Multisolving : Creating Systems Change in a Fractured World

For most of Elizabeth Sawin’s career, she was not a multisolver.Instead, she worked on a single, albeit immenselyimportant problem: climate change.Despite tremendous effort—long hours of teaching, attending conferences,publicizing analysis—at the end of the day, she felt like she was chasing her tail.Unless people began to recognize themultitude of unexpected benefits from ratcheting down emissions, climate change would remain a losing political issue. That experience, along with the guidance of leaders in systems thinking and racial justice, convinced her that the world’sthorniest problems may be easier to tackle together than one by one.That’s multisolving: using a single investment oftime or money to solve many problems at the same time. (Reduced fossil fuel use = improvements in climate, health,equity, economics, and more.) While the idea of killing two birds with one stone (or “filling two needs with one deed”) isage-old, and the notion of co-benefits in policy-making has been around for years, Multisolving addresses the currentmismatch between complex, deeply intertwined societal issues and our siloed approach to them. This unique resource is for local school boards that need revenue for their students but don’t want to overtax low-income seniors.It is for nonprofits working to reduce food waste and combat the root causes of hunger while increasing racialjustice.It is for seaside communities that can protect themselves from flooding while also improving biodiversity with aliving coastline.It may also be for you: doing the work you know is imperative but that is sometimes overwhelming, atiny a drop in a swirling ocean. Multisolving can’t promise a list of “fifty simple things to make everything OK.” What it does offer are strategies to buildsolidarity between diverse groups, overcome powerful interests, and create last change that benefits us all.