This means looking beyond individual services and asking what needs to change in the systems that shape their lives. Many young people’s lives are hitting crisis point. The latest report from IPPR, The Loneliest Generation, makes for sober reading. In short, we're failing young people. They have fewer friends, work opportunities, and support; their mental health is suffering, and they’re reporting feeling ‘lost’. This chimes with our own research where young people reported needing better mental health support, a say in the decisions that shape their future, a fairer education system, and stronger community connections. 

Systems intersect and can fail at many levels. A young person struggling to attend school may also be experiencing poverty, poor housing, unmet additional needs, poor mental health and a lack of meaningful relationships. A young person experiencing homelessness may be navigating racism, immigration policy, insecure work and a housing market that was never designed around their needs. We can become increasingly effective at addressing each of these problems separately while leaving the relationships, incentives and structures connecting them largely untouched.

If we are serious about systems change, we need to change how we think about scale, impact, funding and success

1. Let’s start with our obsession with scale

In the commercial world, scale generally means reaching more people, in more places, more efficiently. This makes sense when you have a product or service you can replicate without fundamentally changing its value. But social change rarely behaves like this, particularly when we deal with complex problems rooted in different places, histories, and relationships.

Sam Rye's work on "alt-scaling" is useful here because it challenges the assumption that impact means an organisation getting bigger. He describes different ways that change can spread, including scaling up through policy and institutions, scaling out to reach more people, scaling deep through changes in relationships, values and beliefs, and other forms of scaling that involve connecting activity, shifting resources, building conditions or enabling others to act.

This feels much closer to how systems change actually happens. Imagine a young person-led organisation developing a radically different approach to youth provision. Success might mean that hundreds or thousands more young people experience the approach directly, but it might instead mean that youth workers elsewhere adapt it, that a local authority changes how it commissions youth services, that young people become recognised as knowledge holders, or that funders begin to think differently about what good youth provision looks like.

The original organisation might not grow very much at all, while its influence grows enormously. This raises an uncomfortable question for a sector that often equates organisational growth with impact: what if what needs to scale is not the organisation? Sometimes it is the idea. Sometimes the practice. Sometimes the relationships, narrative, knowledge or movement around it. Sometimes it is a shift in who has power, who controls resources or who gets to make decisions. And sometimes the most powerful thing an organisation can do is make itself less necessary.

2. Our focus on interventions clouds our understanding of impact

Our funding and impact systems are still largely organised around interventions. We identify a problem, design a programme, measure its outcomes, demonstrate that it works and then try to persuade someone else to fund it at greater scale. There is nothing inherently wrong with this. Good interventions matter enormously, and young people need support now rather than at some theoretical point in the future when the system has finally changed.

The problem comes when we confuse a better intervention with a better system. Our funding structures can reinforce that confusion. Annual grants encourage annual thinking. Restricted funding pushes organisations towards clearly defined activities. Impact measurement often asks what changed within the lifetime of a grant, rather than what might be changing underneath it. We then wonder why organisations working on complex problems struggle to demonstrate systems change.

Perhaps the problem is not that they are failing to show enough impact. Perhaps the ways we fund, measure, and assess social change are simply not designed to recognise the kind of change we say we want.

3. Systems change needs different kinds of funding

When we understand that change is complex, uncertain and non-linear, our funding models need to shift to reflect that reality.

Good funding requires trust. It means giving people enough time and flexibility to respond to what they are learning rather than requiring them to predict everything at the beginning of a grant. It means proportionate reporting, clear expectations and relationships in which funders are prepared to hear when something is not working.

It also means getting the basics right. We should not ask organisations for information we do not really need, create burdensome processes just because they make our lives easier, or ask people to produce things at the last minute that we could have requested earlier.

We understand this from both sides of the table. At Big Change, we are a funder, but we also have to raise the money that allows us to fund our work. We know the pressure of making a compelling case to funders while operating in an uncertain environment, and the problems we are tackling are complex.

And this is where the tension becomes important. We need urgency because young people can’t wait, but it can take years for a new idea to develop, for relationships to form, for institutions to change their behaviour and for new possibilities to become normal. Sometimes what looks like failure at year two is actually the learning that makes eventual change a reality. 

We must hold ourselves accountable:  "Systems change is complex" can prevent real change from happening. While it is complex, we need to be ready to make choices, take risks, challenge power and change behaviour while remaining honest about what we don’t yet know. We need accountability, but not one that focuses on counting outputs.

Instead, we might ask whether assumptions are changing, whether relationships are different, whether power is moving, whether institutions are behaving differently, whether resources are flowing differently and whether new possibilities are becoming visible. We should be asking what we are learning.

4. We need to stop looking for the silver bullet

Perhaps the biggest challenge is that systems change doesn't give us the satisfying answer philanthropy often wants. There is no single intervention that will solve youth mental health, housing insecurity, educational inequality or the many challenges young people face. The answer is more likely to be a messy combination of ideas, relationships, experiments, policy changes, cultural shifts and people doing things differently in different places.

That means we need to become more sophisticated about where we expect change to happen. It could be to replicate or adapt something that works. Sometimes it will be to influence policy, build a movement, change a narrative or connect people who would never otherwise meet. Sometimes it means shifting access to money, knowledge, or networks. Sometimes it means creating the conditions for someone else to do something we can’t do ourselves.

For Big Change, this is more than an intellectual question. Our strategy is built around finding and backing people who are challenging the status quo, helping them develop early-stage ideas and connecting them with others who can help create wider change. This means our job is to find organisations that can grow, and to find people with insight, ideas and potential to shift the conditions around young people.

Sometimes that will mean helping a leader build an organisation. Sometimes it will mean connecting them to people who can influence policy. Sometimes it will mean helping an idea spread through a community, changing the narrative about what young people need, or shifting who has power. And sometimes we will not know at the outset which of these things will matter most.

This is not necessarily a failure of strategy. It is part of working in complexity. Our responsibility is to keep learning, pay attention to what is emerging and be prepared to change our approach when the evidence tells us something different.

The ultimate test is not whether Big Change can say, "We scaled this. It is whether, five or ten years from now, the systems around young people behave differently because the people we backed helped make something different possible. This might mean more young people reached. It might look like better policy, different institutional behaviour, new relationships, new narratives or new forms of community power. It might look like something we can’t see yet.

If we are serious about systems change, our ambition should be to make the conditions for young people to thrive fundamentally different. And this requires us to rethink not just what we fund, but what we mean by scale, impact and success.