Who We Are
Our Mission
“To serve humanity through research collaborations that catalyze reducing suffering, improving well-being, and enabling well-becoming.”
Our Story
We believe humanity is an amazing species. The systems we live in should be amazing, too.
Core Story
Serving Humanity Through Collaboration
ServCollab was founded in 2018 by Ray Fisk, one of the pioneers of service research. Since the early 1980s, Ray and other service scholars have explored how service organizations shape our lives such as healthcare, education, and modern communication services.
By 2010, the service research field reached a profound realization that humans have always lived in service systems. Families, cities, and even nations are all service systems. They are all designed to serve people. But when these service systems fail, they cause immense human suffering. Transformative Service Research (TSR) emerged in the 2010 decade to advocate for service research that reduced suffering and improved well-being.
ServCollab was created to build on the logic of TSR. Its name comes from the phrase “Serving Humanity through Collaboration.” ServCollab is the beginning of a new language and identity for a research movement committed to serving humanity.
Building the Foundation
To shape ServCollab’s vision, Ray invited six leading service scholars to form an Advisory Board: Linda Alkire, Laurie Anderson, David Bowen, Thorsten Gruber, Amy Ostrom, and Lia Patrício. Together, they helped present ServCollab ideas at international conferences and co-authored the founding landmark 2020 Journal of Service Management article announcing ServCollab’s goal of Elevating the Human Experience.
In its first years, ServCollab focused on publishing research that established its credibility and built the foundations for a global serving humanity movement. Articles have explored broad themes such as service ecosystem health, service ethics, wiser service systems, biomimicry for sustainability, and the service standards needed for serving humanity.
Evolving ServCollab
ServCollab has evolved into a global nonprofit that is organizing a Wisdom Community of service scholars seeking early wisdom for serving humanity.
ServCollab is building the research capacity to collaborate directly with nonprofits, international agencies, and local communities to make these populations’ needs more visible and to help co-design healthier service systems for their well-becoming.
We seek to serve underserved populations — including women, children, youths, the elderly, refugees and stateless people, people with disabilities, gender minorities, low-income communities, climate refugees and Indigenous peoples and other minorities— by helping strengthen the nonprofits that serve them.
How We Act?
ServCollab turns ideas into action by working to:
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Diagnose failing service systems and design improvements.
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Invest in the next generation of scholars through scholarships and research grants.
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Build a global Wisdom Community of people committed to serving humanity
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Support underserved populations by making their needs visible through research.
Why It Matters?
Humanity is experiencing a metacrisis of broken service systems, such as healthcare that excludes, education that fails to educate, and natural environments that are degraded. ServCollab builds on decades of service research wisdom to help regenerate these systems and design new systems that truly serve humanity and protect our planet.
We believe humanity is an amazing species. The systems we live in should be amazing, too.
