Late 2015, Sweden received an unprecedented number of unaccompanied minor refugees. Some of the children had fled their countries alone, and some had been separated from their families on the way. They needed a chance to rebuild their lives in Sweden, and society was struggling to manage the situation.
We realized that to effectively help address the challenges for this particular group, we needed to act quickly. We also realized that we couldn’t do it alone. In 2016, together with our co-founders Stenbeck Foundation and Tele2, we designed a thematic program to enable the development of new solutions that improve life chances for newly arrived children and youth.
Our initial research indicated a need to complement the support that public institutions provide in several key areas, including mental health, language skills and social networks. Over the coming three years, we invited seven social entrepreneurs to an incubator program focused on developing and scaling solutions addressing these needs.
As part of the incubator support, Reach for Change has done extensive research in collaboration with external researchers to analyze the program’s impact on newly arrived children and youth. The research indicates that the solutions have led to statistically significant improvements in the youths’ mental well-being, social connectivity and language skills. Research also indicates that these improvements are fundamental to youth success in the labor market and in society in general.
"To successfully integrate the newly arrived Swedes in the labor market and the society in general is a key national challenge that naturally also affects us as a company. Through the Innovation for Integration project, we have been able to help address this challenge in an innovative way that is closely aligned with our strategy. The measurement processes that Reach for Change has implemented, and the verified fundamental impact the solutions have had, confirms that we can effectively support one of the most vulnerable groups of minors — and that there is a scope to do much more."
Expect the unexpected. With Innovation for Integration, we are breaking new ground and have had to build something from scratch. Or in entrepreneurial terms, build the plane while flying. This has underlined the need to ensure we have an agile organization and a readiness to quickly refine and adapt our approaches; when you deal with something that new you better plan for the unexpected.
Strategy-driven change rather than opportunity driven. We want to drive long-term change via strategy, not opportunity. Integration and inclusion will be challenges the Swedish society will need to work on for years to come. And while we saw an opportunity assist thousands of refugee children and youth, we also saw that this type of work needs to be driven by a strategic approach. Consequently, we are implementing knowledge and expertise gained via Innovation for Integration in our core offering.
Measure your impact and act accordingly. The new challenges forced us to develop a new impact measuring framework that, not surprisingly, proved to be vital. It allowed our program development to be driven by impact rather than what we thought would be a good result. Later in 2019, we’ll provide the final findings when all the data has been collected, but because of the quarterly data collections, we could see how and why our Change Leaders were progressing.
Although most of the social entrepreneurs’ solutions were at a very early stage when the groups entered the incubator, many of them have also successfully started scaling their solutions towards impact on a national level. As an example, Kompis Ungdom, a buddy program enabling newly arrived youth to make Swedish friends, has expanded from one to eight municipalities around Sweden. In total, the seven entrepreneurs have impacted more than 2,000 children in the target group. All entrepreneurs state that the support from Reach for Change and partners has played a significant role in their growth, and two thirds state it has been crucial.
Things that we have learned from co-creating solutions to urgent and pressing issue Swedish municipalities and other governments play a critical role in enabling the national uptake of such social innovations. We have therefore put a special focus on promoting effective collaborations and removing barriers between social entrepreneurs and government groups. With support from the Postcode Foundation, we have been able to facilitate a series of meeting forums, joint problem-solving sessions and the development of a hands-on guide for successful collaborations.
The specific nature of the challenges addressed, and the need to quickly reach scale, has challenged us to employ new methods to support social entrepreneurs. Because they all work with the same target group, they help each other through peer-to-peer learning. They have also received coaching on trauma conscious care — expert support and tools to work with children dealing with trauma. In addition, Reach for Change has developed a common framework for impact measurement to analyze their effect on the societal needs identified.
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