This will be a definitive year. The moment requires Move to launch new proposals, test new limits and run more risks. Only in this way will we be able to leverage our contribution to expanding and enhancing the positive social impact of public and private initiatives, our mission.

We have reinvented our organization. Internally we have adjusted the team, divisions and protocols in order to be more efficient and capable of learning from our practice. We will be working in such a way that all the services nourish one another, in an environment of converging experiences, where each piece of data, tool or decision can be useful to our whole community of partners, customers and coworkers.

Some of our coworkers have become mothers and we have been requested to balance the working conditions with this special stage in their lives. Our gender agenda, which has long been present in theoretical reflections, has broadened and needs to progress. The diversity of the team has been questioned, bringing the issue of race to the fore and raising the need for affirmative action. Without a doubt, gender and race are not trivial issues. We believe in allowing such issues to manifest themselves and to seek, through affective conversations and tense dialogue, the healthiest paths for Move.

In this experience of organizational change, with its delights and afflictions, the established principle is having the basis to help us understand our customers’ pains more clearly. We will thus put forward the most appropriate solutions for the challenges they face.

We recognize and uphold our talents and will continue to offer profound evaluation and strategic planning processes, concerned with a critical reading of social programs and policies. We have observed, however, that this is limited and new ways of contributing to social impact initiatives are needed.

So we are seeking innovation. We are studying the emerging movement of lean organizations and connecting with it. We have adopted the embryonic proposal of Feedback Labs, which suggests incorporating feedback in order to bring together, with evaluation and monitoring, the pillars that anchor organizational learning. Still in construction, this approach emphasizes swiftness, seeks what is essential and points to the production of insights rather than absolute conclusions, laws or final truths, whose genesis is all too often unviable in the context of social intervention.

Our portfolio is thus expanding. As well as the traditional fronts of action, we have deepened our willingness to bring quality and rigor to the design of new institutes and foundations by way of studies, plans and well-structured theories of change. We have flirted with the collaborative flows linked into the agenda of collective impact, ventured with greater interest into the field of shared value and will finally be offering formative processes in the shape of courses, seminars and workshops.

We can see an ocean before us. Now we must set sail. I confess that we do not yet have everything ready, the tools totally designed, the crystal-clear solutions. No, this would be impossible for us and even contradictory. We will polish this new organization along the way, learning from what reality shows us. What is clear is this horizon, the enthusiasm for the journey, the curiosity to learn and a clear sense of the mission to increasingly fulfill our support for positive social impact. This is an ultra-relevant subject in these political times we are going through.

Let’s see where this journey will lead.  May we sail together.

Daniel Brandão
Executive Director
Move Social
February 2019