Bill Shore and Darrell Hammond are fabulously successful social entrepreneurs. Each founded a nonprofit that raised tons of money, inspired many thousands of volunteers, drew great press, and provided lots of services. (Share Our Strength fed homeless people; KaBOOM! built playgrounds.) Now, along with Amy Celep, these two founders have written a provocative piece entitled “When Good is Not Good Enough.” This passage –contributed by Shore–gives a flavor of the whole article:

So I began with an idea that was clear, simple, and wrong: we would end hunger by raising money and granting it out to food banks and other emergency food assistance programs. It should have been obvious then, as it is now, that hunger is a symptom of the deeper, more complex problem of poverty.

Both Share Our Strength and KaBOOM! have shifted to addressing what they see as the root causes of big social problems, using tactics inspired by the movements against smoking, drunk driving, and malaria.

In a reply also published by the Stanford Social Innovation Review, Cynthia Gibson, Katya Smyth, Gail Nayowith, & Jonathan Zaff anticipate most of the points I would want to make. They applaud the honesty and ambition of the original article but raise doubts about whether nonprofit organizations can really “solve” social problems without the rest of the public. The two articles together offer a great guide to the debate between social entrepreneurship and civic engagement.

I would add a couple of points that are generally consistent with Gibson, Smyth, Nayowith and Zaff.

First, the metaphor of “root causes” is problematic and misleading. It suggests that if you could fix the root, you could solve a whole problem in one stroke, much as pulling out the root of a weed will kill it. Much more typically, problems form complex systems with no  primary cause. For example, racism, crime, violence, education, and poverty all influence each other. Poverty worsens crime, but crime independently deepens the poverty of afflicted communities. Such complexity should not cause despair. You can intervene helpfully at many points in the cycle, not only at the “deepest” point, which may be the least accessible. For instance, better policing does not directly address poverty, but it can cut crime, and that helps poor people.

The metaphor of a root misleadingly suggests that you should only work on the part of the problem that seems somehow biggest and most difficult. That is doubly wrong: (1) you might be able to do more good with limited resources if you intervened somewhere else, and (2) even if you solved the problem that you see as primary, the rest of the system would remain.

Second, the idea that organizations can solve social problems ignores the persistence of politics. In We Are the Ones We Have Been Waiting For (starting on pp. 65), I mention the popular “moon-ghetto” metaphor from the 1960s:

This was the idea that engineers and other specialists had put human beings on the moon (and brought them safely home), so it should be possible to tackle the problems of the so-called “ghetto” in much the same way. It was all a matter of scientifically diagnosing the causes of poverty and efficiently deploying solutions.

Actually, the moon and the “ghetto” are very different. The moon is almost perfectly detached from all other human issues and contexts, because it is 240,000 miles away from our planet (although NASA’s launch facilities in Florida and Houston might have some local impact). The goal of the Apollo Program—whether you endorsed it or not—was clear and easily defined. The challenges were physical; thus Newtonian physics allowed engineers to predict the impact of their tools precisely in advance. The costs were also calculable—in fact, the Apollo Program was completed under budget. The astronauts and other participants were highly motivated volunteers, who had signed up for a fully developed concept that they understood in advance. The president and other national leaders had committed enough funds to make the Apollo Program a success, because its value to them exceeded the costs.

In contrast, a low-income urban neighborhood is enmeshed with other communities. Its challenges are multi-dimensional. Its strengths and weaknesses are open to debate. Defining success is a matter of values; even how to measure the basic facts is controversial. (For example, how should “race” be defined in a survey? What are the borders of a neighborhood?) Everyone involved—from the smallest child on the block to the most powerful official downtown—has distinct interests and motivations. Outsiders may not care enough to provide adequate funds, and residents may prefer to leave than to make their area better. When social scientists and policymakers implement rewards or punishments to affect people’s behavior, the targets tend to realize what is happening and develop strategies to resist, subvert, or profit from the policies—a response that machines can never offer. No wonder we could put a man on the moon but our poor urban neighborhoods persist. …