Jeroo Billimoria On Impact Led Entrepreneurial Networks Catalysing Systems Change

Jeroo Billimoria is the founder of several innovative and award-winning NGOs, with over twenty years’ experience running systems change organizations as a Skoll Awardee, and Ashoka and Schwab Fellow.

Among her previous organizations are Child and Youth Finance International, Aflatoun International, Childline India and Child Helpline International, which have helped enable the financial inclusion and protection of children and youth in more than 180 countries.

Jeroo is now founder of One Family Foundation, which incubates social innovations, helps them scale, and is currently anchoring Catalyst 2030 – a global network working to accelerate progress towards the SDGs through radical and transformative social innovation at the country level.

Jeroo discusses the development of values based ecosystems for social entrepreneurs to collaborate and her perspective on globalised social innovation.

Highlights from the interview (listen to the podcast for full details)

[Tom Allen] - To start off, could you please share a bit about your background and what led to your passion in social innovation and systems change?

[Jeroo Billimoria] - If I can be honest, I was brought up into it, so I can't take much credit. My mother was a professional social worker, one of the earliest in India. My family was involved in the freedom movement in India, so it was just in my DNA. I remember being taken with her to work from a very young age, and I think I grew up on it. I did my Masters in social work, and I also wanted to do management. I then didn't think that would be enough to create change, because I thought we really needed to do a lot of policy work for systems change. I started to study more about it, and I looked at a lot of systems in community because I grew up doing community development. I looked at a lot of principles from community development, transferred them into systems change, and realised what was important is changing systems collaboratively. For myself, I created this concept of collaborative systems change, which I've applied across a lot of my organisations, especially Catalyst 2030.

As the Founder of the One Family Foundation and Catalyst 2030, please tell us more about the impactful projects you are involved in and the change you're creating?

One Family Foundation is an idea which my children (who were adopted), had, and they wanted to start a small family foundation to give back. But, like everything else, when children start something, it becomes the parent’s responsibility to look after it! One Family Foundation incubates projects. We look at what we can do, so before this we incubated something called Aselo with Tech Matters, which basically is an impact platform collecting the data for child health plan’s so we can advocate better. Through the advocacy, we can accelerate systems change. Catalyst [2030] was my third project which we were incubating. Catalyst started as a WhatsApp group of leading social entrepreneurs from across the world. We used to meet up together and we thought, “while all of us are doing a lot of individual impact, if we came together, couldn't we accelerate our collective impact?”

That was the proof behind Catalysts joining together, so I don't take credit for the idea of Catalyst. I think it's the collective of everyone coming together and creating something. Today, we have over 2000 members of Catalyst across the globe creating many initiatives. We have had 90 plus collaborations in the past three years, which have emerged from Catalyst. There are 40 plus country chapters, and Australia and New Zealand both have chapters. Each chapter creates their own collaborations and policy work with their government, so what we're trying to do is create the ecosystem which will allow social innovation to thrive. That's what Catalyst is doing, and in three years I think it's come a long way.

What have some of the biggest challenges been on this Catalyst 2030 journey, and what lessons have you learned as a result?

In terms of challenges, if I can be honest, Catalyst is a day-to-day inspiration. There have been very few challenges other than funding. Donors don't realise the importance of networks like this.

Peer driven networks which are value based are not normal in the sector, because there is so much donor-generated competition.

This peer co-created collaboration is something which is a ‘new animal’ so to speak. It is something they're not used to, so they're not willing to fund it, and I think that is probably the biggest challenge. We do have two core funders, but I wish more donors were looking at this space, because it would help accelerate social impact. Funding has been one of the biggest challenges.

Another lovely challenge is that our members are so amazing and have so many ideas! With a small team, trying to support all of them is something which is challenging from time to time. If you have one hundred collaborations and a team of twenty people, you can imagine how difficult it is. But that's the most wonderful challenge to have; I hope we have a thousand collaborations going through us. My biggest learning is let it go, let it flow; but that's been a learning lesson from 20 years of entrepreneurship which I use in Catalyst.

What is your perspective on the joint ownership over your projects and providing a space for different founders, entrepreneurs, and systems innovators to step up and take charge?

Honestly, all we do is provide space for co-creation and connection. Part of collaborative systems change is based on principles, and so our whole approach and methodology is based on the principles that are convened, that's what Catalyst does. We convene in a lot of spaces and connect the right like-minded people. They co-create on their own, a secretary isn't needed to do that. They start their own projects, celebrate their successes, and basically write down and calibrate what they are doing.

They cohere because they bond together and then start new things on their own.

New organisations can emerge out of Catalyst 2030, which is fantastic.

Through it, we see that we are being able to shift the needle, so I think those are some of the main principles we look at which are core to our organisation.

What is your current take on the state of social entrepreneurship globally, and where do you see opportunities to improve our communities?

Our community needs three things:

The movement needs to grow much bigger and we need to attract more as a movement.
We are very niche, and we need to be able to articulate better to governments what we do so we are able to have the right environment to go further and become more mainstream.
We need to shift some structures and systems which are rooted in historical colonial systems that need to be changed, so we are able to really open the floodgates of development.

For social entrepreneurs that are working hard to scale their enterprise and create a positive social or environmental impact, what advice would you give them?

My advice to social innovators and entrepreneurs is have a management plan and go for it.

Always start by thinking and dreaming big.

That's my two cents worth.

I really believe that sometimes as social entrepreneurs, we are all about passion. But passion has to link with strong management principles and strong organisations, so you are able to scale that impact.

What inspiring projects or initiatives have you come across recently that are creating some positive social change?

We have 90 collaborations and Catalysts, so many of them are creating change. But if I have to name a few, one of them is Catalyst Market, and any entrepreneur who has a social enterprise with products they want to sell should join it. It's an online website of social entrepreneurs and innovators who have products they want to sell. If you put these products on Amazon, Shopify or any of these websites, we never get what we want. We thought if we all came together and created this website, we would be able to get more traction. That's Catalyst Market, and now they're creating two system exchange forms including their own ecosystem. Catalyst Market is now trying to create all the logistics that are needed to help each other, so that they can look at all the challenges they have and try to create an ecosystem which can help people. We have [The Education Initiative], which is looking at transforming education for the 21st century. All the principles that are there focus on individual development. We also have initiatives helping the environment. I can go on, there are lots and lots of initiative.

To finish off then, what books or resources would you recommend to our listeners?

Recently I was with my son reading this book Lean Impact. That's a very nice book for young entrepreneurs starting their work. The main message in the book is that when you start to create a ginormous business plan, instead think about starting on your own with something small so you can create an agile development of the project. That was something which I thought was very interesting for starting entrepreneurs.

I also very much recommend Cynthia Rainer and Francois Bonnici’s work on systems, because they talk about what is the best way to do systems change with communities and collaborations. That's something which they are looking at, so that is something interesting for people to be able to do and read about.