A few observations on theories of change
Part 1: A diatribe on diagrams
Hello friends! I’m still fiddling with the rhythms, structure, and content of this relaunched blog-turned-newsletter. If you signed up in the past few months, hi!! I’m grateful. I want to acknowledge at the top that, while most of posts the past few months were heavier on the spiritual, inner-work side of things, this one is heavier on thinking about tactics and philosophies of social change. For me, living toward solidarity is about integrating these two dimensions of love and liberation in the places, times, politics, seasons and relationships we find ourselves. But different folks have different jams, and I’m sure everyone here isn’t equally into all of what I’ll dabble in. So I hope you’ll stick around, stay curious, and tell me what you think. Cultivating a way of being together that’s abundant in all our diversity is the point of this following after Jesus, right? Onward!
I grew up with the sheltered-kid double whammy. We were conservative evangelicals (not great)1 and we lived out in the country (awesome). With that childhood, let’s just say I entered the world without a deep grasp of “society.” So I’m often playing catchup. That might look like getting way too into Hip-Hop Evolution and subsequent 90s rap playlists for a white boy. Or reading the Harry Potter books in my late 20s.
When I stumbled into life and struggles with homeless and poor folks, political myths I grew up believing fell apart and a whole new universe of my ignorance started opening up. I’m always disoriented when I meet people who call themselves “red diaper babies,” the kind of kids who have reform or revolution debates sophomore year of college. I have friends who started organizing in their teens and got in enough reps early to hit their twenties with a solid grasp of tactics and high political intelligence. (I’m in awe of these friends, but I recognize most of them got into organizing fighting for the lives in immigration or BLM battles. They got the skills but also the scars.) Even the kids of liberal protestants share a starting point in the world I struggle to understand sometimes. (Though, in this case, I find it as often hobbles deeper solidarity and imagination as not.)
Meanwhile I was still asking people to explain what the heck a nonprofit was in my mid twenties. (Now, I did use the “can you explain nonprofits to me” line to help get my first date with the woman who became my wife, so don’t think I’m complaining. I’m just saying it’s been a journey.) All of this gave me a hunger to understand the world. Because I took such a circuitous path, I wandered through a lot of “social change camps,” let’s call them, with a lot of different ideas about how social change should take place and what, exactly, we were trying to change things into. I’m still discovering more all the time.
Something you begin to notice about theories of change is that the people who develop them love themselves some diagrams. Which is to say they’re a lot like me. So this week I’d like to make a few observations on the kinds of diagrams that show up in theory of change presentations — and to think about what’s being said behind what they are explicitly saying.
If we go looking through theory of change diagrams, regardless of the ideological background, I think they can be sorted into three general types. In no particular order, here they are with a little non-comprehensive commentary.
TYPE 1: THE PROBLEM
My first encounter with a theory of change was handed to me by a friend and mentor one year older than me with whom I had many of my earliest college-era experiences that got me started on this journey. When Helping Hurts was probably the book you read first if, like me, you were an evangelical “with a heart for the poor” trying to figure stuff out in the early 2010s.
I have a whole “When When Helping Hurts Hurts” post in me someday if anyone cares, but I also hold it was gratitude. I don’t think I’d ever asked deeper critical questions like “Why is there poverty in the first place?” until I read them asking it. At some point we learn to appreciate the imperfect role players who shaped our journey. Unfortunately, the authors are basically trying to apply welfare work reform to the Christian charity complex. Don’t read it. But I bring it up because they were the first place I saw an example of a social change expert offering a diagram of “the problem.” This model isn’t terrible, honestly, and it could get us several steps toward a working theology of structural sin. But they ultimately sidestep anything that would imply a need for structural change, instead localizing “the problem” within poor communities and individuals, and their need to regain dignity by assuming the Protestant work ethic: entrepreneurship, labor, and consumption.
I’m digressing. The point isn’t whether this model is right, just that any theory of change has a theory about what’s broken. Whether a focus is placed on education, or social entrepreneurship, or labor and broad-based organizing, or reparations, or mass protest, or electoral politics, and so on, and all the subcategories within each of these, there are emphases being placed on:
a particular point in our social systems where intervention should be targeted
the right tactics to applied to that target
Both express underlying assumptions about what’s broken and what needs fixing. Whether made explicit in a diagram or not, a “theory of the problem” serves as a starting point for theories of change. If a theory of change doesn’t make these presuppositions explicit, that doesn’t mean they are wrong, but for our own sakes it is worth teasing them out.
TYPE 2: THE SOLUTION/STRATEGY
These are probably the most common theory of change diagrams. They all try to show the process you should follow in order to make change happen.
Organizers tend to have nice, easy to follow versions of these. One classic branch comes out of the popular education school, with roots going back to Paolo Freire, whose notes on solidarity I wrote about recently. This school use something called the spiral model:
Another similar version comes out of the Saul Alinsky school of community organizing, which describes itself as a strategy of “power organizing.”
Both of these would be examples of a “praxis cycle” where, in theory at least, participants revolve through action and reflection.
A totally different type of diagram I would place in this same category, because it is trying to teach activists about the process their campaigns will go through and how to act in each phase, is a model proposed by Bill Moyers based on his experiences in the civil rights, anti-war, and climate movements. In 1987, he wrote a seminal essay “The Movement Action Plan.” It offered organizers a map for anticipating the phases work passes through before achieving victory.
So these are the “how to do the job” diagrams. Real life is always messier, but these are probably my favorite.
TYPE 3: COMPARING/RELATING THE OPTIONS
The third most common theory of change diagram you come across is the type that tries to show how various approaches to change making relate to one another.
When Helping Hurts had one. For them, the three approaches they present relate to various stages or causes of poverty: whether it’s resulting from some sort of disaster (give relief!) or a more endemic state (do development, aka make ‘em work for it!). Anything related to structural change is totally off the page. Which is part of why I’m sharing it. In every case, what is excluded is as revealing about underlying beliefs as anything.
If the approach above is trying (inadequately) to demonstrate what interventions are appropriate in a variety of contexts, then another comparative diagram type is the spectrum. These compare a number of approaches against a particular value which the theory of change holds in high regard.
In this first example, the value is ostensibly grassroots power but could perhaps be more explicitly described as a valuing of direct democracy.
Another example of a comparative spectrum comes out of the Alinsky tradition of community organizing where the value held by this theory of change is whether or not an approach to social transformation centers the gathering of enough people around a common issue and demand in such a way that they have sufficient collective force to get what they want to happen to actually happen — whether that be forcing a politician to pass a law or a corporation to change its actions. This is what is meant by power organizing.
These diagrams, you’ve likely noticed, function on two levels: educational and polemic. This is true of all of these categories, but particularly so for this third comparative genre. Diagrams and theories of change in general are trying to help you make sense of the world by offering a more systematic lens through which to interpret and act upon social reality (we can’t have imagination, and definitely not critical imagination, without images). But they are also very much trying to convince you of a particular course of action rooted in their own ideological preferences.
Nothing wrong with ideological preferences. We’ve all got them. We just have to surface them, then either own them or rethink them. And there’s nothing wrong with a good polemic per se. Particularly not for organizing, which we need a lot more of! But issues can arise. Efforts to systematize the complexities of any social reality are always also simplifications, and some simplifications are better than others. Another set of issues crops up when we draw a “map of the world” where all roads points to ourselves.
You can see how all this functions pretty clearly in the diagram above. Now I don’t mean to throw Alinsky-tradition organizers under the bus. I love me some folks in these organizations, many of them are doing the Lord’s work, I’m grateful for my readers among them, and owe an enormous debt for all I’ve learned from them. So just consider this me picking on my friends.
Anyway, let me just point out three issues I have with that last diagram which illustrates some ways our theories of change — particularly when boiled down for popular consumption — can start to create new problems:
Exclusion - Likely inadvertently, the diagram above leaves out a lot of needed approaches, including the sort of grassroots, solidarity economy-oriented community development I’ve spent much of my career doing.
Reductionism - What if the spectrum is more of a matrix or a web? What if your analysis of power is sharp enough to move a policy decision “the people’s way” here and there but doesn’t actually address the deeper structuring forces driving our social crises?
Isolationism - This can happen by devaluing other groups way of pursuing the same goals you are, or by wanting to fashion power by having a bright line around who is “your” base/membership and who isn’t, thus loosing opportunities for broader coalition building. In both cases you ultimately loose out on potential movement power and opportunity for synergy through multiple approaches.
I’m planning to think more about these challenges our theories of change can have with of depth, multiplexity, and integration in the “part II” of this post, coming sometime next month.
May peace, joy, and justice be yours till then, friend.
Some Reads
I’ve google searched “J. Kameron Carter new book” every couple months for the past three years since finishing his magnum opus Race: A Theological Account, so suffice it to say I’ve already preordered Carter’s The Anarchy of Black Religion: A Mystic Song and so should you (if you’re into complex but thrilling theological writing with a Black theory vibe and want deeper resources for dreaming and enfleshing worlds, as Carter loves to say, “otherwise” than whiteness would have it). Expect some posts around here where I’ll attempt to think with Carter later this year. If anyone gets this TELL ME AND LET’S BOOK CLUB!!
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wrote an essay last week that spoke to so many parts of my soul as I’ve come back to “work” from parental leave (because for some reason we don’t consider what I was doing on leave “work”) while still highly involved in caring for our family and longing to hold onto the contemplative inner space I found myself returned to by grace this spring. Love this paragraph!“In my thinking, living seasonally used to mean that winter was for rest, spring was for gentle work, summer was for hustle, and fall was for cutting back in preparation for another winter of rest. While this still has merit, as we move through spring and into summer, I’m finding that summer can be slow too. Yes, the hope is for fruitfulness as we’ve planted our gardens and await fresh produce to fill our home. But is fruitfulness the same as anxious striving for growth? Is seasonal growth the same as grind culture’s hustle for productivity? I think not.”
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The one and only
has been breaking down how the Torah is a chiastic structure (ABCBA - remember?) with Leviticus as the book it all points to and chapter 19 as the middle of the middle where the heart and souls and essence of Torah finds its deepest, sharpest clarity (you may be familiar with the time Jesus quotes from here when asked a particularly important question). And guess what?
Love you mom and love our people. You’re a big part of why I’m here doing what I’m doing!
Yesss, love me some Paolo Freire! (My favorite boss, an assistant principal at my last school, had a "Praxis" tattoo, and I can't think of anything more badass.)
Cheers to reading (and loving) Harry Potter in adulthood! 🍻😂