This publication from Movement Tapestries offers insights and guidance for organizations navigating equity-embedded transformations, and the challenges that can come with embarking on such journeys.
The Vaccine Delivery team at the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation is exploring what it means to shift to an agile strategy and operating model. We are interested in learning what it means to transform to a team that operates on rapid learning and decision cycles and has the ability to quickly and efficiently revise strategy, structure, processes, and people towards achieving impact while ensuring we remain strong, reliable partners to our grantees and the people around the world to whom we ultimately are in service.
Do you know of agile resources, experts, practitioners, or organizations that can help us to be better informed about what agile is (and is not) and help us to understand what is needed to design and implement an agile operating model for our team?
At the Global Fund for Children, we are trying to get better at documenting interactions with our grantee partners. We would like to support our Program Officers to document phone calls, site visits, introductions made, and other important interactions using our current system, GIFTS Online, so that we may better track our inputs and relationships over time. As we offer capacity development services with our funding, we believe that better tracking will enable to us to keep clear records of how we engage with partners and improve institutional memory.
We would love to know if anyone has any resources or strategies to help reinforce the importance of this practice for staff so it becomes a regular part of partner engagement and not an admin burden. Any practices in general that colleagues have found helpful around documentation would also be welcome.
The Finance Department at Global Fund for Children is working towards redesigning the way we manage and report on institutional grants. We are interested to know how you allocate program staff’s time who works on multiple grants in your accounting system.
The fields of strategic learning and evaluation have also grown and shifted over the last decade, and new ways of thinking about and evaluating grantmaking and its impacts have emerged. This paper responds to these changes and provides a fresh outlook and set of resources for grantmaker CEOs, evaluation staff, and senior leaders to use to engage their boards and trustees in strategic learning. Our hope is that staff and leaders use any or all of the ten tools we have developed to help board members and trustees understand what strategic learning is (and isn’t), why it is important, and how to better incorporate strategic learning practices into their work.
As we strive to be more efficient we need to create manuals containing this information as well as an employee manual. Is there a template that is available for us to use and tailor for our needs?
The Arcus Foundation is seeking information about fellow funders’ policies and protocols for when staff travel. We’re interested in example guiding principles or expectations and other best practices that help ensure staff safety while traveling as well as enable workflow continuity. Please let us know if you have resources or strategies that might be of assistance to us.
As part of our capacity building program, we would like to provide scholarships for our grantees to attend trainings and conferences (both local and out-of-town) focused on racial equity. From GEO members who do provide scholarships, I'd love to hear more of the details of your program.
We are researching best practice for a reserve amount that would ensure stability and sustainability of program funding. Any experience, feedback or resources on the area of reserves would be appreciated.