Impact Lab

A Co-Learning Space from Multisolving Institute

What is the Impact Lab?

The Impact Lab is a research and development space for multisolving. Here you’ll find a changing menu of co-learning projects within the lab. The common thread between the projects is that they help us learn about multisolving and new forms of multisolving through collaboration and being in conversation with multisolvers around the world.

Contact us for more information. You can also join webinars and other events. 

Photo Courtesy of David Munezero
The impact lab offers
  • Coaching and support
  • Opportunities for reflection
  • Early access to tools and activities
  • Awareness building about your work
  • Research that picks up early signals of change
In partnership, we learn
  • How to make our tools and research more useful to multisolvers
  • What multisolvers need most in the current moment
  • Stories and examples of multisolving we can share with others

Learning Partnerships

Interested in building your multisolving capacity? Willing to help the Institute learn more about what’s needed and what’s working? The Impact Lab is a place for both your learning and ours. It is a container for structured, customized learning partnerships with multisolvers around the world.

Contact us for more information.

Seeds for the Future

How are people around the world meeting crises and destabilization by nurturing webs of care and connection? How might these “Seeds for the Future” be lasting innovations that shift systems towards health, well-being, justice, and climate resilience? And how can we all better support and multiply such seeds? These are the questions that drive our Seeds for the Future project.

We are addressing these questions by:

  • Facilitating a series of virtual dialogue sessions that convene sensing elements from around the planet, people who have insight into the Seeds for the Future that are emerging where they live and work.
  • Soliciting and sharing “Seeds” from anyone who observes and wants to contribute to a browsable library of Seeds.
Photo Courtesy of ELAKIDD via Story Seed Library

That opened a new front of research at Climate Interactive: what else would improve around the world if countries truly transitioned away from fossil fuels? From improvements in air quality to energy security we documented many co-benefits of climate action, and incorporated some of them into Climate Interactive’s well known computer simulation, En-ROADS.

But, the multiple benefits of actions to protect the climate remain mostly theoretical without ways of overcoming the obstacles to multisolving. That’s why, from the beginning of our work we have collaborated with others to understand the bright spots of multisolving around the world and to pilot multisolving approaches. First in Milwaukee in partnership with the Milwuakee Metropolitan Sewerage District and then in Atlanta, with Partnership for Southern Equity, we began to see what was possible by bringing the different parts of a system together in pursuit of actions and investments that lifted up many goals at once.

From this action research, along with a series of case studies of multisolving projects, we began to see attitudes and approaches that are in common across a wide diversity of multisolving projects, a topic we wrote about in Stanford Social Innovation Review.

Then came 2020. Pandemic. Escalating climate change impacts. Dire warnings about biodiversity loss. And more and more folks connecting the dots between each of these issues and structural inequity. Invitations to write, speak, and teach about multisolving came fast and furious and with it the possibility that what we’ve learned from multisolving bright spots could help support leaders around the world to respond to crises with multisolving. That spark led to the launch of the Multisolving Institute and our mission of supporting leaders as they pursue multisolving approaches