SIL Brings Faculty and Practitioners Together to Cultivate Solutions for Impact at Scale

For more than five years, Stanford Impact Labs (SIL) has worked to accelerate social impact by funding and supporting partnerships between academics and practitioners. 

As a funder uniquely positioned within the university, our aim is to spur these collaborative teams—which we call ‘impact labs’—to jointly frame problems, develop learning agendas, generate and test hypotheses, iterate on intervention strategies, and scale solutions.

By working closely with many of our funded teams, we’ve come to learn that two ingredients are particularly key to partnership success:  (1) building a trusting relationship and (2) honing a shared vision. We have also learned, thanks to insights and experiences shared by more than 40 teams across campus, that it can be difficult to carve out the time necessary to cultivate these two ingredients. Understandably, scholars and practitioners are busy doing the work in service of addressing social problems and are often tied up attending to the most immediate and pressing obstacles.

Recognizing this challenge, Stanford Impact Labs leveraged its role as an accelerator on campus to provide the backbone support of designing, hosting, and facilitating our very first Pathways to Social Impact workshop.

For two days in October 2024, SIL hosted six of our recently funded multi-disciplinary, solutions-focused research teams and their expert partners. The labs that gathered are all recipients of Stage 1 funding and engaged in developing solutions to pressing social problems, from access to family-centered care in neonatal intensive care units to healthier teen smartphone use. 

On day one, the workshop engaged all six teams to identify opportunities and conditions needed to implement and scale impact within the real constraints of existing systems like county courts and electricity markets. Teams collaborated through hands-on exercises to deepen the understanding of each member’s unique role and who they are accountable to in the broader ecosystem of the problem space. These exercises supported teams to identify shared and differing perspectives, sharpen their specific role and duties on the team, and accelerate cohesion. On day two, teams met on their own to continue these conversations and advance their progress along the path from science to impact. 

While much can be accomplished virtually these days, we’ve found that there’s no substitute for meeting in person. In some ways, the normative ease of virtual meetings make in-person gatherings even richer and more productive, especially given that the fastest road to trust involves spending time together face-to-face. 

Academic researchers and their business, nonprofit, and government partners alike voiced deep appreciation for the workshop, noting that it enabled them to achieve surprising progress given the ability to meet face-to-face for an extended period of time. One participant shared that the biggest takeaway from the gathering was “how helpful it is to meet in-person and really put theoretical discussions to the test.” Another participant noted that the workshop created the opportunity for, “our group [to have] a breakthrough for next steps and how to achieve our ultimate goal.” 

In addition to fostering individual team cohesion, the workshop created space for funded teams to engage with other impact labs working in different sectors and social issues. Researchers and practitioners learned from each other about shared roadblocks across disciplines, useful strategies to confront these challenges, and examples of successful social impact work in their field. The workshop included representatives from the judicial system, healthcare, and energy sector as well as academics with subject matter expertise ranging from legal technology to ethical AI innovations. 

In the words of one participant, “So many of the challenges we face in healthcare parallel the challenges faced in other systems and there’s so much opportunity to learn from each other.”

By making it possible for key stakeholders to physically gather and collaborate, the Stanford Impact Labs team learned more about the value of our role as not only a funder, but a convener. We plan to continue hosting in-person events to spur problem-solving mindshare across sectors and catalyze moments of connection and impact.

Click here to learn more about how SIL supports our funded teams.