It’s a question we ask ourselves often at WomenStrong. Being a learning organization is often identified as a positive and is an important part of trust-based philanthropy. However, learning sounds good in theory, but in practice it requires something harder: being open to what isn’t working, letting go of activities we’ve invested in or are expected, and asking partners for honest feedback without overburdening them in the process.
How do we stay genuinely curious without making more work for our grantees?
That tension has shaped how WomenStrong has built our approach over the years.
When we first conceptualized our current approach in 2019, we weren’t starting from scratch. We talked to other grantmaking organizations and implementers about what was needed, what had worked before, and what was important. We also leaned into our own experiences as evaluators, implementers, and grant recipients. We knew we wanted a model that leaned into our values: building trust, listening responsively, fostering shared learning and curiosity, and centering our partners’ voices. Over the years, three pillars of our work naturally emerged:
- unrestricted, trust-based funding,
- tailored support for organizational strengthening, and
- peer-to-peer learning.
Putting these pillars into practice has meant staying open to change, including letting go of approaches that weren’t serving our partners as well as we’d hoped.
Simple, Smart Solutions
One early shift: we stopped asking our partners for written reports. It sounds simple, but it was a significant departure from traditional expectations of reports that take time and effort from grantees to demonstrate accountability to funders but rarely benefit the grantees themselves. Instead, we collect data from partners about the content and quality of our activities, focusing the evaluation on our work rather than theirs, which aligns better with our values. We also created an always available anonymous feedback mechanism so partners can share their thoughts about how we interact with them any time, on their own terms. The message we wanted to send was clear: we are accountable to you.
Welcoming Feedback
Still, we recognize that our own internal learning processes only provide us with certain types of data, and to mitigate issues around power it is important to also engage external evaluators. In 2024, we hired Ignited Word, a women-led consulting group based in Atlanta, to help us understand how change was happening at our partner organizations, and where or how our work fit into that picture. They recommended two methodologies, outcome harvesting, which captures unanticipated outcomes rather than just measuring against predetermined ones, and an adaptation of Critical Moments Reflection (CMR), which invites partners to identify and reflect on key moments in their organizational journey. Both methods, we hoped, would provide useful data not just for us, but also for our partners.
Partners were involved in all aspects, from designing the evaluation through an “outcome harvest committee,” to determining the definitions for success (organizational health), to helping make sense of the data. Finally, all partners were offered a personalized copy of their data for their own use.
Applying the Learning
Once we had the evaluation findings from Ignited Word, we used emergent learning (EL), a structured approach with tools and principles that help organizations make use of information collectively. They facilitated conversations with all WomenStrong staff members about how to apply the results to improve our partner support. Through these conversations, we developed hypotheses to test and committed to timelines for action and future reflection. These conversations reinforced our institutional norm that learning must be a collective practice and that every staff member brings insights that can improve our work and deepen our understanding.
So back to the original question: What does it really mean to be a learning organization? It means being willing to be accountable, to our partners, to our values, and to evidence that challenges our assumptions. It means investing real time and resources in evaluation and reflection and being willing and able to change. And it means leaning into our value and belief that our partners, as community-based women-led organizations, are best positioned to know what their communities need, and our job is to keep getting better at supporting them.
