Lessons from the Hewlett Foundation’s contributions to Fundar
Over the past 16 years of Hewlett Foundation support, Fundar has undergone organizational transformation in several aspects of its organizational health. Prior to 2007, Fundar had a flat organizational structure with ‘artisanal style’ processes and practices. It was a young organization, with no human resource policies, no formal planning process, and without a learning strategy, but it always had a culture of learning by doing.
After many years of growing pains, an extremely difficult initial leadership transition in 2007, and informal governance arrangements, today Fundar’s leadership understands the importance of healthy organizational practices. It has demonstrated commitment to reflection, learning, and a culture of continuous improvement to organizational processes that reflect Fundar’s values. With Hewlett Foundation support, Fundar continues its institutional strengthening by focusing on its monitoring and evaluation system, consolidating a communication model for advocacy, and developing a funding strategy to strengthen the organization’s sustainability.
Building on this organizational strengthening foundation, Hewlett contributions to programmatic support have led to the following social change outcomes:
- Expanded work at the sub-national level in Mexico, identifying and training state-level partners to conduct public budget monitoring and analysis, and developing a state-level government transparency index.
- Promoting the implementation of the ATI constitutional reform, and advocacy for improved public budget accounting practices.
- Fundar’s leadership role in the Colectivo por la Transparencia.
- Fundar’s leadership of the civil society group in the Open Government Partnership, documenting best practices and developing a methodology to increase the number of participating civil society groups in the action plan.
- Improved extractive industries policies that are participatory and transparent, to redistribute spending in order to provide services to affected communities.
- Improved the transparency of the public budget for service delivery at the state level and maternal health care provision at the local level in order to ensure their quality.
- Improved access and distribution of Procampo, a farm subsidies cash transfer program for smallholder farmers.
- Improved public policies for fighting corruption, considering the different effects of corruption on people’s lives.
- Strengthened justice system with an impact on the causes and consequences of violence and impunity.
- Reduced discretion in the allocation of tax privileges by increasing the levels of transparency surrounding tax policy.
Through each of these areas of programmatic work, Fundar has made valuable contributions to improving citizens’ human rights, access to justice, access to services, and efforts to hold governments accountable. Sustained Hewlett Foundation investments in organizational strengthening within Fundar has been key to securing its reputation and credibility, and its recognition as an important CSO actor with a leadership role in advocating for improved public policies and programs for Mexican citizens.
