Task:

Portland, Oregon had become a focal point for growing homelessness, yet the City’s response remained largely invisible to the public. Community members primarily received one-way communication, resulting in extended debates on social media where energy was directed toward arguing about the problem rather than working toward solutions.

FuseChange was founded in 2018 to channel that community energy into constructive, solution-oriented action.

Problem:

In 2018, Nextdoor had become an outlet for community frustration as homelessness continued to affect both those experiencing it directly and the broader community. Thoughtful, well-intentioned people were spending hours debating across threads hundreds of comments long with little to show for it beyond exhaustion and frustration. The energy was real; it simply lacked direction.

We we did:

The FuseChange co-founders ironically connected through Nextdoor and found they shared a common goal: redirect community frustration toward collaborative, practical solutions developed in partnership with service providers. Together, they brought decades of experience facilitating collaboration among changemakers, community groups, and organizations, as well as a social enterprise technology platform designed to support collaboration across the nonprofit sector.

Solution:

The co-founders established FuseChange as a 501(c)(3) nonprofit with a mission to support community members in cities across the country in creating their own Homeless Hackathons. The broader goal was to bring the Portland community together to address local challenges while connecting with others across the country working on the same, or similar issues. Rather than operating in isolation, communities could coordinate across geographies and impact areas.

FuseChange grew to include more than 30 volunteer organizers from around the world, who began mobilizing their cities to host Homeless Action Summits addressing local challenges. Chapters formed across the United States, Canada, Romania, Australia, and Rwanda.

Collaboration Toolkits — Convene
FuseChange developed open-source toolkits that provided methods for bringing people together, working through complex community challenges, and collectively building solutions suited to local needs. These resources draw on facilitation techniques and design thinking frameworks.

Collaborating with Open-Source Technology
While many quality proprietary tools exist, few are cost-effective at the scale needed to serve tens of thousands of participants. FuseChange leveraged a range of open-source tools, assembling a collaboration system that enabled participants to share learnings from their communities alongside the solutions they were developing.

The Goals:

1. Gather data to identify and weave collaborative opportunities across geographies, focus areas, and populations served.
2. Enable participants to build economies of scale by pooling efforts into durable solutions that changemakers can maintain and own.
3. Connect initiatives working on similar challenges to help scale solutions more effectively.