Task:

Portland, Oregon had become a focal point where homelessness was growing, yet the City’s actions remained relatively invisible to the public. Community members mostly received one-way communication, leading to countless hours of heated debates on social media and energy spent arguing the problem rather than solving it.

FuseChange was born in 2018 to harness this community energy and direct it positively toward solutions.

Problem:

Nextdoor had become a unique outlet for community frustration. In 2018, given homelessness was a growing affecting both the unhoused and the broader community. We watched as passionate, driven people debated for hours across threads hundreds of comments long. The result was spent energy that produced no meaningful solutions, only frustration.

We we did:

Ironically, the FuseChange co-founders met on Nextdoor and shared a common goal: divert negative community frustration into viable, collaborative solutions developed alongside service providers. Together, they brought decades of experience facilitating collaboration across changemakers, community groups, and organizations, along with a social enterprise technology platform built to enable collaboration across the nonprofit sector.

Solution:

The co-founders launched FuseChange as a 501(c)(3) with a mission to inspire community members in cities across the country to create Homeless Hackathons in their own communities. The systems-level objective was to bring the Portland community together to solve local issues while collaborating with others across the country working on the same — or similar — challenges. Rather than working independently, communities could collectively coordinate across geographies and impact focus areas.

FuseChange eventually growing to over 30 volunteer organizers from around the world. They began mobilizing their cities to convene community members at Homeless Action Summits to address local challenges. Chapters formed across the United States, Canada, Romania, Australia, and Rwanda.

Collaboration Toolkits — Convene
FuseChange provided open-source toolkits containing methods to bring people together, think through complex community problems, and collectively develop solutions applicable to local challenges. These can be thought of as facilitation techniques or design thinking strategies.

Collaborating with Open-Source Technology
Many great proprietary tools exist, but none are cost-effective enough to accommodate tens of thousands of participants. As a result, FuseChange leveraged a variety of open-source tools, assembling a collaboration system that enabled participants to share what they learned in their communities alongside the solutions they were developing.

The Goals:

1. Capture data to weave collaborative opportunities across geographies, focus areas, and populations served.
2. Enable participants to build economies of scale by pooling efforts into robust solutions that changemakers can maintain and own.
3. Scale solutions more effectively by connecting initiatives working on similar problems.