The Foundation

The Foundation:
Human Dignity, Respect and Agency

Focus on building human dignity, respect and agency of the people the program aims to serve, and of everyone involved in delivering, supporting or enabling the work.

In our work with innovators in whole child development, we have been impressed by the way they honor the dignity and individuality of everyone they serve. Their work brings to life Amartya Sen’s concept of development as freedom, with a focus on human capability. They see people living in settings of adversity, even extreme adversity, as fully possessed of human dignity and potential, and their work involves supporting that potential and removing barriers to its realization.

It may seem that work in this spirit, which depends on high-quality, personal relationships with every individual and family, would be difficult to scale up across systems serving thousands, hundreds of thousands or millions of people. It may seem necessary to accept compromises on the path to large numbers. We have observed that scaling relationship-based programs is indeed challenging, but that within this challenge is also an opportunity: Respectful relationships are contagious. Honoring the dignity of front-line service providers, for example, provides a context for them to in turn honor the families they serve. When innovators ground their scaling strategy in an uncompromising focus on the dignity and agency of everyone involved, they can actually energize systems which have limited resources for service delivery; they can engage individuals, families and service providers in a journey that effectively solves delivery challenges and realizes untapped potential. In short, scaling can align with, rather than cut against, work that honors each individual.

Our journey with innovators on scaling their programs is fundamentally about pathways and strategies to enable this kind of transformation. We have seen innovators achieve a great deal as they enact such strategies; the ‘core themes’ we offer below represent our efforts to synthesize salient aspects of these strategies. While we have seen the promise of these approaches, they are each evolving works in progress, and part of a large ongoing exploration. We aim to offer observations from the journey, not a picture of the any destination.