What common infrastructure enables more effective collective action for ecological and social transformation?
Open Future Coalition ran four events to put that question to the people already doing the work: an in-person convening at New York Climate Week and three salons on the social, technical, and financial infrastructure that collective action depends on. Community groups keep arriving at the same walls, and those walls are rarely about ideas. This is what 34 practitioners, funders, and technologists said about what is missing, gathered in one place so we can work from it together.
It started in person at New York Climate Week, then ran as three online salons: social, technical, financial. The Harvest is where they come back together. Click any point to jump to that session.
Collective action runs on social, technical, and financial infrastructure at once. Scaffolding is the fourth thing: the coordination and stewardship that keeps the other three working together.
Social, technical, and financial infrastructure each has people building it. What almost nobody funds is the work of holding them together: convening the people, translating between a grassroots group and a fund, keeping a shared tool alive after the grant runs out, getting a project from an idea into something an investor can actually read.
That is scaffolding, and it sits underneath the other three rather than beside them. It is also the work Open Future Coalition does. OFC provides the scaffolding and weaving function across all three: Open Impact for coordination, the Regional Resilience Fellowship for practice, and Contextual Capital Labs for the capital. The series exists because every session pointed at this same layer, and every session said it was underfunded.
Each salon convened a different part of the pathway, on purpose. Colouring every organization by where it sits on the capital stack shows what that produced, and one of the rooms should give us pause.
Salon one was the ground: six of its seven organizations are community-rooted. Salon three was the widest room in the series, and the only one where all four stages of the capital pathway sat together.
Salon two is the one to sit with. The session on building and sustaining shared technical infrastructure had five organizations in it: three funders and two toolmakers. Not one community-rooted group. That same salon's own conclusion was that shared infrastructure works best when it gets shaped through real use, not designed in a room and handed over. The room designing the commons had nobody from the ground in it.
Each salon had its own subject, and the diagonal shows it. The last column is the one that matters. Nobody scheduled a session on coordination and stewardship, and it came up in all three anyway. Click any number to read the takeaways behind it.
Good ideas stall because the infrastructure that makes a community capital-ready is missing.
The scaffolding theme, Workshop 3 at New York Climate Week, and the two middle stages below all point at the same spot. Predevelopment and catalytic capital, meaning feasibility, coordination, governance, technical assistance, and first-loss guarantees, is where community projects run out of runway. Look at the counts: 16 of these organizations work in catalytic and blended capital, and only 6 are set up for investment-ready projects. Fifteen of the 33 already work across two stages, which is what filling the gap looks like in practice.
Open a panel for the summary, speakers, what came up, and the recording.
This map shows the presenters and partner organizations. The wider group of participants shows up only as counts, further down.
Mostly North America, with organizations in Ecuador, Uganda, India, Argentina, the Netherlands, and Australia. Hover a pin for the name, click for details, and zoom in to separate organizations that sit close together. Use the filters to show one stage at a time.
The series did not settle these. They are worth bringing to the Harvest.
Search and filter the presenters, hosts, moderators, and organizations from all four events.
Five questions the series raised and left open. Bring them to the Harvest.
This is the record we are working from today. Take it apart, argue with it, add what is missing.
Have something to add after the session? Write to collaborate@openfuturecoalition.org.
No one is named here, only counted. This is where the full group of participants shows up.