As part of the Edge 50 list, Apolitical is publishing a series of articles exploring a selection of these bold initiatives to learn more about the stories and strategies behind them.

Created by Apolitical in partnership with the Mohammed Bin Rashid Centre for Government Innovation, this list is an invitation to look beyond the usual playbook and ask what becomes possible when governments are willing to think boldly about today’s biggest problems.

Apolitical spoke to Renae Hanvin, CEO and Co-founder of Resilient Ready, a social enterprise based in Australia. They recently launched Sociabli, the world’s first government-backed initiative to map social capital and infrastructure on a national scale, creating a powerful new approach to disaster planning.

Disaster planning has long focused on what's visible: fire trucks, flood levies and warning systems. Sociabli maps what isn't: the neighbours who check on each other, the trust between residents and local officials. For the first time, governments can see where social resilience is strong or fragile and act before the next disaster, not after.

When you first started developing Sociabli, what felt like it was missing from disaster resilience planning, and why do you think it had been overlooked?

The disaster space is very focused on tangible things and physical infrastructure. So all of the funding and focus go to things like fire trucks, flood levies or alert and IT warning systems. That’s the case in Australia, and in many other countries I’ve spoken with. I guess physical infrastructure is easier to launch a press release for and easier to measure. You can obviously see, for example, how many cars are going to go across a bridge.

But at the end of the day, what makes up a community and one of the first things that helps save lives when disasters happen, are the people. So I started looking at how we're measuring or including the people and the social side in disaster planning, response and recovery. And it's just not there. I realised that no one was really capturing human factors or social capital. It’s invisible infrastructure.

Yet, it’s the people component that makes communities resilient and prepared. So I really recognised this gap, saw that no one else was focusing on it in this space, and then worked my way towards identifying a solution.

Sociabli aims to take social capital and social infrastructure from invisible to actionable. Can you walk us through how it does that?

I'm not an academic. I haven't worked in government. I have always advised and consulted government from the outside. But in the emergency management and disaster resilience space, there are so many policies that include shared accountability or shared responsibility, but there's no articulation of who has what role and who's going to do what. So I started looking at how I can bring focus to this invisible infrastructure and how I can get people to understand what I'm talking about. The only way to do that was to start where everyone else starts: with evidence supporting its measurement.

I looked at the work that Professor Daniel Aldrich had already done in America. It was definitely relevant to Australia, but it needed tailoring. So we spent 12 months doing a national tour and ‘Australianising’ his wonderful work. Now we have a fantastic national mapping tool that shows, at the Statistical Area Level 1 (SA1) level [the smallest geographical unit used by the Australian Bureau of Statistics for releasing detailed Census data], how strong the bonding, bridging, or linking ties are in a community. You can measure and see how strong the social capital and the social infrastructure are in a community.

“If you don't measure it, you don't validate it. If you don't validate it, you don't invest in it.”

Now we can do all of those things. Having a practical tool that drives change and visibility as an end result is absolutely what I was aiming to achieve.

You’ve mentioned a few terms: social capital, social infrastructure and bonding, bridging and linking ties. Can you tell us more about what they mean and the power of being able to define and measure them?

Social capital refers to the connections, trust and cooperation between people. We measure social capital through three forms of social ties:

The first is bonding ties. These are connections with people similar to you, so family, close friends or neighbours.

The second is bridging ties. These are connections with people who are different to you geographically, culturally, or in age. Bridging ties are harder to form, but they are really important for things like social cohesion and opportunities. If a community has strong bridging ties, you tend to have higher volunteerism rates and more opportunities for people to get jobs they wouldn't normally get through family and friends.

The third is linking ties. These are connections, trust, and cooperation between communities and those in roles of authority and power, such as governments, ministers, local councils, and emergency services.

Now, thanks to Sociabli, we can measure those connections on a map at the SA1 neighbourhood level. This means that governments can see where trust or connections are weak and invest in those areas. We also measure social infrastructure: the places and spaces that foster these ties. Think of libraries, schools, open spaces like sports grounds or parks, social businesses like pubs or cafés and places of culture and faith like churches, mosques and synagogues. By measuring those places and spaces, we can also examine equity and identify where communities have fewer opportunities to connect.

Who needed to be involved to make Sociabli possible?

Everything that I do is multi-stakeholder. We're a social enterprise, and the work we do is about community benefit. Communities are the most important stakeholders because they are the ones building the social capital, and they know what social infrastructure is important to them. We recently had bushfires in Victoria. Communities were saying, ‘Save the pub!’. It’s what brings the community together.

From a government perspective, the next stakeholder we’ve found really important to involve is local government. They're the first level of government up from communities, and they know their local contexts. We know that a lot of local governments are very excited about this tool. State and federal governments obviously also have a massive role in planning and funding. We've been having a lot of discussions about how this tool can help them invest better. And it’s not just stakeholders in the disaster space that we’ve involved. When we ran national discussions, it wasn't just emergency services or disaster policymakers in the room. We invited the whole of government because this is as relevant to health, human services, social cohesion, planning, community services and economic development.

Resilience doesn’t sit in one department. Resilience is about thriving in good times and surviving difficult times. So the solution doesn't sit with one stakeholder. It’s a whole-of-society and whole-of-government, multi-stakeholder problem.

Building a national framework to measure social capital and infrastructure is no small task. What were some of the hardest parts of that journey, and how did you work through them?

One of the interesting things was that I had a few naysayers. In Australia, we call it ‘tall poppy syndrome’. Overnight, there were experts telling me that they were leaders in the country on social capital or social infrastructure. I had quite a few of those people tell me there was no way I'd be able to do what I was aiming to do, and they said that quite publicly. So a hard part for my team was thinking, “Are we able to do this? Is this actually possible?” But when those naysayers came to our launches, some of them came up to me and said they hadn’t thought it would be possible, but we had managed to achieve it.

When you're trying to lead change and find a solution, one of the hardest parts is to keep going.

“If you know the end result is going to be worth it and it's going to make a difference, be respectful of everyone's opinions, but keep going anyway.”

Surround yourself with amazing mentors, too. I've had amazing mentors who kept saying we need this, the country needs this, the world needs this.

Can you tell us a bit more about how you’re navigating resistance to your new approach?

Resistance is something we’re still navigating, especially in governments. Measuring social capital is a new concept. Much of what I'm doing now is creating training and education programmes across governments to build the knowledge and capabilities to use our tool. People need to know this data is out there, why they should measure these social factors and why they should embed them into policy and investment decisions.

I'm all about change in small steps. So I know that I'm not going to get the money to change the world overnight. But it’s little things, like when one public servant told me they had just embedded social infrastructure into their grants round, that keep me going. I take the nudge theory approach, nudging government departments to do it differently, one step at a time. This way, you build understanding and trust over time, slowly demonstrating why this change is so important for communities. So it's baby steps, but towards really positive change.

You’ve piloted the framework in three communities across Australia. What surprised you once it moved from concept to real-world delivery?

I was surprised all the time, but I’ll share one example. We picked 3 pilot communities that were very different from each other: Adelaide, Whyalla and Kangaroo Island. I’ll speak about Whyalla, a regional town undergoing lots of economic and industrial change.

I've always been interested in how accurate our data is, even though we’ve validated it. So I was having a conversation with the Mayor in Whyalla, telling him about an area that came out with medium linking ties, even though I would have expected them to be low, because it’s a farming community. And the mayor told me, no, that’s totally right. Farmers have got themselves onto council! So that was a wow moment for me. The data is really reflecting reality, and it’s correcting misconceptions too.

What early signals suggest Sociabli is shifting how resilience planning happens?

We don't expect to change the dial overnight. But social capital is being added to more conversations and considered in more policies. The National Emergency Management Agency in Australia (NEMA) funded our pilot of Sociabli, and the national framework is now going through the process of formal endorsement. That means social capital could become an official part of the disaster resilience ecosystem in Australia.

Social capital and social infrastructure are also being added into grant programs, and we're developing tools to help measure grant applications against those indicators. We've also seen planning policy include the wording ‘social infrastructure’ alongside ‘physical infrastructure’. That was a pretty good day for us.

There's been much more collaboration across government as well. Instead of just talking to emergency management teams, we're now having conversations with social cohesion, community safety, climate resilience, health planning and infrastructure teams too. We’re pushing to break down the siloes in disaster planning and holistic resilience building. There’s a real shift happening now. People are having aha moments. They see it, they get it, they recognise the value of it, and they want to do it. But there’s still quite a lot more to be done.

For a public servant or civic leader inspired to build something similar, what advice would you give?

The first thing is to listen. I do a lot of listening. I listen and listen and listen, and then I translate what people are saying.

“I'm very much focused on outcomes, not outputs. I don't really care how we get there. I care about what we're going to change or achieve in the end.”

Co-design is absolutely fundamental. I have a background in stakeholder engagement, and the more stakeholders you bring along on your journey from the start, the better your outcome will be. I don't do anything in silos. It's about bringing stakeholders together. Then it's about adapting the information into a tool that can evolve.

In this project, we have an ecosystem of about 30 things we want to create, including future AI integration, but we started with the first. I’d recommend starting by building the core foundation, and then see where the natural progression goes. Disasters aren't rare events anymore, and societies will experience more disruptions moving forward, so we need systems designed for that reality.

Whilst this work was developed in Australia and funded by the Australian government, we've realised this is a global gap. There’s a global opportunity to better measure and strengthen the social connections that underpin resilient communities. Now, we’re in conversations with different countries to try to make this happen.