Four For Friday | Feb 23, 2024

LF111 | The SOIL model for systems change, secrets of a fertile Tokyo suburb, trees beat the heat and $4 billion for impact investing.

Welcome to Looking Forward’s Four For Friday. Four things that have piqued my interest this week. Enjoy!

The SOIL model for systems change

Melbourne is lucky to have Regen Melbourne in its midst. It’s a well-connected and thoughtful group dedicated to improving the city from a systems perspective, drawing on the principles of Doughnut Economics among others.

Specifically, it sees its role as being to “organise and orient business, capital, individuals and community-led organisations towards projects that will transform Greater Melbourne to be in service of people and planet.”

This piece describes their model for systems transformation that they’ve developed over the past three years. It draws on the ‘iceberg model’ for systems change, in which much of the work is below the surface, and makes it more ‘living’ and interconnected, hence the earthy metaphor.

In brief, the four parts are:

• Sensemaking. Diving into a topic and asking the existing stakeholders for what’s working and not working and getting a sense of the edges of the problem today and possible solutions tomorrow.

• Organizing. Is bringing people together thoughtfully around a shared agenda for discovery and co-learning. It’s about framing the space in a way that makes sense for existing stakeholders but is also new and useful, using e.g. Kumu maps.

• Insights. This is about meaningfully adding to the conversation with research-backed novel insights. Regen Melbourne has a Lab they use to partner with the variety of Melbourne’s universities to ensure there’s rigour, depth and data.

• Leverage Points. These are the high impact interventions that only come about after the previous three phases have been done and successfully been able to articulate where limited resources can have the most impact.

Trees reduce impact of global heating in eastern USA

Reforestation in the Eastern USA - an impressive 15m hectares over the past century - has helped limit temperature rises . Depending on the weather, air temperatures are lowered by up to 5 degrees within 400 metres of the trees, adding a significant argument in favour of ‘nature based solutions’ as an adjunct to fossil fuel reduction.

Boosted birth reads in Nagareyama, Japan

The mayor of Nagareyama, a suburb of Tokyo has successfully been able to raise the birth rate of his town; last year the national average in Japan was 1.3 and in his suburb of Tokyo it was 1.5. His a number of things, but one of the most important it seems to be in improving childcare options, including providing buses to childcare to make it easier for parents to access the scarce facilities. It’s interesting how interconnected childcare is with economic growth. The Mayor provided the reasons for this:

There were two reasons for doing this, with one being the declining birth rate. The percentage of baby boomers in Nagareyama was higher than the national average and I knew that Nagareyama couldn’t financially survive this aging population. The second reason was to attract people to the city. Nagareyama is one of the most well-known cities along the TX line now, but at the time, people didn’t even know where Nagareyama was. Our goal was to create a town that sells well, so we thought of measures we should take to attract our main target, which was working families raising children. That’s why we quickly made a ton of new nursery schools, and of course the pick-up and drop-off stations.

California Endowment invests all $4bn in impact

A bold - but also obvious, in hindsight - move by the California Endowment to put all of its $4bn fund into mission-driven impact. The more organizations with a social mission also align the power of their assets behind their missions, the quicker change will happen.

---

That’s all for this week. As always, feedback welcome. Feel free to share insights or links of interest.

- Stephen