A substantial amount of social-good activity begins from an assumption of scarcity: insufficient funding, insufficient expertise, insufficient organisational capacity, insufficient people willing to contribute. Those constraints are often real. But I have become increasingly interested in a different form of scarcity: situations in which relevant capabilities already exist but remain inaccessible to one another.
Canberra makes this particularly visible. It contains dense concentrations of expertise in government, policy, technology, research, community services, law, health, education, business and civil society. Many people also have substantial capabilities that sit outside their formal employment: lived knowledge, specialist interests, community relationships, creative skills, technical ability or simply a willingness to contribute to work they consider worthwhile.
The existence of those capabilities does not make them practically available. They are distributed across organisations, professions and social networks that expose only a small portion of what they contain. A community organisation may recognise a problem that could be addressed technologically while having no relationship with anyone capable of building the relevant system. A public servant may understand an institutional constraint that would materially alter how an outside organisation designs an intervention, but there may be no ordinary channel through which that knowledge becomes available. Someone with relevant expertise may be willing to contribute while having little visibility of where their contribution would be useful.
In those situations, the constraint is not capability in the aggregate. It is reachability.
This distinction matters because it changes the range of plausible interventions. If a capability genuinely does not exist, it must be developed or acquired. If it exists but cannot be found, the problem may be discovery. If it can be found but cannot be accessed, the problem may concern institutional boundaries, trust, incentives or cost. If several capabilities are individually accessible but difficult to combine, the problem becomes one of coordination.
Treating all of these as shortages risks producing unnecessary duplication. New organisations, programmes and platforms can be created to reproduce capabilities that already exist elsewhere but are poorly connected to the people who need them. In some cases that duplication is justified; institutional boundaries frequently exist for good reasons. But it should at least be possible to ask whether the missing capacity really needs to be produced again or whether the more useful intervention is to improve access to what is already present.
This is one reason I am interested in Real Good operating across communities, technology, ventures and organisational systems. These are not interchangeable activities, but each can affect the reachability of capability in a different way. Communities can expose knowledge and relationships that organisational directories cannot. Technology can make resources, opportunities and expertise easier to discover. Partnerships can provide stable channels across institutional boundaries. A venture can give continuity and accountability to a combination of capabilities that would otherwise remain informal.
There are obvious limits to this argument. Expertise cannot always be transferred casually between contexts. People have finite time. Institutions have legitimate restrictions on information, authority and responsibility. A network that makes capabilities more visible can also create demands on people who were never resourced to meet them. Better connectivity does not remove the need for specialised organisations or dedicated capacity.
The useful claim is narrower: before assuming that a socially valuable capability is absent, it is worth asking whether it may instead be inaccessible, undiscoverable or difficult to combine with other necessary capabilities.
For Real Good, that creates an important line of inquiry. How much additional capacity for good could be created without inventing anything fundamentally new, simply by making existing knowledge, relationships, resources and abilities easier to reach from the places where they can be useful?