Defining Our Mission of Impact at Scale

Interim Executive Director Nate Wong shares his vision of the Beeck Center’s mission.  

Solving complex social problems requires a joint effort across partners. Impact at scale goes beyond growing the efforts of any one organization or program, instead demanding collaboration within a system of players and groups. As Nate Wong takes the helm at the Beeck Center with founding Executive Director Sonal Shah’s leave of absence, he shares the Center’s reinvigorated mission and program goals. 

The Beeck Center’s mission is simple yet ambitious: we exist to help scale social impact globally. This goes beyond replicating the success of a single organization or program. Impact at scale requires cross-collaboration and ultimately behavior change. Societal problems are increasingly complex and cannot be solved in silos. Business, government, and social programs alone will not be able to fully address these issues. We need models where collaboration can flourish, and a new way of training people to adequately solve these intractable problems, using the tools of interdisciplinary and experiential education.

The Beeck Center solves these two needs as an experiential hub located at Georgetown University. To spur greater impact, we hold up scalable models where multiple sectors are solving societal problems. We do this through our two portfolios, fair finance and data + digital, which house our projects that we incubate and eventually scale out of the Center. Using our perch at Georgetown University, we serve as a truth-teller and impact broker to showcase truly emergent impact models and the leaders making an impact through their work. We also are a training ground for students, teaching them the importance of a human-centered, interdisciplinary problem solving approach. Through our experiential programs connected to our real-world problems and our world-class problem solving practitioners, we prepare students with the tools to truly make an impact now and into the future.  

I am excited for the fall not just because students will be coming back to campus, but also because we will be showcasing the full breadth of what we have been incubating over the past few months. A few highlights include:

  • New models for how local governments can better collaborate and use the power of people-centered design and technology to better improve services like foster care or disaster relief. 
  • Emergent collaborations around how investors/ developers can responsibly deploy capital to designated locales called Opportunity Zones.
  • Piloted navigation tools to help students better navigate the impact space by cataloging key skillsets and mechanisms for the 21st century leader.

This is an exciting time here at the Beeck Center, and I’m looking forward to sharing updates throughout the year.