Stanford PACS 2022: A Special Progress Report

Through its award-winning magazine and website, webinars, conferences, podcasts, and more, Stanford Social Innovation Review is one of the world’s leading sources for research and practice-based knowledge in the field of social innovation. 

In 2022, the English-language print SSIR magazine had a circulation of about 13,000, with nearly 98,000 newsletter subscribers and more than 2.7 million unique website visitors exploring SSIR’s wide range of offerings for and by social change leaders around the world. 

SSIR is also continuing its global expansion and now has partnerships with organizations around the world publishing SSIR in six local-language editions: Chinese, Korean, Arabic, Spanish, Japanese, and the latest edition, Portuguese. In 2022, SSIR and partners released 8 international publications (Chinese, South Korean, Japanese) and total visits to international (non-English) digital SSIR platforms surpassed 2.75 million. More than 17,000 readers subscribe to partners’ international (non-English) newsletters.

As a prominent convener of scholars, practitioners, and leaders in social innovation, SSIR engaged nearly 12,000 people at its Nonprofit Management Institute, Frontiers of Social Innovation, China Social Innovation Summit, and Data on Purpose conferences, and at a host of informative and hands-on webinars, workshops, and speaking engagements.

PACS Faculty Co-Director Robb Willer and his team at the Polarization and Social Change Lab launched a massive, year-long project called the Strengthening Democracy Challenge to test a variety of practical ways to counter anti-democratic beliefs. The Challenge invited academics, practitioners, and industry experts to identify promising, short interventions that could reduce anti-democratic attitudes. The research team then scientifically evaluated them in one of the largest randomized experiments in the social sciences. Results from the experiment, conducted on a national sample of over 32,000 Americans, have been released as a working paper shared online in August 2022, and on the Strengthening Democracy Challenge website. Robb Willer shared the results of the challenge across multiple media outlets, including on Fox News, C-Span, The New York Times, Washington Post, NPR, The Atlantic, MSNBC’s Morning Joe, Fast Company, Yello Politics, and others.

The Program on Democracy and the Internet (PDI), in partnership with the Center on Democracy, Development and the RulT of Law (CDDRL) at Stanford University, launched a new initiative on Digital Technologies in Emerging Countries: Impacts and Responses (DTEC). The program seeks to examine and share knowledge about the impact of new technologies on countries in Asia, Africa, and Latin America by convening scholars and practitioners whose work focuses on these topics to create more, and better informed, conversations about tech policy issues prevalent in developing countries to facilitate greater knowledge production about major regional trends and observations.

“Global Neoliberalism as a Cultural Order and Its Expansive Educational Effects” published in International Journal of Sociology, authored by Julia C. Lerch, Patricia Bromley, John W. Meyer. The publication expanded sociological understandings of the cultural dimensions of neoliberalism, by conceptualizing neoliberalism as a broad cultural ideology that has reshaped how we think about people and institutions in all arenas of life, not just the economy.

In July 2022, the Civic Lives of Cities Lab published a special issue for the journal Global Perspectives titled “The Civic Lives of Cities Around the World.” The issue highlighted the value of the place-based, organizational approach that the CLCL takes in studying nonprofits and civil society around the world. The essays focus respectively on the nonprofit sector in the San Francisco Bay Area, Seattle, Shenzhen, Singapore, Sydney, and Vienna. Each essay utilizes the original and rich data from the Lab’s research to present a summary of the diverse portraits of the local nonprofit community, and then discuss several notable features of the city’s nonprofit sector, such as professionalization, embeddedness in local communities, and the use of digital technology.

On June 9, 2022, Stanford PACS and partner Bloomberg Beta hosted the fourth annual convening of the First Principles Forum (FPF), drawing nearly 90 participants. The First Principles Forum was established in 2019 to convene founders, early employees, and investors in the technology sector to advance and challenge their thinking on giving and impact. The FPF community was born out of the recognition that leaders from the technology sector will be at the forefront of the next generation of transfer of wealth.

The Nonprofit Management Institute: Bridging the Divide conference was hosted in person by SSIR from September 13-15, 2022 at Stanford University. It brought together nearly 300 nonprofit leaders and noted academics, foundation leaders, and policymakers to explore the latest research and thinking on the best ways for nonprofit leaders to avoid organizational paralysis and leverage today’s economic and political challenges to drive their organizations forward.

Hosted by SSIR in partnership with the Beijing-based Leping Foundation for Social Innovation on December 6-7, 2022, the 2022 China Social Innovation Summit attracted nearly 3,000 social innovators from around the world to provide insights from global changemakers along with direct perspectives on the work of social and environmental change being pursued in China. Designed to support and build the social impact sector in China, this annual conference marked its 10th year of programming in 2022. This year’s gathering explored the theme “New Connectivity Creating New Momentum: Towards a Stakeholder Driven World,” with several subtopics, including Understanding Today’s World, Reimagining Philanthropy, Business for Social Good, and Fostering Well-being.

In 2022, Stanford PACS held its Inaugural Book Festival, which celebrated the scholarly milestones of our alumni and fellows. From March 31 to April 2, 2022, we brought together 8 authors for rich conversations about their new books, covering a wide range of topics including democracy, polarization, social inequality, limitations of philanthropy, and political legitimacy. The Book Festival participants were a curated group of 35-40 PACS alumni, current faculty members, PhD fellows, postdoctoral fellows, and a few other Stanford faculty members from across campus. The convening was an extraordinary celebration of the scholarship that we have helped support and inspire since our founding. It stimulated ideas for future research and prompted discussions about the ways we could continue to expand our scholar programs.

The Global Innovation for Impact Lab, in collaboration with R4D/IDIA, delivered a training course for the international funder and practitioner community. For the first time, the training took place in Kenya to enable the participation of local parties unable to travel to the EU or US. We are currently preparing to deliver this program to  a new cohort in South Africa in April 2024. The program will be co-sponsored by USAID.

In partnership with El Centro de Filantropía e Inversiones Sociales (CEFIS) at Universidad Adolfo Ibáñez in Santiago, Chile, Stanford PACS launched the new Spanish-language Effective Philanthropy Guide for Latin America. To help build on PACS’ partnership with CEFIS, SSIR’s Editor in Chief Eric Nee traveled to Chile in June 2022 to speak at the university, where he was joined by PACS’ Board Member Felipe Medina. We hosted a workshop for about 100 members of the Association of Family Foundations in Chile on the challenges of leading foundations during uncertain times. We also hosted an online discussion about how COVID has changed philanthropy with about 200 faculty from universities throughout Latin America.