Why ShareCraft?

Learning from others is key to social innovation but it's hard for busy practitioners to find the time. ShareCraft helps make that process easier.

Wall graffiti showing possibilities flowing from heart and sharing
Photo by Katarzyna Pypla / Unsplash

Working in the social impact world is both inspiring and difficult. Social services and not-for-profit organisations are filled with smart, ethical and motivated people wanting to do good - and good is often done. Yet there are some social issues that stubbornly resist all these valiant efforts to address them. We may make a difference at the personal level, but the statistics on everything from homelessness to child protection to mental health refuse to improve at scale.

In social services, there are many pieces of the puzzle we don’t yet fully understand - what specifically works for which people in what context in an increasingly complex and dynamic world. When we don't know the answers, we need to accept that we don't know the answers, and prioritise learning, experimentation, and testing in the real world - ie do more and faster practical innovation.

Learning from what others have done is fundamental to practical innovation - whether from what’s worked in similar contexts or different contexts. While learning from theory can be a useful starting point, there is no substitute for learning from practice, from the people who have actually delivered a service in a context to people over time. That's because it's not just the idea or 'model' that matters - the local context, the style, relationships, networks, skills and leadership of individuals can have a huge effect on success. All this 'implicit' knowledge that leads to successful social programs is often hard to replicate in other places. Yet we must try - otherwise we are caught in a wasteful loop where every local community tries to invent it's own unique and sub-scale solution to common problems.

The social sector sometimes protects itself from accusations of ineffectiveness by pointing to how unique each individual is, how everyone's background and needs are different. While this is true, it can be misused to slow down learning from good programs. We need to get better at taking not just ideas but well-developed and well-documented service models to new places and new groups of people. Yes they need to be adapted to local conditions and needs, but there is incredible practice wisdom and insights that can be made to work for others if we make the effort to spread the best service models.

But it’s often hard for busy practitioners to find the time to share their practice wisdom let alone document it and train others, and there is seldom any incentive to do so in a resource-constrained sector. We believe that a system is needed that makes it easier to find and implement good evidence-based practices, and provides incentives to share knowledge and build learning communities across differences.

That’s ShareCraft.

We are consultants and data analysts who have worked for many years across many different organisations and social issues. It's common to see great programs limited by being delivered by a single organisation in a single location, without the resources to spread and scale that program. Communities and beneficiaries miss out on effective, evidence-based programs, and funders don't get to see the wider picture and they miss out on funding better solutions. These social organisations (the creators of this service model IP) usually don't have the time or funds to open offices in new places and take the risk to spread their great program.

To help accelerate this spreading of great programs, we need to support organisations to scale their service models to others. By licensing a service model, the creator of that service model gets to spread it to new places without having to deliver it themselves, and they get a payment for the IP and training they provide to the licensee who delivers it. The new community where it spreads gets to implement a well-designed and proven program that would otherwise be very expensive (not to mention duplicative of effort) to recreate themselves.

So that's why ShareCraft - we want to promote great programs that have a social impact, spread good practice with evidence, and get solutions that work to spread and scale to new places and people more easily. We hope you'll join with us on our journey.