Issue Briefs

The Challenge

In the past decade, students of all ages have become interested in the field of social innovation. While interest has grown, information resources haven’t kept up.

Social issues contexts are notoriously difficult to understand: stakeholders are vast and varied, information is scattered, and issue causes and consequences are interconnected and complex. The lack of a foundational information resource presented a large barrier of entry for aspiring social innovators.

As a member of the founding team, I worked with The Ballard Center for Social Impact, the world’s largest university program focused on social impact, to solve for this tension of aspiration without adequate information. The result?

A social issues research library that empowers social innovators with the information they need

The Process

Social issues are complex, and our social innovators needed simple, structured information to inform their aspirations.

Social innovators also come in all sizes, shapes, and ages, and it was critical that our resource meet the needs of youth changemakers and professionals alike. So, we started with a central question.

To determine how we might achieve rigor and become a highly trusted academic resource, we researched existing publications that represent the standard for rigor: academic journals, law/business reviews, and government reports, paying careful attention to their sources of information.

Next, we brainstormed how we might develop a voice and a structure that would be accessible. We determined that our voice would be simple, direct, approachable, and consistent by 1) creating a style guide, 2) defining key terms, and 3) executing a peer editing system.

In developing our structure, we surfaced a critical insight: while each social issue is uniquely complex, each can be broken down into key components that are consistent across issue areas.

After multiple rounds of iterating on these components, we settled on the following structure:

• contributing factors

• consequences

• practices - description, impact, gaps

• key takeaways
  

To prototype our structure and voice, I selected a topic, Sexual Assault Against Women in India, and began writing a brief. To right-size our scope for each topic, we developed the following formula: issue area + demographic + geographic area.

My topic was inspired by prior travels to India and my fierce belief that lifting up women accelerates progress across the board. The previous summer I had traveled to India with a humanitarian group where I partnered with a local non-profit to build self-sustaining latrines, provide english lessons, create a fundraising campaign, and offer togetherness at a leper colony.

I poured myself into research—filtering through complex, international sources—simultaneously parsing interconnected factors as well as connecting the dots. Diving into the writing process enabled me to surface several key learnings about our structure and voice, iterating as I went, to develop the final product.

The Result

With final briefs in hand, the website was structured and published. Since then, thousands have accessed our briefs and students continue to contribute—growing their social analysis skills.

Access my published papers here and here!