A Rohini Nilekani Philanthropies webinar on systems-led funding approaches.
The webinar tackled the issue that traditional funding models in international development — based on siloed interventions and a projectised logic, rigid log-frames and short-term frameworks — are not a good fit to foster the societal transformations required to meet the Sustainable Development Goals.
Transcript
This transcript was generated with AI-assisted transcription and may contain occasional transcription or speaker-attribution errors.
Speaker 5: Just give people a few minutes to to join in.
Speaker 7: Hello. Hello. It’s so long, it’s so nice to see you.
Yeah, I didn’t know I was getting bonus, bonus two of you. Oh, I’ll be quiet. I’m just, I’m thrilled to be able to listen in.
Speaker 5: And for those of you attendees that are joining in, we’re just sort of waiting for people to come in. So in a few minutes, we’ll take off. I should have prepared some music that we could have in the background as people are joining in.
That’s a note to self. I’ll make sure to do that next time.
Speaker 6: You can just sing, Soren.
Speaker 5: Yeah, in theory. I think they’ll require a lot more preparation on my side. But I think maybe as we sort of, I can sort of slowly kick off and Julie, I’ll pass on to you in a bit.
But just to start to thank everyone for joining this webinar applying ecosystem approach to funding. We’ll hear from three interesting sort of entities, foundations. So it’s great to see so many of you here.
And we have a really great lineup. And I’ll introduce each of the speakers as we get to them. And once we’ve heard from our speakers, we’ll move into a discussion and Q&A.
So I should listen and get inspired to jot down your questions, pop them in the chat or the Q&A tab. And I’ll keep an eye on those and pose them to a presenters as we move on to discussion. I can’t promise we’ll get to all of them, but we’ll try.
But maybe to start out with, Julio, I’ll pass it on to you. And I’ll share my screen for you to talk through a slide there.
Speaker 4: Thank you, Soren. And thank you very much to our guests that are coming to share their experiences with us. As I was tweeting my enthusiasm for this session today, someone replied by posting this chart, and I thought it would be quite appropriate to put it up here.
So the reason why we wanted to have this conversation, there was many reasons apart from selfishly learning from some inspiring work, is that as we started working on our work, what we call deep demonstration, so trying to apply a system and a portfolio approach to development projects, it is becoming quite apparent that the moment we start talking about the fact that we need to move beyond funding single point solutions or supporting individual projects, and we want to actually try to work with systems and with ecosystems, a lot of questions start coming up about funding modality, why would you want to do it? Is anybody ever going to fund things this way?
And isn’t it this difficult proposition? Why would we want to try to do it? So I found this thing that was tweeted this morning a little bit resonates very much with our experience.
So one of the things that we are basically trying to say is that there is one type of innovation which leads itself very nice to quick experimentation and to the funneling logic, meaning you try many different things and then hope that one sticks and that becomes, you know, your unicorn if you want. And that is a type of innovation that is very suitable to work within an existing system. Doesn’t necessarily challenge it, allows you to learn very quickly about certain things.
However, if we want to try to work in around systems, a different type of innovation is needed, which has both a different type of lens in terms of time framework, but most importantly require a very different underlying logic in terms of the coalitions that you put together, in terms of the way you look and you understand the issues and the way you actually intervene. So your hope is not to diminish your options over time, but actually to increasing them by providing people within a systems with new options to tackle very difficult issues. So this has been a little bit, you know, logic on the left we call funneling, the other one we call layering.
This is some of our emerging questions as we move, try to explore at least the shift for one model to another. What is actually happening out there? Who is thinking more or less along the same lines or at least is asking different type of questions in terms of how to fund and how to have impact.
So our three speakers today come from very different organizations with different lenses to this. We probably use different language, but the point is to actually framing. This is exactly why we invited them because we know that, you know, still there’s quite a lot of discussions around this.
We are newcomers in many different ways. So there’s no reason for us to reinvent the wheel and a much better to learn from the experiences of others. So without any further ado, Soren, I’ll let it to you to introduce our speakers.
Speaker 5: Thank you, Giorgio, for that introduction. And our first speaker is Erin Saenz from the Magata Foundation. So Erin is the co-director of the On Nigeria initiative at Magata.
With the co-director, she leads the foundation teams responsible for investments to reduce corruption and promote accountability in Nigeria. And Erin and her team at Magata are doing a lot of really interesting things when it comes to how they think about funding, the time horizons they work with and how funding is provided to partners and in support of what we call systems transformation or systems change or with assistance logic. So let’s hear from Erin.
Erin, over to you for around, we have around 10 minutes.
Speaker 3: Wonderful. Thank you very much for the invitation to be here today. I look forward to learning from all of you and sharing a little bit about what we’re doing and learning.
So let’s see. I’m gonna share a little bit about the background of the foundation and the On Nigeria program. And I’m also gonna tell you about how we work in order to contribute to systems change.
So just a minute of background. The MacArthur Foundation is a private foundation located in Chicago in the US. It’s about 45 years old.
We also have offices in India and Nigeria and those offices are around 30 years old. About six years ago, the whole foundation went through a really significant reorganization. We started the reorganization with 25 programs that worked in something like 45 countries.
And we ended the reorganization with seven programs that work in the US, India and Nigeria. So one of the models, the new models of programming is called a Big Bet. And that’s what I’m gonna talk about with you today.
So Big Bets are meant to be time limited programs that are designed around an opportunity or a problem. And they’re designed to exist for about 10 years and then they exit. And they’re all meant to strive for some kind of transformative change in an area of profound concern with the understanding that MacArthur will not be involved in that topic forever.
MacArthur has four Big Bets. One is on climate solutions, so working to prevent climate change. One is about criminal justice reform in the US.
One is working to reduce nuclear threat around the world. And then finally, there’s On Nigeria, the Nigeria-based anti-corruption program. We started in 2015 and we’ll exit in 2024.
Our exit is public. All of our grantees, partners, peers know about our timeframe. We have a large team in Nigeria and then a smaller team in Chicago.
So from the start of On Nigeria, we knew that we would be funding Nigerian organizations. With a topic like corruption, we felt really strongly that messaging solutions, demand for policy change had to be led by and informed by Nigerians. So we have something like 100 grantee partners and maybe 92, 93 of them are Nigerian organizations.
And they’re quite diverse. They’re civil society organizations from all over the country representing very diverse constituencies, government agencies, their media houses, entertainment companies, universities and faith-based organizations. So quite diverse.
We have four overlapping and mutually reinforcing portfolios. One is a criminal justice reform portfolio that focuses on implementing policy and adopting informed and enlightened anti-corruption policy that creates an enabling legal environment. We support independent media and journalism.
So English, local language reporting, print, radio, TV and online. We have a portfolio that’s advocacy, accountability and community participation. So this is quite diverse.
Organizations from all over the country. We’ve got women’s groups, pastoralist communities, all the way to elite policy advocacy organizations located in major cities. And then finally, there’s a behavior and norm change portfolio that’s led by faith groups and also entertainment and content creators.
So a little bit about how we work now. We think that a strong, deep connected civil society, independent media, functional justice system with a lot of coordination among the actors, plus really good anti-corruption policy framework and communities that have some agency and capacity to bring attention to the issues that matter to them will bring lasting change to Nigeria. So our grant making is all geared in service of that.
But we also hypothesize that the way we work can contribute to systems change. So one thing we do is that we ask all of our grantee partners to work in coalition. This is hard and dangerous and sensitive work.
And so we think that there’s power in numbers and this has proven to be true. To that end, we use what we call the cohort approach. So instead of making one advocacy grant here, one there, we make a package of, let’s say, 10 to 20 grants at the same time to organizations across the country working on similar issues.
They all write their proposals at the same time. They share information as they’re writing their proposals, identify possible areas of overlap or coordination. They get their money at the same time.
And then they agree to share information with each other over the life of their three-year project. And we find that collaboration happens organically. We don’t require collaboration, but we do find that it happens sometimes.
So they meet now about twice a year to share information, plan, strategize. And we’ve noticed that it helps reduce the duplication of effort. Say, for example, there’s one organization that has really strong monitoring and evaluation skills.
So they’ll often design the data collection template for the group and then the other 19 can just adopt it. So that’s a way of peer learning and also saving a lot of time. They’re also able to divide up a state or region more effectively.
They coordinate their advocacy visits and talking points. And what they tell us is that they like to work in this way. They’re surveyed anonymously.
They participate in focus groups administered by a third party. And they tell us directly that they like working in this way. They’re not competing for money.
They have peers and partners. And many of them unsolicited tell us that they plan to work with these new peers and partners after On Nigeria ends. Our grantees have really informed our strategy in a way of working in a very significant way.
In the early days of the program, they told us that they were going to need some additional support to do the collection of their own monitoring data and to analyze it, to make decisions with it. So we hired an outside firm to work with them to provide tailored one-on-one support for monitoring, and in some cases, evaluation. We’ve done the same with communications and also behavior and norm change approaches.
Through surveys, the grantees tell us what kind of skills they want and want to work on. And we have a pot of money that’s separate from our grant-making budget. And we use it to fund these skill-building initiatives.
So as a rule, the foundation doesn’t evaluate individual projects. We only evaluate at the strategy level because we think the strategy outcomes are far more important than the individual project outcomes. At the start of On Nigeria, we hired an external learning and evaluation partner.
They’re called Encompass. And the focus here is really on learning. So they collect data on strategy progress and facilitate these regular learning sessions for staff, but also for grantee partners to understand and use the data to make changes to our work.
Incidentally, we have baseline and midline reports that are available on our website. I could share if anyone’s interested. And the learning has really been invaluable to us and grantees.
We’ve all made important decisions based on that data. We ended some portfolios early in the program when it showed that although the grantees were doing excellent work, there was no political will to make progress in, let’s say, the electricity sector. Another thing that we’ve learned over time is that to be successful in Nigeria, it’s critically important that we ensure that resources are spread across the country, the six geopolitical zones, North, South, East, West.
We’ve also always been very attentive to gender balance. But in the second and final phase, we’ve asked our grantee partners, too, to ensure that they are thinking about gender, age, geography, ability, faith, ethnicity in their programming, in hiring. We think that will be a way to, again, bring a more diverse coalition of people, groups together to work on these pressing issues.
This is also a new area for a lot of folks. So we’re, again, offering some outside support to help people design programs, think about these issues in a new way. So we realized that skill building, collaboration, and the gender equity and social inclusion lens that we’re now using were so important to the success of our program that we actually made them strategy objectives.
And we’re measuring ourselves and how well we’re doing in those areas. So you can look at those reports to see how things are going. So when we get to 2024, we know that there’s going to be more work to do.
Work certainly won’t be done. But we are already proud of the progress that we’re making and the grantee partners, more importantly, are making. And we think that we’re going to be able to say that we’ve left behind a stronger accountability ecosystem, a stronger and more harmonized criminal justice system, a more independent media sector with higher quality reporting.
And we strongly believe it’s going to be stronger than when we started. We also think we’re going to be able to say that more diverse communities from across the country are going to be better able to demand attention to the local governance issues that really matter to them. And so we think that’s important, certainly for anti-corruption, but also for civic space, democracy, human rights, and any challenges that Nigeria faces in the future.
So I’ll end with that. Thank you very much. And I’ll look forward to any questions you have later.
Speaker 5: Thanks so much, Erin. Super interesting. And I can see there’s already a question in the chat.
But in the interest of time, let’s move on to our next speaker. And then we will tackle questions towards the end. So our next speaker is Cassie Robinson from the National Lottery Community Fund.
Cassie is the Deputy Director of the Funding Strategy at the Lottery Fund, where she’s responsible for innovation, policy, and practice. She’s also the co-founder of the Point People. At the Lottery Fund, Cassie and her team work with developing funding strategy, among other things.
And in this context, they’re doing a lot of interesting things, such as looking at how to co-create funding strategies across the fund. So bringing together the different internal stakeholders, experimenting with new approaches for involving external stakeholders, as well as focusing on new areas to fund. So super interested to hear more from you, Cassie.
Over to you. Again, you have a round table.
Speaker 1: Great, thank you. It’s lovely to be here and nice to see so many people. I’m going to actually share some slides.
But yeah, just before I do that, I mean, I won’t say much more about my role. I think you’ve covered it. But just briefly, yeah, I work at the National Lottery Community Fund, which does what it says on the tin, spends national lottery money.
But our focus is on communities. There’s different distributors for lottery money in the UK, some towards art, some towards heritage. And I work at the Community Fund, and we distribute about £600 million a year to community initiative and broadly with a focus on how to grow more thriving and prosperous communities.
That’s kind of our overall remit. So I’m going to just talk actually about one of our new funding programmes, which I’ve had to take our funding committee on quite a journey towards. And we just had our first decision-making panel at the end of March, where we managed to get nine out of 10 initiatives up to £45 million.
So we’re right at the start of this journey. I’m learning as well, and I definitely don’t have all the answers, but I’ll share with you where we have got to so far. Can you see my screen?
Yes. Great. So yeah, I guess I just wanted to sort of touch on, initially, this is actually the same piece of work that Julio had on his slide, which is by Jenny Windhall, primarily by Jenny Windhall.
Just because I wanted to acknowledge the fund has done work that they would describe as systems change before I arrived. And some of that work has been good work, but I would say primarily the work that the National Lottery Community Fund has been doing, labelled as systems change, was really mostly about changing the existing system. So lots of really interesting work around shifting power, using participatory grant-making, doing all kinds of different sorts of funding.
But it did feel like it was mostly still working in the existing system, which is why I’ve found this diagram a really helpful way to move the dial on this kind of funding. I also apologise, my slides are very wordy and I’m probably actually going to almost read some of them. But they, yeah, I think it just really helps to understand what we’re trying to do.
So the Growing Great Ideas Program has a focus on supporting transformation and long-term change. And it’s really about going beyond individual organisations. And I suppose the highlighted bit that’s crucial is we’re really looking for initiatives that are generating an infrastructure through which many other things are possible.
And that the generative nature of the work is what’s really important. I’ll share these slides as well, so I won’t read them word for word. But we are also, yeah, so we’re looking to invest in kind of ecologies, platforms, ecosystems, assemblages, networks.
And it’s been very hard to get those words agreed at the fund because we normally have to write for, we’re a for everyone, very generalist funder. But I have really wanted to use some different language because I’ve wanted to kind of suggest it’s not the same as what we’ve done before. And so language has felt incredibly important.
And yeah, we’re looking to invest in things that grow and deepen over time. So we’re looking at like the soil and refreshing soil and this idea of attracting more to an ecology as it grows. And this is one of the kind of diagrams that I’ve been using to get our funding committee on board.
And it’s from the GILS socio-technical transitions theory, which talks about the landscape, the regime and the niche, but we also added in the soil and the roots and the sort of culture. And for all the things that we’re funding through this programme, we’re looking for them to be working at these multiple levels or layers. And that feels really important and quite different actually from a lot of the previous funding that the community fund has done, which tends to mostly just fund at that niche level and at the roots level, but not really thinking about the kind of institutional kind of change that’s also required and the kind of narrative landscape level change.
This is me trying to compromise. Like I love that diagram and the language I’ve been using, but this is how I had to translate some of the language for our committee. So I was trying to help them when they were making the funding decisions, trying to help them think about, you know, it’s not this on the left hand side, it’s this on the right hand side.
And this is what we’re moving from towards. I won’t go through them all, but I will share them. And again, there’s just loads of words, but I’ll just pull out a few.
This is us sort of trying to explain what we will fund. And I guess some of the really important things I’d pull out here is that we are looking for initiatives that start with a new philosophy or a new logic like Julio touched on. You know, equity is important in everything that they do for people and for planet.
I’ve already talked about the infrastructure point. I’m really trying to get a sense that they are really moving away from something and towards something new. So this idea of transition is really important.
How people have been working is something that we’re also looking out for. You know, can we see that they have been asking good questions and kind of exploring and inquiring as they go? And do they have a rigor to how they do that?
And also looking at like the momentum behind some of these initiatives, like are they, is there an energy and a ripple effect around them? Because that also feels really important for this kind of work. And yeah, are they working?
Is this not just a single initiative, but a growing ecology? And like the last one feels really important about power as well. Are they creating new and different power and a shift in what is valued?
So all of the grants that we’ve just awarded in this first round for 10 years. So we’ve, you know, that the most that we’ve tended to fund before is up to five years. So we’ve doubled the length of the funding and these are 10 year grants.
And we’ve also tried to move away from the language of core costs, because whilst I really understand why that’s important, it’s just, again, almost like the language of, you know, we see this money and these ecologies as being alive and growing and that kind of vitality, which the word core can maybe mislead around. And we’ve also tried to be, I would say in some ways, we are still clearer about what we won’t fund rather than what we will. I guess that’s kind of emergence in a way.
And we’ve had so many applications that are not the right fit. And we’re going to have to start doing some webinars because we realize like people are really grappling with it. And that’s our responsibility.
But we’ve tried to sort of say what we won’t fund. And, you know, whether it’s furthering the agenda of a single organization or there’s only trying to involve a single approach to change or where we really can’t see something that’s been like re-imagined. Those are the kind of things.
And we’ve also been trying to look at how we can visualize what we will fund or the kind of different types of structures that this infrastructure might be like. This isn’t actually the thing, but we’re working with the designer that did this. We’re looking also at the support for the program.
So recognizing that if you’re going to fund ecosystems or ecologies, what else do you need to do around that? So the reason the other three are blank is because we haven’t really, we sort of know those are the things we need to do, but we haven’t sort of commissioned that work yet. So we’re working with an organization who’s looking at like, what are the new tools that are needed, like whether that’s different contracts, different kinds of legal guidance, different kinds of, yeah, partnership agreements.
But we’re trying to make sure we provide some of those new tools as part of the funding. We’re going to commission an organization to work at the moment with these nine grants who are in and of themselves ecologies, but I guess make up a wider ecology. And so working with people that can do narrative and culture work, we’re also going to commission people to do what we’re calling the sort of deepening of the ecology.
So the relational learning kind of work with the cohort and then working with our evaluation and evidence and insight team to think about what is the role of data here? How are we thinking about progress? What’s the language we want to use that’s not impact, but is contribution?
And yeah, so sort of thinking about that. Am I running out of time?
Speaker 5: A minute or two more.
Speaker 1: Yeah, so I guess, you know, we are, this is a new program for us. And so there are lots of assumptions we’ve made and things that we need to test. And, you know, whether ecologies can shift structural barriers that get in the way of change.
Can our governance at the fund be flexible enough to follow the work? Can the ecologies governance be flexible enough to follow its own work? And, you know, can we fund an ecology, not just the people in the organizations?
There’s a few others in there. And then just even with our legal team, you know, we’re, you know, we’re having to ask some new questions about our contracting, which I won’t go on to. But yeah, just I’ll finish with some of the feedback we’ve had.
You know, that a three-year organizational strategy means that people were so out of date, it became meaningless. And this idea of just being more flexible over 10 years has been really appreciated by people. And I like this idea of the ecology phrasing or modeling, which suggests developing, distributing, creating, and transferring energy and ideas.
And these are the last two. Yeah, so a grant agreement that gives security for long-term thinking whilst providing the security for agility and responsiveness. And that the actual purpose of an organization is also emerging and evolving over time, albeit held in the frame of a strategic mission.
So yeah, so that’s, that’s one of the programs that we’re underway with. And we, yeah, we’ve made, we’ve made nine grants and we’ve got some more going to another panel in four weeks time.
Speaker 5: Thank you, Cassie. It’s so interesting. And I can see you also have already a question for you in Q&A.
But let’s move on to our third speaker, Gautam John from Nidikani Philanthropies. So Gautam is the Director of Strategy at Nidikani Philanthropies. And prior to this, he spent several years with the Acharya Foundation.
And he’s also worked, before he was in the nonprofit space, he worked as an entrepreneur for a number of years. Gautam has a lot of interesting experience to share when it comes to the role of funding systems change. For instance, Nidikani is part of Co-Impact, which is an initiative with really big philanthropies working on systems change.
And they’re also doing a lot of interesting work to support social platforms. So really curious to hear more from you, Gautam. Over to you.
I think you have around 10 minutes. And in the meantime, the audience, please have a think about whether any questions you’d like to pose to our presenters. And yeah, over to you.
Speaker 2: Thank you, Sarin. And thank you so much for having me here. It’s just so great to listen to people who think similarly and fund in ways that we have so much learned from.
I will start just with the caveat that in India, philanthropy and systems change is a very new and emerging discussion. It’s not as well developed as it is in other parts of the world. So our perspective is one of a philanthropy who’s beginning to engage with this and deeply curious about the model and learning.
And I’ll talk a little bit about how we’ve been applying it in our own work, in touch upon the work in Co-Impact as well. Broadly as a philanthropy, we are a private foundation based in the south of India. We’re a private philanthropy that supports work primarily in India, not really outside of it.
And philanthropy has been active for about 20 years now, but it’s been more formal over the last five to 10 years. In particular, with the most active and visible front of the philanthropy, which is Rohini and Mahesh Nelikani Philanthropies, we anchor our work in the idea of a good society. And for the longest time, we have framed that as a society that is underpinned by constitutional values and framed in a democratic structure.
Over the last few years, with a series of learnings and conversations, we’ve begun to understand how narrow and limiting that framework is. In particular, responding to the times that we live in, to kind of go a little bit deeper. And I think that’s where our journey around systems kind of started, to understand that democracy and constitutional values in a society are an emergent outcome out of a series of conditions that we create.
That what we need to do is really work on issues around agency and belonging and power, and that creates the opportunity and the conditions for democracy to emerge. And so we as a philanthropy have gone a little bit deeper over the last five to 10 years to look not just at justice as a system, which we do, but the underlying conditions as well. So we have started to think about our philanthropy almost as a bridge, that what we’re doing is creating the societal skills and the societal institutions and the platforms for the value systems in which the outcomes we seek will emerge.
That was part of the inner journey that we made as a philanthropy, and it’s been, it also then expressed itself differently in how we approach the work that we do. It’s kind of given us a new lens into what systems and ecosystem work looks like, but it’s also clarified, helped us clarify our role in that. In particular, we anchor our philanthropy in three or four values, and one of them is the idea of learning.
So over the last five to seven years, as we’ve learned alongside our grantee partners, we’ve begun to be able to appreciate the broken systems that manifest themselves as societal failures. And in making this journey along with them, it’s allowed us to see, A, what the opportunity to fix broken systems is. And I find myself using that line from Martin Luther King very often, that not just charity, but to fix the underlying inequalities that lead to it.
And also the other bit that we’ve begun to start to understand a little bit more deeply is that we always posited the individual who is aggrieved and the system that caused that as binaries. And we realized that they’re no longer binaries, they are polarities to balance. And so where we as a funder have started to find our own feet is in articulating our role in creating a good society and understanding that a good society is made up of well-functioning systems and that our role is not necessarily to fix systems, but to bring together unusual coalitions and collaborations of people who are able to see the system, but also articulate clearly their position and what their role in fixing the system is. So over the last couple of years, we’ve articulated our role as a funder of systems change in five values.
One is that we will be a philanthropy led by trust, not log frames. So we don’t seek to hold people accountable to outputs. We seek to partner in long-term change.
We are curious, not certain. So we don’t hold them accountable to metric-based outputs. We hold them accountable to process-based learning outputs.
We are deeply accepting of failure. Working at the level of the system is complex. It also has a much higher rate of failure, and that’s OK.
What we have done as a philanthropy is deeply embrace the idea of the commons. So we now articulate this as everything funded by philanthropic capital must be public goods. And therefore, even the failure of a mission is OK because the value that the mission creates is available to others to build on.
The fourth one is an idea, is a sense of humility that we don’t know, but not modesty. We do want to change systems. And I think it’s important to state that it’s not modest to say that you want to improve a system.
But the humility of recognizing that it is a massive undertaking is really, really important to us. And the last one goes back to something both Erin and Cassie mentioned, of patience. We have moved from short grant cycles to an average of three to six-year grant cycles now, just because it’s impossible to do this otherwise.
There’s no way to effect change. I mean, you can either have a quick, thin change or deep, meaningful change. And we want to do the deep, meaningful change now.
And I think for us, we’ve then been able to distill the three models of systems change that speak to us and are relevant to our context. So the first one is really what we refer to, very much inspired by the MacArthur model of the portfolio approach. Where we create a space for organizations who are unified in intent, but take different and complementary approaches to exist side by side.
But also create definite pathways to cooperation, collaboration, and hopefully co-creation to addressing the systemic failures and sometimes to creating common infrastructure for the field as well. The bit that is new to us over here is the fact that when you do this, you also need to be able to surround these portfolios with incredible amounts of support across a variety of spaces, whether it’s technology, whether it’s communications. But the one that’s been particularly important for us to be able to build and we have been particularly weak at and are doubling down our efforts on that going forward is around the normative and the narrative.
Most of these system changes are not technical shifts, right? They are deep muscles that we’re seeking to move and build. So we’ve learned, we’ve really learned the necessity to create the normative shift that then helps amplify all of the work and also sometimes the narrative that helps do that.
So we’ve started to be more conscious about building that into our work. The portfolio approach is also new to us because traditionally we have funded areas of work. We are now funding systemic shifts.
So it’s as a philanthropy as well, it’s meant that we’ve had to change how we curate these groups of organizations, what we look for in leaders. And I think that’s been the biggest shift for us in terms of what we look for in the leaders of these organizations that we’re supporting. And there’s this three levers of leadership that we believe are necessary for organizations to work both cooperatively, but also systemically.
That the leaders need to see themselves differently in terms of the leadership model they bring to the organizations and that the organizations are able to work in the ecosystem anchored in purpose and built through empathy. That change is inevitable, that there has to be a bias to action and that collaboration is in their DNA. It doesn’t come easy to civil society organizations in India because that hasn’t been the tradition.
We’ve had movements, but those have been slightly different. So this necessity for system changing leadership at the level of self, at the level of others, and at the level of the system is something that we’re really, really focused on highlighting as we look for leaders, that they need to be able to see the problem differently, see their role differently and therefore their approach is different as well. The second approach that we’ve been experimenting with primarily in the access to justice space has been to create and spin out an independent organization that’s akin to venture philanthropy in the sense that it is both a participant and a catalyst.
And what it seeks to do is two roles. One is filling gaps by actively engaging and creating pieces of work, but also by coordinating. And the third one is by catalyzing.
So it’s a little bit new to us. We haven’t done this before. And I don’t think as a philanthropy, it was perhaps our role in space to do that ourselves.
We believe it was best done by an ecosystem player rather than by us. So we’ve done this in a couple of spaces now to see what the role of a venture philanthropy could venture philanthropy body. We don’t have a good name for it yet, but essentially what they’ve been doing is catalyzing new organizations to fill existing gaps, commissioning work to fill gaps and then a very vital role of coordinating all of this towards systemic change.
Our first experiment has been very successful, but I think that has as much to do with the leadership as it does to do with the model. And very clearly, the leadership that we look for was very similar to what we were looking for in our portfolio based approaches approach as well. The last model is something that’s.
Just one more minute. Yep, I’m done. And the last model that Soren had alluded to is really something that is something new and which is where we partner on the idea of societal thinking or change at scale.
We very clearly understood and realized the limitations of the traditional idea of scale. And so we’ve been trying to articulate from our learnings how we can create a new way of creating infrastructure that can amplify the work of all existing actors in a system to create context specific solutions using lightweight digital platforms to solve complex problems and to do so at scale with urgency and sustainably. So yeah, so that’s us.
We’ve come to systems change through the work of our grantees and the learnings that we’ve had from that. We have three emergent pathways to how we’re approaching systems change. And we anchor it in a set of non-negotiable values as a philanthropy.
Speaker 5: Thank you so much. Super interesting and inspirational. And I know we don’t have a lot of time left, but I’m keen to get to a few questions.
And we already have a few posts in the chat. I know there are a few questions targeted specifically to Cassie, for instance, and Erin. So feel free to just kind of respond to those bilaterally.
But there’s one question that sort of is for all of you. And after that one, I’ll pass it over to Julia, who might also have a few reflections and questions. But the question is, what has triggered major shifts internally in how your organization approached the work?
That you’ve traditionally done. Have your organization kept so agile? And yeah, what are your thoughts on that?
Speaker 6: Cassie, Erin, Jotun.
Speaker 5: And I guess the follow up question is sort of what hindered or supported your organization making this kind of shift to a more sort of ecosystem approach.
Speaker 1: Oh, go on, Erin. Where are you going to go?
Speaker 3: Sure, I could say a little bit. I think one thing that triggered the big shift at MacArthur was a real sort of dissatisfaction at the board level about our place in philanthropy and were we making enough impact? And of course, they supported all of those 25 programs over many years.
I mean, some of those programs were almost 40 years old. But they also felt this pressure to act with more urgency and to be able to respond to new challenges that were arising in the world. And so that’s one of the things that drove this big shift.
And then I think one thing that allowed us to, in our program at least, to make the decisions we made was also the board. They gave us almost total freedom in designing this program, which does not look like most anti-corruption programs. They asked us a lot of hard questions.
They didn’t always agree with what we were doing, but they let us try things. They let us make changes. We’ve made many changes to the strategy.
And sometimes they were right and sometimes we were right. But just having that flexibility and the trust they put into our work has been extremely helpful.
Speaker 1: I’ll just quickly whiz through the questions there. I think the most difficult thing in the table, which is in the slides, actually just the most difficult thing overall has been trying to take people on maybe what I would call an imaginative leap into this idea that we’re trying to invest in a kind of vision or a sense of new possibility. And I think most people in the organization in which I work are used to funding around problems at a service level or like with really clear kind of outcomes.
Adrienne Marie Brown talks a lot about having the yes rather than the no. And in a way, this is about trying to fund the yes. And I think that’s really hard actually to get people to sort of make that imaginative leap.
And then in terms of, I mean, I think I feel I should just acknowledge in terms of being able to try this approach, I were able to, I guess, because we are just such a big funder we have. I mean, even in my portfolio, I have eight different funding programs. So we’re not doing ecosystem, systemic transition type funding across the board.
So I guess I’m just fortunate that some of my remit is to try something new and different, which obviously just helps. But also, and I guess like that, you know, COVID and the pandemic has created more legitimacy for doing, you know, it’s so clear how so many things no longer work and how much so many things are broken that I even had a line in my paper to the committee that kind of said, like, surely on no level do you really think that things are working well? So therefore, what are we going to do differently?
And that’s kind of been my way into a lot of this.
Speaker 2: I’m going to quickly answer that. The philanthropy’s largest area and oldest area of work was water and conservation. And it was a very easy pathway from there to understanding the systemic nature of the challenges.
With water, we began around clean drinking water and then very soon realized that everything is connected in community groundwater management is the way out with all of the complexities and actors and incentives. Similarly, with conservation, we went from conservation to biodiversity to climate change. And then there’s no way but to confront the systemic nature of some of these challenges.
And once we were able to see it there and it helped that, you know, the principles of the foundation are very involved in those areas, then we were able to apply it more widely. Then it opened our eyes and then, you know, the instinctive curiosity was, but what is the systemic failure in the other areas as well? So that’s how it happened for us.
Speaker 5: Thank you, all three of you. And I can see, Aaron, as well, you responded to a question in the chat on Nigerian civil society. Thanks for that.
And I’m keen to let Julio jump in maybe with a few reflections or questions that you might have for our panelists.
Speaker 4: Well, first reflection is just, wow, thank you. This has been like a crash course in many different ways for us. I think there’s two or three different things that seem to me, even if you come at it from very different angles, to come, you know, come across your experiences.
One is obviously the question about time horizons. The other one is this questioning the traditional metrics, right? What do we measure and how we can account for those?
There’s a couple of other things that to me are really quite foundational. And I just wanted to know, you know, whether it’s just my impression or whether I’m reading into it, right? So one of the things that seems to me you’re all saying is, you know, I’m thinking about that in your comment.
We don’t evaluate an individual activity per se, but we look at the strategy overall, right? And but also the things that you were saying, Cass, in terms of the ecology and some of the examples that you made, Gautam, right? So this whole idea that we get fixated with a particular intervention and we lose sight of all the connection that this one has and how we rethink about that.
And if we really take a portfolio logic, we evaluate the whole portfolio and not necessarily one individual activity in isolation. To me, that seems to be quite a fairly fundamental shift in the way one looks at things. And the second thing is, all of you in different ways to me are talking about a profoundly generative logic.
So providing a system that you’re intervening with, with options, infrastructure, connections, a new framing, et cetera, to be able to develop new solution by itself over time. So your exit eventually, you know that you have left with systems with new capabilities to change themselves and to take better decisions. So to me, these are quite profound changes in many different ways, both in mindset, et cetera.
I was just wondering whether this is just me projecting into what you’re doing, whether this resonates. And most importantly, when, you know, again, this is a question for us, as you can imagine, you know, as we are at the beginning of our journey, this would be quite fairly profound changes in the way we think about what we’re doing. And I was just curious whether you have any advice for us on how would we want to think about these issues?
Speaker 6: Any takers? I know that was a super easy question to answer. I’m hoping to learn from Cassie and Erin on this really.
Speaker 1: Do you want me to try? I mean, I think I mean, how you’ve reflected it back is I’m like nodding away being, yes, that’s it. Whether it is actually what we’re doing.
It sounds great. I feel like I don’t know. I really think there is something about the health, thinking about the health of the ecology or that the vitality of the ecology, like the some of those things being measured or the you talked about capabilities and that the attraction.
And I don’t know how on earth you measure energy, but I feel like there is something about the whole quality of how the ecology is working together and deepening and growing. That is definitely some of the kind of indicators that we’re thinking about. I mean, in terms of that, that’s the harder question.
Any advice to you? I guess this is really lame, but like keep having things like this where we can all learn together and share what we’re doing. And you know, the thing I have worked really hard at to get where we are is actually really specifically around the language, that the constant translation of trying to help people make sense of what it no longer is and giving them at least something to understand what it might be instead.
And that that’s probably been the key, the key thing.
Speaker 3: I appreciate the overview comments, and I also agree with what Cassie said about the health of the system, the ecosystem. I can tell you from our experience, we’re six years into not evaluating individual projects, and I don’t feel that we’ve lost anything. Not everything works, not everything we do works, not everything grantee partners do work.
And that is totally fine. And being able to tell them if you want to evaluate your work, that is fine. We’ll pay for it.
But what we’re more interested in is enabling you to collect some data so that you understand how your work is going and that you can tell your story to us, to others. That has been, it has freed all of us, I think, and enabled us to focus on the bigger picture, you know, the media sector at large, the quality of investigative reports, the quality of how certain laws are being implemented. And it’s so much more important than, you know, the individual tactics that people are using.
Speaker 6: Thank you. And thanks, Cassie.
Speaker 5: And Gautam, you know, when you were speaking, you had some really interesting reflections on sort of, you know, moving away from the lock frames, having more focus on the kind of the process through which you’re learning. And that’s what we kind of hold ourselves and hold others to account too. Like, do you have any reflections on like how has that that type of dynamic approach been received among your grantees and sort of other partners you work with?
Speaker 2: So what, you know, as we started to work in areas that were more complex and interconnected, what we realized was that there needed to be a more formal way for everyone to learn alongside the work. So instead of holding it at the foundation, what we did was commission, not a monitoring and evaluation partner, but a learning partner. And what they do is work with each grantee in the portfolio to synthesize the learnings and then disseminate it and bring back the synthesis.
So they’re constantly surfacing new stuff to the coalition, but we get visibility of that as well. And we’re very, very clear that we don’t use this for monitoring. We don’t use this for evaluation.
We use this for learning. And in the portfolio approach, it works really, really well because we’ve created a space of trust. We’ve gone, I don’t know if it works so well in any of our other areas of work where we just have grantees, but in the areas where we’ve consciously decided to take a portfolio approach, it works really well because there’s somebody whose only role it is to surface opportunities for collaboration, you know, missing pieces of the jigsaw puzzle, which is actually really hard to do.
I think one of the biggest problems we have faced in this sort of work is an efficient workflow that allows everyone visibility of what everyone else is doing. It’s really hard. So we said instead of trying to solve it through a technology platform, we’ll solve it through a partner whose only job it is to surface learnings and opportunities for the jigsaw puzzle to put together.
Speaker 6: Thank you, Gautam.
Speaker 5: And I could see a lot, a lot of nodding from our other panelists on that. We only have a few minutes left, so unfortunately, Giulio, I don’t know if you have any sort of reflections or thoughts, and then we can also sort of, I can just quickly wrap up. I just want to give you an opportunity to follow up.
Speaker 4: Yeah, no, just to, well, first of all, obviously, thank you. Now, obviously for us, this is a journey and we are scouting out who is on similar journeys. So we had a similar session with donors, meaning governments for us, right, in the traditional way of doing things just a month ago.
And we want to continue this journey. So taking up your offer, Cassie, right? So we very much want to continue engaging with people who are in this space, who are typically much further ahead than we are.
But also starting thinking about what are, again, opportunities to, in the same way as you just described, to signal, right? We are all working on similar things. We have some similar questions, et cetera.
So for us, in that sense, it’s the beginning of a journey in many different ways. And as I mentioned before, you know, for me, some of the things that all of your presentation talk about ultimately are a rethinking of the organizational identity and what is the role of it. And what relation you have with the people that you fund and seeing yourself in a different way in relation to them.
And I think in a sense, that’s the same journey that we are on, except, you know, we are probably slower and this is taking us quite a lot longer time. But seeing the example of people who have been on the same journey who are asking the same type of question for us is super inspiring. So I would like to thank you very much once again, also for being open about what you’re learning, what failed, what didn’t work.
That’s been super, super inspiring. Thank you.
Speaker 5: Yes. Only to echo that. Thank you so much, Aaron, Kathy, Jonathan.
This is absolutely interesting, super inspiring. And thank you to everyone that listened in and posed questions. I hope this was interesting, useful to you as well.
And as always, if you have any feedback on this event, if there’s anything you’d like us to explore, do reach out. Otherwise, stay tuned for future sessions like this and keep safe, everyone.
Speaker 3: Thanks. Thank you very much.
Speaker 6: Thank you. Thank you.
Originally published by Rohini Nilekani Philanthropies on 29 May 2021. View on YouTube →
Gautam John 
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