Solutions Insights Lab
The Solutions Insights Lab is a targeted research and analysis service focused on identifying and interrogating what’s working and what’s not in a particular sector or field. It employs interviewing techniques drawn from the solutions journalism approach, but is not a work of journalism and is appropriately separated with a firewall from SJN’s core journalism work.
The Solutions Journalism Network is helping journalists and other media makers report on evidence-based responses to problems that many people assume are unsolvable. By exposing people to what's working, solutions reporting offers a more holistic, accurate view of the world, while building credible hope.
What happens when the journalistic principles of solutions journalism are applied in a non-journalistic system – in this case, social change? The Solutions Insights Lab, an initiative of SJN, uncovers insights, themes and patterns that can inspire and inform social change organizations. Working with notable organizations from around the globe, the Lab is a resource for social entrepreneurs, investors, nonprofits, NGOs and more. And it all starts with two questions: What's working? And what can we learn?
The Solutions Insights Lab integrates the elements of the solutions framework into research on social change. These elements include:
Recent Projects
Leading social change organizations have enlisted the Lab to support the work of social entrepreneurs, funders, investors, policymakers, NGOs and more. Here are a few examples of what that looks like in practice.
‘What’s Working: Solving the World’s Most Pressing Problems’
With support from the Skoll Foundation, the Lab created “What’s Working,” a searchable portal that combines published solutions journalism and interviews with a wide array of leaders whose work has been supported by the Skoll Foundation over the past 20 years to uncover insights that can help address social problems around the world.
Future of Wellbeing
The Rockefeller Foundation is supporting a partnership between the Lab and the Wellbeing Economy Alliance to help find and connect people working to envision the future of the “wellbeing economy.” The idea of such an economy is one that prioritizes quality of life over the quality of the economy, offering a very different vision of progress.
Eyeglass Initiatives
The Livelihood Impact Fund engaged the Lab to study pilot initiatives working with community health care workers and pharmacies to deliver reading glasses to those in need. Our analysis has already uncovered insights that can help scale these efforts, with the eventual goal of enabling access to over 800 million people globally.
