How can funders change their work to support greater, systemic change?
We have been supporting the Environmental Funders Network in the UK, helping the sector to explore how to shift the way they work to support greater breakthroughs.
This work goes back a number of years, through work with individual foundations, and it is connected to themes that have emerged in work such as Stanford’s project on Collective Impact. The essence is that too much social and sustainable impact work still operates in isolated silos.
Working with the team at EFN and fellow facilitator, Laura Miller, we have helped to design and facilitate spaces and inquiries to help funders consider how to shift their work to be better connected, resilient and supportive of systemic impact.
This work started earlier in 2020, co-designing and co-facilitating a virtual retreat that supported more reflective and collaborative working. We did this firstly by working not only on questions related to the direct work of foundations (i.e. topics, trends, issues, problems, solutions, tools etc.), but also on ‘how to work differently’ (i.e. collaborative case studies, working with nature, notions of power and equality, stories from movements and more.) Just as importantly, the model of the retreat also demonstrated a more networked, adaptive way of working, making space for people to connect at a more human level of learning, inquiry and support.
After a great success, our work with EFN has evolved through 2020, first through a set of research conversations, to deepen a sense of where breakthrough and tipping points exist as a community, then by co-facilitating a series of workshops on themes at the heart of new ways of working:
How to use the pandemic as a catalyst for change and greater impact
How to grow capacity for for change through community, systemic work and shared action
How to be good ‘ancestors’
How to grow and support resilience as individuals, organisations and communities
We are looking forward to continuing our working relationship with the EFN through 2021, helping the funding world demonstrate even better forms of connection, collaboration and adaptive working.