Balancing voice, power, and resources in collective learning for climate work

Authors: Nicole Walshe, Amelia Abdelrazik, and Marta Arranz

The Climate SMILE community has met four times over ten weeks between May and July 2024 to learn about different processes for supporting Collective Learning and Equitable Knowledge Ecosystems for Climate Work. This is part of the Sparking Dialogue series, a set of curated online conversations to explore a topic of interest to the community from different angles over a period of time. We have invited contributions from different corners of the philanthropic and development fields to inspire, challenge, and contribute to our thinking and practice, to help us identify ‘pockets of the future’ to explore, expand or adapt. This blog is part of the series that accompanies the Sparking Dialogues, to bring the ideas, questions, answers, and more questions! from the conversations to a wider audience.

The third fascinating Sparking Dialogues Session explored examples of how to balance diversity, voice and resources in collective learning for climate work. The contributors this time were Diana Ugalde, Learning Lead at Healthy Food Healthy Planet (HFHP), supported by Cristina Temmink, Transformational Learning consultant, and Natasha Joshi, Associate Director at Rohini Nilekani Philanthropies. Diana spoke about HFHP’s use of transformational learning principles, and how it is influencing a novel approach to collaborative grant making (supporting coalitions and movement building). Natasha provided an inspiring picture of how Rohini Nilekani Philanthropies seeks to balance the power relationship between grantees and funders through an innovative outcome tracking system. This blog provides a snapshot of the approaches shared and highlights some common threads that emerged from the presentations and discussion with participants.

Healthy Food Healthy Planet:

Healthy Food Healthy Planet (HFHP) is a pooled fund initiative dedicated to increased collaboration and trust among civil society actors and funders and spearheading movement building to transform food systems across Europe, striving for greater health, sustainability, justice, and accessibility for all. Established in 2019, it was inspired by how Plastics Solutions Fund supported an international organized movement to tackle the global plastic pollution crisis.

Transformational learning for transformative change

“We have embarked on a transformational learning journey to support system change in the food system in Europe” — Diana Ugalde.

Over the last couple of years HFHP has explored how to incorporate transformational learning in its work as a pool fund. For HFHP, transformational learning is more suitable than conventional monitoring and evaluation (M&E) as it favors the sort of relational work that is needed for transformative systems change. Transformational learning embraces uncertainty, supports reflective practice to challenge the status quo, and fosters stronger connections amongst co-learners. Transformational learning prioritizes the process over the outputs, the personal experience and relations over the immediate products.

For HFHP a transformational learning approach goes hand-in-hand with the commitment to co-creation. In this context, co-creation is a means to balance interests and power of those involved in the process. Co-creation also supports the conditions for deeper learning to flourish and invites all actors to participate in a collectively-owned strategy. In her presentation, Diana explained how HFHP built connections between over 100 civil society organizations (CSOs) and funders working on food systems across Europe. They started by identifying similar broad change goals that could be shared by these organizations working at different scales in the climate-aware food production and consumption picture. Then, they brought together these organizations to co-developed HFHP’s strategic framework in its inception, back in 2020.

Diana emphasized that making visible the hidden connections between power, voice and access to resources is key for transformative change. A young organization, (HFHP’s first operational team was established in 2021), HFHP is experimenting with different grant-making frameworks to reduce competition for resources in this eco-system. The team pays particular attention to balance voice and participation amongst this emerging movement, to increase equity and diversity in the access to funding.

Learning translates into tangible improvements:

Co-creation and transformational learning have resulted in very concrete and visible shifts in HFHP’s governance structure and how it funds. Diana shared inspiring examples:

• HFHP revised its governance model in 2023 to better balance power dynamics between funders and CSOs, establishing a new steering committee where both groups were represented.
• After the first cycle of grant-making HFHP shifted from traditional call for proposals to a collaborative grant-making approach to foster new alliances by breaking silos, and promoting experimentation, innovation and learning. Collaborative grant-making is a funding model to resource collaborations, coalitions, networks, and alliances rather than providing individual grants to organizations separately. This approach did not come without challenges. Although it promoted collaboration, it was difficult to completely avoid competition for funding altogether, as not all initial ideas could be funded. Also, funding alliances turned out to require more resources than initially estimated. The team realized deep, sustained collaboration amongst partners required good facilitation and that more time was needed, hence, grants needed to be longer.
• Adopting a flexible mindset allowed more space to try out a broader range of solutions, including seeking additional funders and increasing the budget for collaborative projects. For the next round of grant-making HFHP is planning to first map both barriers and soft levers for change on the subnational level before implementing the next grant-making cycle to trial a more targeted, strategic, and inclusive funding approach. The team is aware that this new approach may well generate unforeseen challenges and they are preparing to embrace the uncertainty that comes with genuine learning processes, in a spirit of continuous evolution and improvement.

Rohini Nilekani Philanthropies

Rohini Nilekani Philanthropies (RNP) is an Indian philanthropy and focuses all its grants and projects in India. RNP works across five key areas: climate and environment, mental health, active citizenship, access to justice, and gender, specifically working on masculinities with boys and men. RNP has adopted a non-traditional approach to monitoring, evaluation, and outcome tracking.

A re-definition of accountability and impact

RNP has developed a bespoke framework to understand if and how they are enabling changes in systems. Instead of using partners’ reported outcomes as proxies to describe its own impact as a foundation, the Foundation focuses on how effectively they are playing their role as a funder whose primary purpose is to support a thriving ecosystem of civil society organizations. This is a very compelling illustration of how funders can re-balance their power with grantee partners and shift the narrative about accountability and impact.

A partner-led approach to understand systems change

Natasha shared the foundation’s internal journey to develop an impact framework that captures changes as they are described by those who experience them, rather than by those who set the frame. RNP began by asking 80+ partners how they categorized progress and success and how they thought that RNP’s impact should be measured. They heard many interesting responses from partners that were integrated into what has become the so-called Four-Quadrant Framework.

The Four-Quadrant Framework is an innovative example of how to reset and rebalance the power and accountability between grantees and funders. This framework categorises reported outcomes by tangible vs intangible and fast emerging (e.g. rescuing animals) vs slow emerging (e.g. mind shift changes). Based on feedback from grantee partners, the team also identified four areas that would allow them to track how well they were doing as a funder. These include: grant-giving, convening, systems-level sense-making, and informing other philanthropies. RNP uses this framework to evaluate its own impact as a funder, and reports on it to its partners.

RNP also uses other interesting equity-building approaches in spaces where power over resources and influence is uneven. For example, accepting grant proposals made through WhatsApp voice notes from organizations based in remote locations with limited connectivity.

Through partners like CORO they support the Academy of Grassroots Leadership which is a consortium of 250 grassroots organizations, emphasizing the value of indigenous knowledge and giving it greater visibility. RNP has explored novel ways of capturing and representing knowledge (oral, visual, lived experiences) and integrating these with traditional methods, to create dual or triple layered bodies of communicable knowledge. These approaches are all the more important for climate work as they contribute to ensuring the voices of those most affected by climate change, who often have the least power, are heard.

An invitation to other funders

Both speakers concluded with some suggestions that members of the Climate SMILE community (and other funders) could consider in their respective journeys.

• It is possible (and urgent) to decentre the funder in the learning relationship with grantees. Both Natasha and Diana emphasized the relevance of experimenting with ways to shift the focus from the funder’s perspective to the needs and insights of the grantees and local communities.
• As climate becomes a central priority for many funders, it is time to move beyond the binary of mitigation and adaptation. Natasha described how extreme climate events are increasingly more frequent and more devastating, affecting all aspects of life for local communities. She described how in the current context, the distinction between mitigation and adaptation efforts can feel artificial, and she advocated for a more integrated approach. Diana emphasized that due to the rapid pace of change and the interconnected nature of climate issues it’s critical to take a wide-systems approach and invest in context-specific solutions.
• Integrating indigenous and unconventional knowledge with traditional MEL may be complicated at times but adds real value to both trust building and knowledge capital. Both speakers reflected on how to integrate Indigenous and other unconventional forms of knowledge with Western ones, reflecting that this is an area that many of those working in the climate field, including their own organizations, want to do more of.
• Break the association between failure and confidence loss. Diana and Natasha both shared how HFHP and RNP respectively intentionally create space and time to allow organizations (including themselves) to experiment and fail. This is part of the innovation process and can lead to significant discoveries. To truly embed transformational learning, it is crucial to break the association between failure and loss of trust. In Natasha’s experience, clarity of purpose and the ability to experiment are more important than the size of the grant in achieving transformative change.

We welcome your reflections and experiences to support funders to explore transformational learning approaches in their climate work.

Further reading and resources:

• Learning our way into the future of transforming food systems by Cristina Temmink
• Plotting impact beyond simple metrics by Natasha Joshi
• Kickstarting the co-creation of the Transformational Learning Framework by Marinke van Riet and Diana Ugalde
• HFHP’s new participatory steering committee by Guilia Lagana

Climate SMILE (Strategy, Monitoring, Impact, Learning and Evaluation) is a learning and practice community bringing together practitioners working in climate philanthropy. Climate SMILE connects SMILE staff from foundations with other key actors and groups in the knowledge and learning ecosystem, stretches thinking and practice in the field, and optimises resources. If you would like to find out more or engage in some of our ongoing conversations, please reach out to climatesmile@gmail.com

The authors acknowledge the valuable inputs from the speakers and participants during the Sparking Dialogues Sessions that have given rise to this blog.