Learning partner to The Cornerstone Fund

Supporting civil society infrastructure organisations and funders to learn and develop their systems change practice

The backdrop

There is a growing recognition within civil society that organisations need to see themselves as part of a whole ecosystem. To enable this, grant making needs to move away from funding short-term interventions delivered by single organisations, to providing funding that helps build the conditions for long term systems change.

The Cornerstone Fund is a collaboration between City Bridge Trust, The National Community Lottery Fund, Trust for London, Greater London Authority and John Lyon’s Charity. Since 2018, these organisations have come together to fund systems change initiatives led by civil society support organisations to help contribute to a thriving civil society in London that is adaptable, resilient, collaborative, sustainable and driven by communities.

Ten partnerships led by civil society support organisations were funded through Round 1 of the Fund which launched in April 2018. The partnerships ranged from place-based generalist support and specialist equalities networks, to thematic partnerships focusing on issues like the effective use of data and power-sharing. A further twelve partnerships have been funded through Round 2 which launched in July 2021 and has a specific focus on addressing structural inequalities.

We were commissioned to be the Learning Partner to Round 1 of the Fund in 2018, and were subsequently recommissioned for Round 2 in 2021.

What we are doing

Our approach to this work is based on emergent learning — a context-led and collaborative approach that uses ongoing reflection and sensemaking to help shape change in complexity. We focus on creating a brave but safe learning culture where funders and partnerships can honestly and openly share the opportunities and challenges they face and in a way that explicitly acknowledges and seeks to rebalance traditional power dynamics.

In our work with Round 1, we adopted a structured approach of four 6-month learning cycles. Each cycle featured interviews, surveys and focus groups, followed by a learning workshop which brought together partnerships and funders. To support this process, we co-created a learning framework featuring foundations for systems change (collaborative behaviours, collective purpose and vision, learning, power dynamics, influencing and leadership). While systems change work can take time to show impact, understanding the development of these foundations has helped partnerships notice and reflect on the underlying conditions they are building.

In Round 2, we are continuing to convene learning conversations, helping partnerships and funders to experiment and reflect on their role in contributing to systemic change, as well as sharing their learning along the way. This includes helping partnerships tell the stories of their work, an often difficult task when it comes to systems change efforts. We will also support the Fund to share the learning with others to develop future civil society funding models and influence systems change more widely.

Learning and impact

Through this work we create meaningful spaces for learning which enable partnerships and funders to explore progress, different routes to change and models of collaboration. Both funders and partnerships have expressed that they value the opportunity to come together to build trusting relationships and learn collectively as peers, and the blend of structure and flexibility the sessions provide to help enable this

We have used the learning framework to support the partnerships to reflect more deeply on their ways of working and progress in ways they would not otherwise do as part of more delivery-focused partnership meetings.

After Round 1, Jenny Field, former Deputy Director at City Bridge Trust said that our involvement “has been invaluable in helping us, from our various perspectives, think about what ‘systems change’ means to us and to our work and to think about how we can remove the barriers to this change and lay the foundations for longer-term, systemic change.”

We have summarised key learning from the first two years of the Cornerstone Fund (2018–2020) in this report, which includes key features of effective systems change practice for partnerships and funders. We are also reconnecting with Round 1 partnerships to help capture their stories and impact as their work supported by the Cornerstone Fund comes to an end

Learning from Round 1 fed into the design of Round 2, and we facilitated design conversations with both funders and the wider sector. One outcome was to make equity and tackling structural inequalities a key focus for Round 2. This has meant funding initiatives with a strong focus on the people and communities furthest from power and decision-making, who face the most barriers to participation and to finding the support they need.