Great article! We facilitate learning communities for many of our foundation clients and agree that they can be quite powerful for sharing knowledge, spreading best practices, and aligning efforts to achieve collective goals. I like your emphasis on engaging grantees and in the design of these communities. In our own work, we have found this to be absolutely essential to the success and sustainability of these efforts. We have also found it important to gather ongoing feedback to ensure that participants are satisfied with their experience and that the community is continuing to meet their needs and goals.
Julie – Thanks for your smart insights and the helpful examples of fruitful learning communities! Arabella Advisors (arabellaadvisors.com) also supports funders, philanthropists, and investors in creating, managing, and sustaining learning communities, and the lessons we’ve learned largely mirror those you raised above. One additional challenge we’ve observed is frequent turnover at their home organization. For that reason, we agree that investing over a longer-time frame and being adaptable and flexible on strategy are both important. We’ve also found that “building bridges, not tight ropes” into with every partnering organization is critical for the sake of capacity building. Put simply, we often encourage organizations to bring at least two people to the collaboration table and ensure senior leadership’s buy-in to community participation.
Arabella has gleaned a number of additional insights from our work building vibrant learning communites. We would love to hear how other funders supporting grantee collaboration have confronted the issue of turnover and secured the infrastructure of a learning community.
Julie, Thank you for this helpful article. As Paul Born of the Tamarack Institute notes, to achieve collective impact everyone has a job, and writing a check isn’t a job. Funders need to be engaged in the learning process and learn with the other stakeholders, including grantees.
While funding and its implementation is the most important aspect of an organization and determine the success of it in driving the social change there should not be any set rules for it. Every society posses different challenges and same set of rules may not apply for everyone, however they need to adapt the challenges and improvise. Sometime bottom up or outside in approach yields better results then traditional practices.
COMMENTS
BY Clare Nolan
ON January 31, 2015 07:17 PM
Great article! We facilitate learning communities for many of our foundation clients and agree that they can be quite powerful for sharing knowledge, spreading best practices, and aligning efforts to achieve collective goals. I like your emphasis on engaging grantees and in the design of these communities. In our own work, we have found this to be absolutely essential to the success and sustainability of these efforts. We have also found it important to gather ongoing feedback to ensure that participants are satisfied with their experience and that the community is continuing to meet their needs and goals.
BY Daniel Widome
ON February 4, 2015 12:54 PM
Julie – Thanks for your smart insights and the helpful examples of fruitful learning communities! Arabella Advisors (arabellaadvisors.com) also supports funders, philanthropists, and investors in creating, managing, and sustaining learning communities, and the lessons we’ve learned largely mirror those you raised above. One additional challenge we’ve observed is frequent turnover at their home organization. For that reason, we agree that investing over a longer-time frame and being adaptable and flexible on strategy are both important. We’ve also found that “building bridges, not tight ropes” into with every partnering organization is critical for the sake of capacity building. Put simply, we often encourage organizations to bring at least two people to the collaboration table and ensure senior leadership’s buy-in to community participation.
Arabella has gleaned a number of additional insights from our work building vibrant learning communites. We would love to hear how other funders supporting grantee collaboration have confronted the issue of turnover and secured the infrastructure of a learning community.
BY Chris Thompson
ON February 5, 2015 04:06 PM
Julie, Thank you for this helpful article. As Paul Born of the Tamarack Institute notes, to achieve collective impact everyone has a job, and writing a check isn’t a job. Funders need to be engaged in the learning process and learn with the other stakeholders, including grantees.
BY Linda Simmons
ON February 23, 2015 11:26 PM
While funding and its implementation is the most important aspect of an organization and determine the success of it in driving the social change there should not be any set rules for it. Every society posses different challenges and same set of rules may not apply for everyone, however they need to adapt the challenges and improvise. Sometime bottom up or outside in approach yields better results then traditional practices.