Community weaving to address societal grand challenges: The case of mental health destigmatization

Abstract

Addressing society’s most pressing problems requires sustained coordination among stakeholders across organizational boundaries. A central dilemma of such grand challenges is how to sustain engagement among actors who hold potentially incommensurate objectives, priorities, and values while pursuing a shared vision of social impact. Yet existing scholarship reveals little about how novel organizing forms are built and maintained throughout grand challenge initiatives and even less about the iterative cycles of interactions among their stakeholders. We examine this dilemma through a 3-year action research study of a multistakeholder initiative focused on eliminating mental health stigma. We draw on participant observation, interviews, and archival data to develop a grounded model of community weaving —an organizing approach that enables sustained engagement among heterogeneous actors under conditions of complexity, uncertainty, and evaluative heterogeneity. Community weaving combines a central coordinating architecture with semiautonomous substructures that support partial alignment around a multivocal shared purpose while enabling distributed, locally meaningful action. Rather than resolving tensions in stakeholder goals, values, and priorities, the initiative sustains participation by recursively reworking persistent tensions as it grows. Our model and theorizing advance research on organizing for social impact by showing how collaboration can be maintained without full convergence or centralized control. In doing so, we shift attention from consensus and governance toward partial alignment, multivocality, and recursive coordination as mechanisms for sustaining collective action in complex social systems. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2026 APA, all rights reserved)