The Social Foundation
The social foundation is the inner boundary of Raworth's doughnut: the composite floor of human dignity composed of twelve dimensions drawn from the Sustainable Development Goals. The foundation is not a checklist to be completed one dimension at a time. It is an interconnected system in which each dimension supports and depends on the others. Health depends on income. Education depends on nutrition. Political voice depends on social equity. A person above the foundation on eleven dimensions and below on one has not achieved thriving — she has achieved a fragile, vulnerable improvement that can be reversed by any shock along the unaddressed dimension.
In The You On AI Field Guide
The framework's insistence on twelve simultaneous dimensions is what distinguishes it from single-variable measures of deprivation — income alone, or the Human Development Index's three components. Raworth draws on decades of development economics, most directly on Amartya Sen's capability