About Us

Our Beliefs • Our Values • What We Do • Initiatives

Root Cause is a research and consulting firm dedicated to mobilizing the nonprofit, public, and business sectors to work together in a new social impact market.

This new kind of market matches resources to innovative and proven approaches for solving social problems while enabling collaboration that helps to spread the best solutions. Root Cause provides leaders from all three sectors with the information and skills they need to participate in this market and make progress on social issues as efficiently and effectively as possible.

Our Beliefs

Root Cause believes that, while many successful approaches to improving lives around the world already exist, we are not doing enough to spread those approaches and support new social innovation that meets the demands of unmet market gaps. The social impact market gives us the infrastructure necessary to spread proven approaches while fostering social innovation – so that we can make people’s lives better, faster.

We stand for the following core ideas that guide our quest for a social impact market:

• Investing for Social Impact: The development of, access to, and usability of information on practitioner performance is essential to helping investors and intermediaries direct resources to the best approaches.
• Generating Sustainable Social Impact: Practitioners must receive the skills and information they need to measure their performance and maximize their social impact.
• Collaborating within and across Social Issues: Market participants must prioritize collaborative efforts while sharing information to maximize resources and spread solutions.
• A New Role for Government: Government leaders must realize and act upon government’s special role in facilitating collaboration and supporting policies that unlock citizen potential.

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Our Values

1. Focus above all else on the social problem being addressed, regardless of organizational structure (government, for-profit, nonprofit), ego, or political agenda.
2. Take a rigorous, thoughtful, and creative approach to work that integrates a broad range of perspectives.
3. Strive to integrate practice, applied research, and public policy.
4. Take an entrepreneurial, goal-oriented approach to work, with a commitment to integrity, diversity in all forms, and learning by listening, acting, and on-going self improvement.
5. Collaborate to support new and existing systems, institutions, and infrastructures in order to provide all types of organizations with access to the information, capital, and tools they need to develop enduring solutions to social problems.

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What We Do

Since 2004, Root Cause has worked across the nonprofit, public, and business sectors within the social issues of economic development, education, the environment, health and health care, and youth, family, and elderly issues. Our clients and partners include social innovators who demonstrate promising approaches to social problems, social impact investors who want to make the most of their resources, and public innovators working within government to enable the spread of proven approaches.

To provide leaders from all sectors with the information and experiences they need to advance their missions and become active participants in the social impact market, we offer:

• Advisory Services: Building a new social impact market requires guiding leaders to think and act in a new way, while providing them with quality information on social impact. Through our consulting and research services, we balance a clear vision of the social impact market that we seek to create with flexibility and practicality that lets us meet our clients where they are and provide them with actionable tools and information.

• Knowledge Sharing: A healthy social impact market relies on widely available information that leads to greater transparency and an improved ability to connect investment to results. We prioritize developing and sharing knowledge based on our work in order to provide information on the best models and strategies for social innovators, social impact investors, and public innovators. 

• Community-Based Learning: We facilitate opportunities for leaders from all three sectors to explore the roles they can play as social innovators, social impact investors, and public innovators through workshops and events.

Initiatives

We pursue our vision and values through four initiatives:

Consulting • Social Impact Research • Social Innovation Forum • Public Innovators

   Consulting

Root Cause offers a unique strategy consulting service to help organizations think and act strategically to maximize social impact. We specialize in developing rigorous business plans focused on growth and sustainability. Root Cause consultants employ the latest management strategies and tools, coupled with knowledge drawn from our own social enterprises, to conduct all phases of the business planning process. Our engagements often include executive coaching for our clients’ leadership teams to ensure timely implementation of the business plan.

Social Impact Research (SIR) is Root Cause's independent research department. SIR aggregates, analyzes, and disseminates information to help social impact investors identify and support the most effective, efficient, and sustainable organizations working to solve social problems. Modeled after private sector equity research firms, SIR produces research reports, analyzes philanthropic portfolios, and provides educational services for advisors to help their clients make effective and rigorous philanthropic decisions.

The Social Innovation Forum is Root Cause's strategic philanthropy program. Each year, the Social Innovation Forum partners with leading local funders to select outstanding Social Innovators working on the most pressing social issues in Greater Boston. We provide these Social Innovators with consulting and coaching support and introduce them to a community of social impact investors interested in supporting those organizations with their resources of money, volunteer time, in-kind resources, or partnerships.

Public Innovators, a nonpartisan Root Cause initiative, supports a new wave of government leaders at the city, state, and federal levels who ensure the creation and growth of the most efficient, effective, and sustainable solutions to pressing social problems. Public Innovators builds off of two Root Cause reports: “Social Entrepreneurship and Government: A New Breed of Entrepreneurs Developing Solutions to Social Problems,” published by the Small Business Administration, and “Advancing Social Entrepreneurship: Recommendations for Policy Makers and Government Agencies," a co-publication with The Aspen Institute.