I am trying a couple of new things, and I’d genuinely love to know how they land with you.

First, I want to offer an overview of the content generated in the first quarter of this year, helping you decide what source material is worth your time. Then, I want to offer a reflection across that material — across essays as well as LIVE conversations — identifying themes, posing the next set of questions, and inviting you to shape the coming quarter of our shared inquiry.

This is my first attempt at Field Notes on Changemaking.

What I’m hearing. What I’m sensing. What I’m making sense of — in real time, with you.

This is not a recap. It is an attempt to build shared memory for an emerging field.

Talking to changmakers I deeply admire when schedules aligned, I ended up having — and sharing with you — extraordinary conversations in the first three months of 2026. There was no premeditated arc. And yet, with hindsight, powerful themes emerged. Furthermore, they reflect my own continuing dance with the two questions that have guided my life:

1. How does meaningful systemic change actually happen?And:

2. How might a willing individual wield this power for good?

Not in theory.Not in aspiration.In practice — at the actionable level of roadmaps, patterns, and plans that empower the willing to make a real difference.

Across essays and interviews on systems transformation — and across climate, storytelling, politics, policy, leadership, gender, social enterprise, and public life — one premise has become much clearer:

We do not lack solutions.We lack their adoption at scale.

Solutions repair what is broken. Transformation shifts what people accept as normal.

That distinction sits underneath everything. And it helps explain why so much good changemaking still struggles to move systems.

Before the LIVE conversations started up this year, my essays were already naming the gap.

In Your Support of Public Libraries Will Change Lives, I argued for something deceptively simple: access matters. Infrastructure matters. Public goods matter. Not as charity, but as conditions for agency as the transformational energy. That piece may seem modest beside climate or power or regret, but it is not. It names one of the most important truths of changemaking: agency – individual and collective – needs favorable conditions in order to recast systems.

https://changemakershandbook.substack.com/p/how-this-monday-can-turn-out-way?r=1i4aw7

In We Measure Everything Except the Thing That Changes the World, I tried to name a more uncomfortable gap: we still do not have shared instruments for sensing changemaking itself. We measure outputs, activity, and even useful proxies. But we do not yet adequately measure shifts in legitimacy, permission, coordination, or collective movement — the things that actually determine whether change holds.

https://changemakershandbook.substack.com/p/we-measure-everything-except-the?r=1i4aw7

And in A Changemaker? Meet Your Spirit Animal, I reached for metaphor to make the work more visible. The beaver became a way to talk about changemaking as slow, world-shaping, collective, habitat-altering labor: practical, unglamorous, often uncelebrated – and essential. That piece matters more to this quarter than I first realized. It helped me begin naming changemakers not just as catalysts or leaders, but as ecosystem engineers whose work is often invisible until the landscape itself has changed.

https://changemakershandbook.substack.com/p/a-changemaker-meet-your-spirit-animal?r=1i4aw7

While I wish I could take credit, it sure is good timing that Hoppers, the new animated film, came out this quarter to illustrate my point. Official trailer: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PypDSyIRRSs

Taken together, those essays point to one increasingly unavoidable problem:

We are still treating changemaking as something that individuals carry, rather than something systems enable.

That is not a small difference.

It means that even when solutions are available, even when the moral case is clear, even when the evidence is overwhelming, change can still stall because the field itself remains underdeveloped.

The LIVE conversations

The LIVE conversations helped turn that diagnosis into something more textured, human, and grounded.

Suzie Barnett — the influence challenge

https://changemakershandbook.substack.com/p/we-confuse-being-right-with-being?r=1i4aw7

Suzie made the influence challenge visible.

We avoid naming what changes systems: narrative, permission, influence. We confuse being right with being effective.

That conversation sharpened something I had already been circling but had not yet landed clearly enough: ethical changemakers are often deeply uncomfortable with studying influence, even while less scrupulous actors use it fluently. We can tell ourselves that this discomfort is virtue. But often it is something else: a refusal to become literate in the mechanics of transformation.

The landing, for me, is this:

Evidence matters. Intention matters. But neither moves systems on its own.

If change depends on narrative coherence, social permission, and believable pathways, then a changemaker who refuses to engage those dynamics is not preserving purity. They may simply be limiting impact.

The implication is uncomfortable but unavoidable:If we refuse to study influence, we concede it to those who will.

Bill McKibben — the time challenge

https://changemakershandbook.substack.com/p/post-live-reflection-when-solutions?r=1i4aw7

Bill McKibben made the time challenge visible.

We will likely win.Whether we win in time is another question.

The constraint is no longer technology. It is speed. Speed, in this context, is moral.

That matters because it transforms the meaning of delay. When solutions do not yet exist, delay is frustrating. When solutions do exist, delay becomes something else. It becomes tragedy.

This is where the adoption thesis grew teeth for me.

If the tools are ready and the crisis is accelerating, then the bottleneck is no longer invention. It is movement. Coordination. Legitimacy. Permission. Politics. Timing. Everything that sits between a viable solution and a shifted system.

In other words:

Once solutions exist, delay is no longer unfortunate.It is tragic.

Michelle Malanca Frey — the field challenge

https://changemakershandbook.substack.com/p/post-live-reflection-changemakers?r=1i4aw7

Michelle turned the tables and interviewed me during my birthday week, which made the field challenge visible in a different way.

Changemaking exists without language, roles, pathways, or recognition. Too few people are carrying systemic responsibility without systemic support.

That conversation did not simply recap my argument. It exposed something about the field itself: how long this work has existed without being properly named. So many people doing changemaking have been forced to understand themselves through adjacent vocabularies — leadership, advocacy, change management, organizing, strategy, service — because there is no stable public category for what they are actually doing.

It is not merely that changemakers deserve recognition.

Fields cannot mature if their practitioners cannot see themselves, find one another, or develop shared standards.

This is not a talent problem. It is a structural gap.

Jorge Chapa — the transformation challenge

https://changemakershandbook.substack.com/p/revolution-is-a-moment-transformation?r=1i4aw7

Jorge made the transformation challenge visible.

Revolution is a moment. Transformation is a process.

And most of what determines outcomes is slow, technical, and invisible.

This mattered because it clarified something our culture consistently confuses: rupture is not the same as transformation.

Tearing something down is dramatic and can be cathartic. Building the next condition of legitimacy, practice, policy, or norm is much harder. It is also where most movements lose stamina before transformation takes hold.

That conversation strengthened my conviction that:

The world is not short on solutions. It is short on the conditions required for them to spread.

And those conditions are often invisible: standards, procurement, sequencing, institutions, cultural legibility, repetition, shared language.

Jason McLennan — the movement challenge

https://changemakershandbook.substack.com/p/where-the-movement-stalled-interview?r=1i4aw7

Jason made the movement challenge visible.

Building an industry does not equate to building a movement.

That distinction matters enormously.

Industries can professionalize, certify, optimize, and scale techniques. Movements must do something harder: shift what a society will accept, fund, celebrate, and normalize.

The conversation with Jason exposed a core asymmetry:

Those resisting change are organized. Those advancing it often are not.

This is one of the clearest doctrine lines to emerge this quarter because it shows why intelligence and innovation are not enough.

A field can be morally serious, technically advanced, and still strategically underpowered.

This is not just fragmentation. It is a power asymmetry.

H.G. Chissell — the coordination challenge

https://changemakershandbook.substack.com/p/from-solo-burden-to-a-team-sport?r=1i4aw7

H.G. made the coordination challenge visible.

Changemaking is not individual.It is coordinated. It is a team sport.

And for the first time, I could see what professionalized changemaking might actually look like in practice.

This conversation mattered because it moved my thinking from diagnosis toward prototype. H.G.’s work showed what it looks like when change is treated not as inspiration or sacrifice, but as a team sport: shared accountability, sprint cycles, alignment around one solvable problem, visible progress, real-world coordination.

And then, unexpectedly, something else opened: the idea that changemaking might someday have leagues, rituals, fandom, public recognition — not to trivialize the work, but to normalize, popularize, and sustain it.

Its power lies precisely in its playfulness. I think it may be design energy and hope to explore this further.

Sujatha Ramani and Jenna Davey-Burns — the distortion layer

https://changemakershandbook.substack.com/p/on-gender-and-the-cost-of-change?r=1i4aw7

In the most recent conversation with Sujatha and Jenna, something shifted again.

Not a new model but a distinct lens:

What is the effect of gender on systems ripe for changing?

That conversation revealed something I had not fully named before:

Transformation is not only about systems moving.It is also about who pays the cost of moving them.

Gender made that visible because it often determines:

Who gets believed. Who gets trusted. Who gets to act. Who must persuade. Who absorbs friction. Who metabolizes conflict.

This is not just “about women.” It is about patriarchy as a system that unevenly distributes legitimacy, permission, labor, and penalty. Men and women may both uphold it. Men and women may both resist it. But the lived cost is not symmetrical.

Patriarchy does not only shape identity. It shapes the mechanics of change.

Who must pre-regulate. Who must translate. Who must buffer. Who must remain palatable while pushing for change.

And suddenly, something clicked for me. I have been arguing that changemakers are under-supported. This conversation sharpened that further:

We are not just under-supporting changemakers.We are unevenly distributing the cost of change.

That matters profoundly because if some people are carrying more legitimacy-building work, more emotional labor, more self-regulation, more relational smoothing, and more exposure to consequence than others, then any serious account of changemaking has to include not only how systems move, but how the burden of moving them is allocated.

Patriarchy does not just shape experience. It shapes outcomes.

What has become impossible to ignore

These are not conclusions. Merely patterns I can not ignore.

Theme #1: We lack adoption at scale

The presence of a solution does not guarantee transformation.

That depends on adoption at scale, which depends on legitimacy, timing, coordination, incentives, permission, and cultural traction.

This is where the written work and the conversations converged most clearly.

From libraries to climate to green building to gendered institutions, the problem is not simply that people do not know what is right. It is that systems do not absorb it.

Theme #2: We are still asking individuals to carry systemic change

Responsibility is individualized. Failure is internalized. Support is inconsistent.

This is not only inefficient. It is extractive.

It asks people to carry public transformation through private heroism. It romanticizes grit while neglecting structure. It rewards visible leaders while ignoring the habitat that makes durable change possible.

Theme #3: power is under-theorized and underused

Influence works. Narrative matters. Permission drives behavior.

Avoiding this does not make us more ethical. It often makes us less effective.

This quarter has made me more convinced that changemakers need a more serious literacy in power — not to become manipulative, but to stop surrendering efficacy to those with fewer scruples.

Power ignored is power conceded.

Theme #4: the most important work is invisible

Transformation depends on coordination, repetition, sequencing, and institutional movement.

This is where A changemaker? Meet your spirit animal suddenly feels less whimsical and more central. The beaver metaphor works because changemaking so often resembles habitat work: unglamorous, cumulative, often unseen until the environment itself behaves differently.

The work that matters most is rarely the most visible.And the work that is most visible is rarely the whole story.

Visibility is not a proxy for importance.

Theme #5: the field lacks infrastructure

No shared language.No common pathways.No agreed capabilities.No durable support structures.

We are asking people to deliver systemic change without systemic support.

This is where We measure everything except the thing that changes the world matters so much. If a field cannot adequately sense its own work, it cannot train for excellence, support practitioners properly, or distinguish signal from performance.

Theme #6: the cost of change is not evenly distributed

Who carries the friction matters.Who absorbs the labor matters.Who gets to act without penalty matters.

Any theory of changemaking that ignores these distortions is incomplete.

What changed for me

Something else changed this quarter. Since I aim to enhance our collective understanding of changemaking, it is not about opinion alone. To achieve this, I’m trying to distinguish confirmation, signal, and residue.

* Confirmation names the basic risk of sharing evolving concepts in public. When I put unfinished thinking in front of you, I expose it to contradiction, validation, expansion, refinement.

* Signal is what materially advances the inquiry. It changes what I think, what I can now see more clearly, or what I can no longer ignore.

* Residue is what is warm, eloquent, satisfying, or moving, but does not materially alter understanding.

And with every dialogue, I now find myself asking:

* How does this conversation shape the trajectory of my inquiry on behalf of changemakers?

* What does it reveal about the pathways, leadership, conditions, or costs of transformation?

That shift in method feels important. It means I am no longer simply conducting conversations. I am building a way of learning from them.

My inquiry for Q2

Here is the unresolved that Q1 leaves me with:

1. What builds legitimacy at scale?

2. Can we create transformation without social movements?

3. How does power actually move?

4. How do we design for impact — not just moral correctness or agreement?

5. Why do changemakers serve, against all odds?

6. What would it mean to professionalize changemaking without flattening it?

7. How do we build the infrastructure the (emerging) field of changemaking lacks?

8. And how do we reduce the unequal cost of change?

These are not rhetorical questions. They are, increasingly, the next phase of the work.

Upcoming LIVE conversations:

* Tomorrow, I speak with Laura Mae Lindo (Canada) on power and legitimacy. Join the conversation live on Thursday, April 9 at 2pm Pacific (San Francisco) / 5pm Eastern (New York) / which is Friday, April 10 at 8am for Sydney/Melbourne.

Also in the coming weeks:

* On changemaking as service with Dr. Whitney Austin Grey (US): Thursday, April 16 at 2pm Pacific (San Francisco) / 5pm Eastern (New York) / which is Friday, April 17 at 8am for Sydney/Melbourne.

* On changemaking within the “unspeakable” with Andrew MacLeod (Saudi Arabia): Friday, April 24 at 8am Pacific (San Francisco) / 11am Eastern (New York) / [what time is this in London and Paris and Moscow?]

* On leading change within “other” social norms with Guy Eames (Russia): Wednesday, April 29 at 9am Pacific (San Francisco) / noon Eastern (New York) / [what time is this in London and Paris and Moscow?]

* On propagating regeneration with Dr. Dominique Hes (Australia): TBC.

* On the role of emerging tech with Sheree Ip (Australia): TBC

* On vehicle electrification through a fossil fuel crisis with Casey Brown (US): TBC

Join live or listen later on Substack, Spotify or Apple Podcasts.

The invitation

This is my first attempt at making meaning from a stretch of an ongoing inquiry into changemaking as a practice.

A way of thinking in public.

These are the starter questions I am carrying into the next quarter. What are yours?

Challenge it. Contribute to it. Complicate it. Expand it. Let’s see where that gets us.

If you have been following these conversations and posts, I would genuinely value your perspective.

* Is this useful?

* Does it help you see your own work more clearly?

* Or does it miss something important?

Because if this is a field in formation, then this is not my synthesis alone.

It is ours.

Changemakers’ Handbook is an audience-supported publication focused on professionalizing changemaking in a post-solutions world. Consider subscribing (free or paid) on Substack to join future live conversations and to access all posts. Follow on Spotify (https://open.spotify.com/show/4MGxEQM72DhSvpURHo7IQS?si=e6cef2e629474b12) or Apple Podcasts (https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/changemakers-handbook-with-elena-bondareva/id1828981728).

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