The Inspired Network
Welp, we finally did it.
After filling inboxes weekly for eight months, we decided to formalize our communications and start a substack. Let’s just call it being “fashionably late” to the party. 🎉
Since this is our first substack, it seemed logical to start with introductions - especially because our organizational mission is unlike any other mission in the health, freedom, and human rights movement.
"HI, NICE TO MEET YOU!”
The Inspired Network is a backbone organization for the health, freedom, & human rights movement (herein referred to as “the movement” - because that’s a mouthful!). It was founded in 2023 by Dr. Andrea Nazarenko, PhD and Susie Olson Corgan, with support from some dedicated, powerful freedom fighters that we deeply love and admire!
Our inaugural event, “Inspire Global Leadership Summit” brought together over 125 leaders from across the world. It was an incredible success, and shed light on some important issues that, if targeted, could drastically amplify our collective impact.
These issues can be boiled down to two critical factors: Relationships & Strategies.
The Inspired Network is designed to tackle both of these factors directly. The focus of the network is analyzing and augmenting the ways in which the movement functions as a whole to create sustainable change.
We look internally and support the movement from within.
The mission of The Inspired Network is to strengthen and advance the health, freedom, and human rights movement through the development of an optimized infrastructure. We aim to harness our collective impact and foster a global community committed to proactive strategies that drive sustainable change. Our dedicated efforts focus on creating inclusive social networks that champion freedom and facilitate transformative global progress.
Unlike most organizations in the movement, which focus on activities that, e.g., sway public opinion or change policies that directly shape our world, we focus on the internal processes of the movement. We leverage evaluative data to enhance the movement's social network, aiming to create a streamlined infrastructure for internal communication and successful strategy development and implementation.
We ask, for example:
What is our collective vision and how can we best achieve it?
How can we best coordinate our actions for maximal impact?
How can we measure our success at a societal level?
What is the social ROI of our activities and investments in the real world?
Our level of analysis is the entirety of the movement and the interactions therein, not individual people, groups, or activities. We care about the network as a whole and focus on how we can improve internally to make lasting impact externally.
As an analogy, consider health improvement.
One approach to improving the health of a nation focuses on the individual doctor. Health can be improved via doctors reaching patients and developing personalized plans to improve health. This approach is considered “first order change” and deals with changing individuals and behaviors.
Alternatively, another approach (called “second order change”) focuses on changing the way the system works to facilitate change overall. Second order change is a transformative process that focuses on the efficiency and effectiveness of a system, not individual-level change processes.
To state it in concrete terms, to improve health, one can act as the doctor directly influencing the patient, or one can change the way the entire hospital system works to support health overall. Both are necessary for success.
The Inspired Network focuses on the system of the movement, employing the analogous “hospital system” approach. We examine our strengths and gaps as a whole, moving us beyond a silo’ed approach to societal change and facilitating coordinated action.
We care about the ways in which we work together to get to outcomes.
The Inspired Network is the “backbone organization” of the movement.
We are not the brain.
We do not control what happens, nor do we dictate what other parts of the system do.
We are not the muscle. We are not the strength of the system, nor are we the fighters on the frontline.
We are the backbone. We hold the structural integrity and make sure all moving parts are communicating together for maximal impact.
The Inspired Network is founded on the science of social change – incorporating elements of human-centered design, implementation and improvement science, political activism, psychology, and sociology, and evaluation – to build the capacities of the movement to achieve long-term, sustainable societal change.
Why are we doing this?
Simple: because people we deeply love were injured by vaccines. We suffered the injustice. We suffered the pain. And, like many of you, we will not stop until everyone - especially children - is protected…
Our motivation for starting The Inspired Network came from our personal lives and our direct experiences in the movement. Susie, in particular, has been deeply engrained in this fight for the past few decades, giving hope to families and strength to organizations. Before the network even existed, Susie has been a connector and capacity builder. She naturally links people together and holds people up, when internally they want to fall apart.
Simultaneously, we understand that the world is moving fast, and our opposition has increased in their sophistication in their fight. So must we. We do not have time or resources to waste on ineffective or inefficient action. The Inspired Network recognizes that we must address the problem from both our hearts and minds, and act in systematic and coordinated ways that get results.
Dr. Andrea’s background offers a unique skill set in this area that can help us attain our mission. She is a community and quantitative psychologist, who focuses her applied work on implementation science and evaluation (including the building of evaluation capacity, a key need in the movement right now - but more on that later!) The world is not short of good ideas; but there is a big difference between good ideas that are just ideas and good ideas that change the world. The difference lies in implementation.
Andrea is a leading implementation scientist who has consulted with many private, public, and governmental systems worldwide to build coalitions and interorganizational partnerships, develop and implement new innovations with quality, evaluate progress, and achieve measurable outcomes. Her work in system-level change offers a unique perspective to the movement - because sometimes it’s not just what you do that makes a difference, it’s how you do it that matters.
While Andrea maintains a prestigious and Ivy-league academic pedigree and a respected program of research, she decided about a decade ago that she preferred yoga pants and motherhood to the Ivory Tower. She is the proud mother of three pharma-free boys, and wife to a family chiropractor who saves lives daily through the power of chiropractic. She can speak machine learning algorithms and implementation frameworks with the best of them, but mostly just prefers talking about dinosaurs with her son. Her current work focuses on bridging the research-to-practice gap in order to make a noticeable difference in the real world, not just for the accumulation of knowledge. After all, what good is knowledge if it isn't used for social good? Her work spans across international borders, content areas, and scale.
Ultimately, The Inspired Network isn’t about us; it’s about the movement that will save the world. It’s about using our skills and passion for bringing people together for societal change. Our world is full of toxins of the body and mind, with external forces attempting to separate us daily.
The thing that will heal us at a societal level is - and will always be - love.
The Inspired Network is about social connection in a disconnected world, with a little bit of data, frameworks, and general nerdiness mixed in!
This substack represents our reflections of the movement at large.
We highlight both our strengths and gaps between our current functioning and how successful social movements functioned in the past, with knowledge that no two movements are similar and what has worked elsewhere may not work for us!
The intent is to Inspire Conversation.
So, engage in dialogue with us. (Again, we aren’t the brain. You, the reader, are!) We are merely opening up communication and making connections.
Please subscribe to our substack and - more importantly - join our conversation.
(We’ve got lots in store!)
Love & Light
(a little bit of laughter),
Andrea and Susie
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