In this companion piece to “Not Always Movements: Multiple Strategies to Advance Large-Scale Social Change”, we dive a little deeper into building fields. We outline some key theories and frameworks that underlie this approach, outcomes to look for, considerations regarding equity, and guidance on measurement and learning along the way. It is intended as a bite-sized introduction to key concepts around field building, to support further exploration and engagement.

This brief aims to help funders, evaluators, and other social change agents be crisper and more accurate in how they talk about and understand approaches to advancing large-scale social change. In response to the increasing use of the term movement to describe a wide variety of efforts, we compare and contrast three distinct social change approaches that are often conflated with movements: field building, network development, and promoting the uptake of practices by large numbers of organizations.