How do we really make a difference in the world? We act, we reflect, we learn and we change, argue Jenny Hyatt and Allan Kaplan in the June issue of Alliance magazine. This is particularly important for donors as they control resources that can enable or disable social change.

Too often, however, reflection and learning are neglected out of organizational complacency, fear of failure, and a paradigm of impact which is over-reliant on what can be counted rather than what counts.

Funders talk about listening to their grantees and their beneficiaries, and spend time and money on evaluating their programmes, but what lies behind the rhetoric? Do they really absorb the lessons that their work throws up or is organizational learning simply one more item on the list of neglected good intentions?

In this Alliance special feature, guest editors Jenny Hyatt and Allan Kaplan set out the critical features of a learning organization and suggested that many funders were struggling to live up to these. To read their article, click here.

In response, a number of donors looked at their own organizations and described the means, formal and informal, by which they seek to profit from their own and others’ experience. Contributors include the Bernard van Leer Foundation, Dutch organization SNV, the Carpathian Foundation, South Africa’s Social Change Assistance Trust and Oxfam.

Hyatt and Kaplan caution against the ‘we measure impact’ mentality, which can result in a feeling that learning is mainly about measuring things ‘out there’ rather than something embedded in the fabric of organizational life.

Do you agree with this view of learning? Have your say NOW!

Welcome to the Social Edge Café! Join Caroline Hartnell (Editor, Alliance magazine), Jenny Hyatt (Director, The Development School) and Allan Kaplan (a South African consultant and a core associate of The Development School) in the conversation.

Jenny Hyatt - Jun 20, 2006 3:06 am (#1 Total: 15)
Director, The Development School (London)


Welcome to this discussion on donors as learning organisations. I wanted to open with a warm encouragement for you to participate and make this a lively conversation. Read the articles in Alliance and see what they bring forth for you. For me, this forum is very timely. This weekend i will be in Serbia for my last meeting as a member of the Board of the Balkan Community Initiatives Fund (BCIF) - a grantmaking foundation we set up in 1999. Its Executive Director - Alex Vesic - is one of the contributors to this Alliance. Leaving its Board has brought back its whole living history to me and I have become aware how much learning has been placed at the centre of BCIF's development. Perhaps this is best expressed in how it has regularly looked at its purpose and its values. Hence, it has not become a chaser of money bent on its own survival but an intelligent donor that is clear about how it understands and works with change. Yet this has taken leadership (from Alex and the Serbian Montenegrin Board members) and the creation of time to consider issues and opportunities as they have arisen. I worry that some leaders of foundations do not create the 'space' that is needed for their organisations to be self-aware, centred and open to emergence (see article by Al Kaplan and I). Indeed, some constrain that space by buying into the myth of activity equalling performance. If foundation leaders do not have that critical capacity (and courage) to open and hold the space for learning then they push their organisations towards mechanistic approaches which herald the death of creative grantmaking to enable social change.

Caroline Hartnell - Jun 20, 2006 4:43 am (#2 Total: 15)
Alliance Magazine

A very warm welcome from me too to this Social Edge discussion. The special feature on donors as learning organizations in the June issue of Alliance magazine raised a lot of interesting issues, and this is a great opportunity to carry on the conversation that was started there.

In her opening post, Jenny stresses the danger of organizations adopting 'mechanistic approaches' to learning that will stifle creativity and responsiveness. For me, one of the big issues that emerged from the Alliance feature was how to reconcile the more open and 'for its own sake' approach to learning that Jenny and her co-guest editor Allan Kaplan advocate with what another contributor, Phil Buchanan of the Center for Effective Philanthropy, describes as 'the responsibility of foundation staff and board members to use their learning to inform improvement in performance'.

I'll be very interested to hear what other people have to say about this.

Patrick O'Heffernan - Jun 20, 2006 5:34 pm (#3 Total: 15)


Too often NPO's skip evaluation unless they are told to do it by their funders. The reasons are usually time and money - both in short supply and often not provided by funders. But there is another reason. In my 20+ years in the NPO/NGO field, one thing I have learned is that "impact" and "evaluation" are not the same thing. Impact is more than the result of a single project; it is the results of the work of an NPO or a cluster of NPOs or of a funder over time. It is analagous to "cummulative impact" in environmental assesment....it asks "what is the cummulative change to society over time of this project and others before, after, and with it?"

This kind of impact analysis is more properly done by the funder in conference with NPOs who have worked in the field for years. This does not mean tht NPOs should not evaluate their project -- but those evaluatons will be more of a "lessons learned" than an impact analysis.

This kind of long term view takes place in venues like the Global Philanthropy Forum, Indpendent Sector, and at discussions hosted by the Packard Foundation with its donees.

Gordon Whitaker - Jun 21, 2006 7:28 am (#4 Total: 15)

Jenny Hyatt and Allan Kaplan call our attention to the importance of learning for donor organizations (and those who guide and manage them).  They discuss some of the preconceptions that create blinders that can limit organizational learning, including a preoccupation with the donor organization's own view of the world and a reluctance of the powerful (those with the money) to share power.  They lay a valuable theoretical framework for those in donor organizations to think about learning with the NGOs they fund. 

How might such learning partnerships be created and sustained?  Hyatt and Kaplan helpfully point out that formulas and procedures can become blinders that limit learning, but without some guidance about how to create opportunities to learn together, many potential learning partnerships are likely to fall into familiar patterns of donor dominance and lack of learning.

I want to suggest that creating "mutual accountability" between donors and the NGOs they fund can provide a framework for learning partnerships.  By "mutual accountability" my colleagues and I refer to negotiated agreements about what products (or changes in the world) each partner expects to produce under the relationship, what alterations each partner has authority to carry out unilaterally, what information each partner will provide the other, and how the partners will review/revise their relationship.  Accountability need not be hierarchical;  it can be shared.  The acronym PAIR calls attention to four critical aspects of any system of accountability and suggests that these can be jointly determined, rather than set by the more powerful party for compliance by the less powerful party.

As Patrick O'Heffernan suggests, discussions among funders and those they fund bring a range of insights together and encourage deep learning.  Those discussions need not be ad hoc or episodic, however.  Discussion can be built into the grant-making process as negotiation about what donors and NGOs expect to accomplish (and what they plan to do to get there), how much flexibility of operation each will have, what kinds of information each will provide, and how they will learn together to revise or renew their work.

For more discussion of "mutual accountability" see articles available at http://ncinfo.iog.unc.edu/pubs/electronicversions/pg/pgfal03/article3.pdf and http://www.innovations.harvard.edu/showdoc.html?id=10358 or our project website at www.publicintersection.unc.edu .

tutormentor - Jun 22, 2006 7:59 am (#5 Total: 15)
Cabrini Connections Tutor/Mentor Connection

I think that what's being discussed is really a two part discussion. 

Part one, is a discussion among donors of how to give effectively, with accountability and without the funds being misused in ways that would be embarrasing to the donor.

Part two is, how do donors use their resources and those of NGOs and others to solve important problems facing communties throughout the world. 

I don't know of many places where there is an ongoing and open dialogue between donors and NGOs as part of an on-going as part of a learning process. For instance, I cannot get a meeting with many donors, without a proposal in front of them. If they tell me they don't want to look at a proposal from me, they cut off any learning they might acquire from a discussion with me. Furthermore, some of the meetings are five and 10 minute events, which seem more for protocal than for learning.

To me, even if we met every month for an hour, the problems that my organization addresses (helping poor kids to careers) are too complex to be learned from my one on one discussions with a few donors.

And while donors create public forums to share their research and publications with groups of people (I've been in forums with 100 to 500 people), these provide little opportunity for questioning, interaction and brainstorming ways to use the knowlege.

Thus, I believe that internet libraries and collaboration portals, focused on specific issues (health, hunger, war, poverty, etc.) could be meeting places for donors and NGOs and anyone else who wants to learn more about any specific issues, then find paths of greater or more effective, involvement.

By putting knowledge on the Internet, we create the opportunity for anyone to go to that knowledge as often as they want to learn from the experiences of people from all over the world. In such places, the discussion should be "what do we know about the problem, or about those who are working to solve the problem" and "what ways could anyone in the discussion be involved in providing solutions?"

By creating discussion and collaboration forums linked to specific knowledge sectors, we create the ability for people to help each other collect, organize discuss, and understand specific problems, and then decide how and with whom, they want to work to be part of a solution.

If these exist, and if donors are actively involved, it would be nice to know where they are.

Allan Kaplan - Jun 22, 2006 10:57 am (#6 Total: 15)
The Development School, London


I'm not entirely sure that this message will be posted, as I'm having trouble connecting, but this is not so much to contribute to the discussion as much as to extend warm greetings to all those who join, to apologise for arriving late, and even more for having to depart before I have even connected into the discussion.  Unfortunately I have to leave in a very few hours for Ghana, so I really have no opportunity right now to engage.  I will however try to connect up in when in Ghana, and contribute from there.  Must just note - for the sake of some of those from the US who have joined the discussion - that Ghana have just beaten the US in the Fifa World Cup, and I'm expecting to arrive to rapturous joy.  I will try and connect from there.  Greetings 

Caroline Hartnell - Jun 23, 2006 6:18 am (#7 Total: 15)
Alliance Magazine

The interview with Lizzie Zobel in the June issue of Alliance provided some interesting insights on learning among beneficiaries, NGOs and donors. On the one hand, Lizzie's NGO, engaged very frequently with their beneficiaries - children and teachers in public primary schools involved in a reading programme - and reflected endlessly within the NGO on what they learned. During the course of this, their 'understanding' (interestingly, a word she used throughout the interview) of the situation they were working in evolved continuously, and they constantly adjusted their behaviour accordingly. But engagement with donors was very different, and involved a lot of deference to donors' pre-existing views and expectations of the programme.

I really like the term 'understanding', applied to both parts of the discussion tutormentor refers to above. Donors need to understand their own role, what they're doing and how they're doing it. They also need to understand the problems within the communities they want to work in and how they can help. In all cases, action flows from deeper and always evolving understanding.

Jenny Hyatt - Jun 26, 2006 1:10 am (#8 Total: 15)
Director, The Development School (London)

I am writing from Belgrade after yet another extraordinary weekend of working with the Balkan Community Initiatives Fund. This weekend reminded me of how important it is for donors to make time to really listen to grantees.BCIF has a few of those sorts of donors and we were discussing this week just how their ability to accompany the foundation - through highs and lows - has transformed BCIF's confidence and ability to engage donors in critical issues that emerge from very local community initiatives. Ultimately, this is the joint concern of us all - to truly empower local actors to lead the processes of change that will bring lasting benefits to their communities. And it reminded me how THe Development School got its very first grant - when i was alone in an apartment in Kosovo just after the NATO bombing - at night time. There was a power failure and a lot of panic on the stairs of the block outside. It was such a darkness that i could not see my hand in front of my face. I took the risk of opening the door (which those of you who have lived in emergency situations will know) and called for a light - at that moment the phone rang. I picked it up - and heard in the very same moment that someone passed me a candle from the stairs that we had received our very first grant from Rockefeller Brothers FUnd - after some months of meaningful conversation about what we are trying to achieve. SInce then, for me that light has symbolised the potential that all donors have to bring light if they are open to listening and learning. I urge that all donors pick up the Olympic Torch of learning.

tutormentor - Jun 26, 2006 12:56 pm (#9 Total: 15)
Cabrini Connections Tutor/Mentor Connection


I'm sure everyone has read how Warren Buffet has donated about $30 billion to the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation. When you're as larege as they are, how effective are they as a learning organization? How much do they really have their ear to the ground so that the small voices with big ideas might be heard?

Any comments?

David Bonbright - Jun 26, 2006 10:35 pm (#10 Total: 15)
Managing Partner, Keystone


Like Gordon Whitaker, my organization promotes learning through an accountability lens. We also work from formalized understandings about roles and responsibilities between the agents of change and those who are meant to benefit, the so-called beneficiaries. We call them "agreements of honor" and they typically cover similar areas to those laid out by Gordon. Nice to see this convergence of methodology!

We recently conducted an online survey on CSO and Donor practices with respect to accountability to beneficiaries. I previewed the findings in a short article in the featured issue of Alliance -- "Not Learning from Beneficiaries". I attach it here. The full report on the survey will be available on our website later this week -- www.keystonereporting.org.

The headline from the survey is that there is a much greater recognition of the importance of engaging with, learning from and being accountable to 'beneficiaries' then there are practices in place to do it. We take this as an opportunity to close the gap.

Attachments:

not learning from beneficiaries.pdf (49 KB)

Caroline Hartnell - Jun 30, 2006 12:58 am (#11 Total: 15)
Alliance Magazine

The last three posts have all talked about the importance of donors listening to/engaging with others 'on the ground' - grantees, beneficiary communities and potential beneficiaries. I'd like to take this opportunity to bring together two aspects of this discussion we've been having both here on Social Edge and in the June issue of Alliance.

In their Alliance overview article (www.allavida.org/cgi-bin/click/click.cgi?id=139), Jenny and Al dwelt on the qualities of the 'learning organization' - the openness of the donor to be aware of itself as an organization and to reflect continually on what it is doing and what role it plays in the world. In her post above, Jenny talks of the need for donors 'to make time to really listen to grantees'.

Superficially, these might look like different emphases, on the one hand the donor looking inward, on the other listening to those outside, 'on the ground' - though I'm not suggesting Jenny and Al ever separated them in this way. Where they come together clearly is in answering the question 'What do you do with what you hear?' A donor organization can engage with grantees, beneficiaries, the 'small voices' as much as it likes, but unless it is truly open to arriving at a different understanding of the situation it is working in and re-evaluating what it's doing and changing course if necessary, none of it will do any good.

 

tutormentor - Jun 30, 2006 8:20 am (#12 Total: 15)
Cabrini Connections Tutor/Mentor Connection

Caroline,

I feel that you're right on target. I don't feel that foundation leaders are the only ones infected with the "not invented here" and "In love with what I'm already doing" virus. This is what separates good from great organizations, and can mean the difference between evolution and constant improvement and extenction for busineses and non profits.

Changing habits is not easy. Thus, I feel we need to think further to the future in dveloping a new generation of leaders who use learning and innovation as habitually as others use iPods and junk food.

I believe a starting point is the aggregation of information related to specific issues. If someone has a web site with examples of how some people may be solving a certain problem, or learning about a certain issue, then others can point to that in efforts to budge people from their entrenched thinking by showing how similar groups in different places may be acting differently and getting better results.

This is what I'm trying to do at http://www.tutormentorconnection.org but what I feel can be done even better if we can get some people in universities involved in the process of collecting, mataining and facilitating the understanding of this information.

Alexia Latortue - Jun 30, 2006 9:01 am (#13 Total: 15)

CGAP is a resource centre for the entire microfinance industry where it incubates and supports new ideas, innovative products, cutting-edge technology, novel mechanisms for delivering financial services, and concrete solutions to the challenges of expanding microfinance. Since 2002, CGAP has also focused on aid effectiveness, using microfinance as a test case for concretely improving how development agencies work. CGAP’s joint work with its member donors (bi-and multi-lateral agencies, regional development banks, and private foundations) has shown that effectiveness and harmonization can be put into practice. 

 

Between 2002 and 2004, seventeen development agencies received Microfinance Donor Peer Reviews and have taken tough decisions to improve their operations. Some have commissioned portfolio reviews and instituted new policies to rectify weaknesses. See details on the Peer Reviews on www.cgap.org/projects/donor_peer_reviews.html

  

 

Five core elements of effectiveness emerged from the 17 Microfinance Donor Peer Reviews. These elements, while not exhaustive, are key to improving aid effectiveness at the individual agency level. These same elements also help determine an agency's comparative advantage in microfinance vis-à-vis other donors when supporting financial services for the poor.

 

  

See the Aid effectiveness star attached to this message.

 

  

1. Strategic Clarity and Coherence: The extent to which an agency-wide vision of microfinance exists and whether this vision and agency policies are in line with accepted good practice.

 

2. Strong Staff Capacity: Whether the microfinance focal unit has sufficient capacity and resources to provide skilled technical support to operational colleagues. Also, whether the overall level of technical capacity is adequate to ensure quality operations.

 

3. Accountability for Results: The level of knowledge of the microfinance portfolio (e.g., whether it is "visible" to the agency) and transparency on portfolio performance.

 

4. Relevant Knowledge Management: How well the agency learns from its own and others' experience through the creation, dissemination and use of practical, user-friendly knowledge.

 

5. Appropriate Instruments: Whether an agency has instruments that allow it to work directly with the private sector — a critical pre-condition for effectiveness in microfinance. The quality, range and flexibility of instruments are also crucial.

  

 

To take its aid effectiveness work one step closer to field operations, CGAP launched a series of Country Level Effectiveness and Accountability Reviews (CLEARs) in 2004.  The CLEARs combine a quick financial systems gap analysis with an in-depth assessment of donors’ and investors’ contributions to helping build financial systems. These country reviews seek to spark a process that will lead funding agencies to make changes to their internal systems and procedures so that they can design better interventions that build on their comparative advantage and take into account the work of others. For the reports of the country reviews conducted in five countries, please see www.cgap.org/clear.

 

  

All of this work has been an incredible exercise in learning how development agencies can improve the way they work to better serve their ultimate clients—poor people in developing countries.

 

Attachments:

AidEffectivenessStar.pdf (50 KB)

Caroline Hartnell - Jul 3, 2006 3:45 pm (#14 Total: 15)
Alliance Magazine

We've talked a good bit about learning from beneficiaries/constituents/grantees, but interestingly the last two posts (tutormentor and Alexia Latortue) have focused on donors learning from other other.

'There's nothing wrong with making mistakes,' I remember hearing someone say. 'In fact, if you never make any mistakes, you're not taking enough risks. But what is wrong is making the same mistakes that others have already made.' This sums up for me one key aspect of learning that seems to be little talked about - donors sharing their experiences and learning from each other. Even where donor organizations are open to listening to their beneficiaries and reflecting on what they hear and making changes in their policies and practices where needed, they will surely be missing the biggest trick of all if what is learned is not shared with other donors.