Understanding the Strength of Shared Stewardship
Over the past few decades, stewards have been increasingly recognized for the critical role they play in the movement to thrive together. This is largely because the work they do advances the vital conditions we all need to thrive.
If we want to effectively grow and sustain the movement to thrive together, we must understand how much stewardship is taking hold and to what extent the necessary capacities for stewardship exist. This page provides an overview of how we can do that.
Stewards are people or organizations who work with others to create conditions that all people need to thrive together, beginning with those who are struggling and suffering. By strengthening stewardship, those working to build healthy, equitable communities can shift levers—such as organizational strategies, policies, resource flows, and power dynamics—that ultimately expand vital conditions.
Fortunately, a core set of stewardship practices has become increasingly well-defined. Together with thousands of collaborators, ReThink Health has identified essential stewardship practices that can generate lasting change in virtually any setting. These practices involve shifts in mindsets and behaviors—thinking and acting in ways that foster interdependence by connecting across differences, creating transformative opportunities, and learning and adapting.
Measuring Stewardship Across America
To understand the extent of stewardship values, priorities, and practices across the United States, ReThink Health, in partnership with the RAND Corporation and with support from the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation, conducted the first-ever Pulse Check on Shared Stewardship.
Fielded between October 2020 and July 2021, during the COVID-19 pandemic, the survey provides rare and timely insights about stewarding well-being in a period of significant threat and opportunity. It captures insights from 348 leaders across eight types of organizations, including public health departments, hospitals, nonprofit organizations, and multi-sector partnerships. The organizations were selected from a nationally representative sample across the U.S.
Key Insights
The results from the Pulse Check survey revealed encouraging signs about stewardship in America and clarify the need to build capacities to advance the movement to thrive together:
- Over 90% of respondents affirmed core stewardship values, such as the belief that purpose in life should extend beyond oneself and that people and organizations should use their resources to create conditions for all to thrive.
- 78% recognized that opportunities for people to live their best possible lives are not equally shared in their communities.
- 44% would prioritize vital conditions, while 32% would prioritize urgent services. Even during a national crisis, many respondents emphasized that investments to expand vital conditions should be the higher priority right now (in terms of everyone’s time, money, and effort).
- 45% favor being creative with existing resources, rather than seeking additional resources first. Even though more resources would undoubtedly help, nearly half (45%) believe most problems can be improved by being more creative with existing resources.
However, challenges remain, especially regarding perspectives about how to approach the work of building thriving communities:
- Only 26% identified systemic change as their organization’s most important goal.
- Just 38% rated their community’s working relationships as highly effective.
The Path Forward
The Pulse Check survey also measured stewardship diffusion—the commitment to stewardship values, priorities, and practices—using a summary score with scale of 0 to 100. Encouragingly, about one-third of respondents stand out as stronger stewards (75+). Taken as a whole, this degree of diffusion is encouraging: it indicates that the values, priorities, and practices of stewardship are broadly familiar and widely endorsed.
These findings point to a clear opportunity: while stewardship values are widely recognized, efforts must now focus on enhancing stewards’ capacity to apply these practices more effectively. For instance, stronger stewards were much more likely than their peers to prefer investments that prioritize those who have the most to gain.
For all people to thrive, invest more resources among those with the most to gain.
Strengthening stewardship—within individuals, organizations, and across networks—is perhaps the most critical step toward advancing the movement to thrive together. By deepening collaboration and prioritizing systemic change, we can create communities where everyone has the opportunity to thrive.
Stories From the Movement
Check out Stories from the Movement—another way to help us to understand the extent to which, and how, we are thriving together through shared stewardship.
