A New Kind of Initiative

Eight years ago, five of the largest peace and security funders in the United States—the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation, the Hewlett Foundation, Carnegie Corporation of New York, the Skoll Foundation, and Ploughshares Fund—launched an initiative with the intent to inspire new ways of working on nuclear challenges. That initiative was N Square.

Our funders recognized that while the community tackling nuclear nonproliferation and disarmament issues had achieved numerous successes over several decades, it was also small, siloed, and shrinking,1 even as threats posed by nuclear weapons continued to grow. Throughout the field, they saw immense dedication but also a notable lack of reliable, replicable processes to innovate, harness the power of networks, or disrupt the status quo. So, in an act of collective intention, they activated just such a strategy together.

Since that time, the world around us has changed in ways we could hardly have anticipated, making progress on some of our shared goals even more difficult and our capacity to solve problems creatively even more important. And yet N Square’s original mission, then and now, has held steady. That mission is to accelerate the achievement of internationally agreed goals for the reduction and ultimate elimination of nuclear weapons by attracting new human, technical, and financial resources; introducing innovation and design methods; creating collaborative environments and frameworks; and hosting an interdisciplinary, cross-sector network that works together to develop new concrete solutions to pressing problems.

N Square was originally conceived as a two-year pilot program. Eight years later, we are still creating new offerings, forming new partnerships, building and weaving our network, and observing the many ways in which individuals and organizations in the field are expressing new perspectives and practicing more collaborative methods. We’re still here, eight years in, because demand for and acknowledgment of the value of our programs is steadily increasing, because several of our founders have consistently reinvested in the experiment they themselves created, and because of compelling evidence of N Square’s impact both inside and outside the nuclear realm. We are seeing that mindsets and culture are shifting in this field, and that an inspired new generation of insightful, adaptive, cooperative leaders is ready—in fact, eager—to bring new models, new insights, and new energy to this issue space.

And yet … change is all around us. While dynamics in the field are demonstrably shifting, nuclear dangers are at a new zenith, making a world free from nuclear weapons seem perhaps as distant as it has ever been. Funding is constrained. We at N Square are not immune from all that; we feel it too. And so we have entered a period of active reflection about where we are, where we are going, and how we can best continue to serve our goal of helping the nuclear field become a place where the best, brightest, and most diverse professionals come to do their most creative work.

We have always made it a point to be transparent about our strategies, to model adaptiveness to change, and to learn out loud. This report is no different. Within it, we share data about N Square’s impact over the last eight years and how we are thinking about what we see as a crossroads. Later, we’ll share a follow-up to this report that reveals what we’ve decided to do next, how we’ve taken the input of our network and our funders into account, what we ourselves have observed and learned, and what we think the implications are for the field. We see exciting times ahead, even if they are not yet fully clear.