Next week I will be facilitating a Design Summit for the Grand Challenge to eliminate the stigma around mental health and substance use disorders. We have 115 organizations participating. It’s an exponential jump from our last major event, which had representatives from 25 organizations. Granted, it’s to the 1.5 power approximately, but that makes no difference in the long run as long as it is above 1. Our next jump of the same exponential power will take us to 1,154 organizations. And the next is more than 34,000. The challenge is being able to support this kind of growth.
We have reorganized our staff and are delegating some core activities to volunteers, including outreach, communication, metrics, and financial strategies to ensure our partners secure funding. Eventually, we anticipate reaching 330 million people and hundreds of thousands of organizations with specialized initiatives targeting laws and policies, communities of all kinds (schools, places of worship, neighborhoods, gamers, social media users, etc.), and even the mindset of individuals (i.e., how people think about substance use disorders and mental health).
It’s thrilling work. For our team and each of us on the team, it means continuously reinventing our roles and learning how to leverage our work so that it reaches more and more organizations and activists.
What challenges to growth are you addressing? Growth need not be defined as increasing quantity; it could be increasing efficacy or self-development. On what thresholds will you focus your attention this week?
“The teacher who is indeed wise does not bid you to enter the house of his wisdom but rather leads you to the threshold of your mind.”
– Khalil Gibran
