Stories & Insights

When we first shared the story of the Wisconsin Labs for Environment and Democracy, or WiLEAD, the labs were still unfolding. Students were mapping environmental challenges, building relationships with community partners, and designing small experiments to test what might move people from concern to action. Now, after a full year of work across three labs,

WiLEAD labs are now underway, and across Wisconsin, students, professors, community organizers, and local leaders are rolling up their sleeves to bridge divides and co-create solutions to the state’s most pressing environmental challenges. Each lab is a living experiment in how people can come together—across sectors, generations, and differences—to tackle shared problems while strengthening local

Our country is more divided than ever, with too many of us isolated from those who hold different views. This division harms our communities, disrupts our families, and prevents us from working together for the common good. Between April 2023 and September 2024, Root Change and The Carter Center launched an ambitious effort  in Arizona,

Root Change is thrilled to celebrate the completion of the first-ever youth Social Labs cohort, which took place in Phnom Penh, Cambodia as part of the USAID Advancing Youth Leadership (AYL) Program! Over four months, twelve teams of ambitious young people came together to address some of their community’s most pressing challenges. The projects that

Root Change’s Social Lab initiative is empowering communities to bridge divides, foster connections, combat disinformation and tackle the rise of extreme rhetoric through innovative, grassroots solutions. Across the country, diverse teams of everyday citizens are coming together to experiment with creative ways to reduce polarization and build stronger communities. From organizing community debates that blend

This blog is a follow-on to an earlier post about a Social Lab that was conducted as part of the three-year USAID-funded Local Organizations—Movement Towards Self-Reliance (LO-MTSR) activity implemented by The Cloudburst Group (Cloudburst) and their two major partners, Partners Global and the DevLab@Duke University. LO-MTSR aimed to increase the organizational resiliency of Cambodian civil

These activities are being conducted as part of the three-year USAID-funded Local Organizations—Movement Towards Self-Reliance (LO-MTSR) activity implemented by The Cloudburst Group (Cloudburst) and their two major partners, PartnersGlobal and the DevLab@Duke University. LO-MTSR aims to increase the organizational resiliency of Cambodian civil society organizations (CSOs) across the health, education, food security, environment, and democracy,

About the Authors Emas Potolani and Myson Jambo are Root Change’s Social Lab Field Managers and Malawi Ambassadors who served on the frontlines of a USAID-funded Local Works Initiative in Malawi. The purpose of the Social Lab is to test alternative approaches to supporting, sustaining and measuring locally owned and led development. The Social Labs

This post was originally published by the Global Partnership for Social Accountability on July 9, 2019. “We need the local people themselves to prescribe solutions to the problems they’re facing, and they must be able to lead in testing and implementing those solutions.” Charles Kajoloweka, Founder and Executive Director of Youth and Society (YAS) in Malawi. The

This post was originally published on the CIVICUS blog on June 28, 2019. Real change happens when local communities are in the lead—leveraging their assets, ideas, and expertise to implement solutions to their own problems. Unfortunately, too often, development initiatives bypass local communities and local resources in designing and carrying out programmes. At Root Change, we

Fifty people including citizens, representatives from Community Based Organizations (CBOs), NGOs, INGOs, government, and traditional authorities turned up at the Rumphi Malin Lodge to reflect on their recent efforts to innovate together and address emerging issues of trust and power within their group.  They came by bicycle, mini bus, car, motor bike and on foot

“The idea of an inclusive forum for discussion sits deep in our culture. The idea that we can harness this part of our culture to undertake actions to reform the aid system is new and exciting. We have complained about the jet-set foreign aid experts. But it is on us to step up and become