area as not a health issue, but as an input to other critical global development goals that had already been addressed and already recognized on the global development Agenda. And then we wrote that paper with a strategic partner in the World Economic Forum. So it was published by the World Economic Forum. We got to present it at Davos and we were able to provide this information to leaders in both the public and private sector. So that was really a critical strategic move for us. That paper when it became published then enabled us to present it at other places. For instance, we presented it at USAID. We were invited to present it there. In our presentation there with other efforts, the other big area of concentration was to influence the US government because if we could move the US government and signal attention To this issue area through recognition by the US government, as a leader, we felt other governments would follow suit. And so a big court of our work has been trying to influence the US government in recognizing this issue area as important. And I'm pleased to say that within two years of working with them, we were able to get language in this state and foreign appropriations bill around the importance of eyeglasses to education. And over time, that led to just this year for the first time actual line item in the state and foreign appropriations bill. And so for the first time ever, we now have a line item. It's two and a half million dollars. And once the line item gets in there, it gets in there for good. So we've anticipated being there for a while.)
- Time 0:15:03
-

(highlight:: Trust: The Currency of System Change
Transcript:
Speaker 1
Well, we often talk about the currency of system change work is trust. Without it, you're not going to get anywhere. All the organizations you're bringing together and the systems that you're trying to change have to deeply believe that your efforts as the secretary, if you will, are in line with What they're trying to achieve and additive and with what they're trying to achieve and not working across purposes. And one of the reasons why we rolled Alliance out of Vision Spring pretty early on was that it became very clear that in order to have trust, you had to have sort of that neutral broker stance. You couldn't be embedded representing one organization in an effort of many. So yes, trust is the currency and it's something that is only built by open communication, consistent action and often leading from behind and putting the members out in front. For instance, we were instrumental in getting a front page New York Times article placed about a year ago.)
- Time 0:24:17
-