What happens when a funder has big strategic questions, a short timeline, and a deep commitment to centering the wisdom of movement leaders and funding peers? In this case story, Alison Gold shares how Optimistic Anthropology collaborated with the program team at a feminist funder focused on the Global South to move from uncertainty to clarity by pairing qualitative research informed by feminist practice with a highly-facilitated Emergent Learning process. It's a strong example of how learning, when intentionally designed and facilitated, can be a powerful tool for creating strategy rather than something that slows it down.
How might we get to a strategy when the questions are big and the runway is short?
Over the summer, I had the joy of partnering with members of a program team at a feminist funding organization focused on the Global South. They set out to evolve one of their funding streams, which focuses on cross-movement collaboration, and needed to get a call for proposals out the door (with a deadline that was coming up fast!). They were committed to making sure their strategy wasn't shaped only from the inside, but by funders and movement leaders working in and with the Global South.
The funding organization’s original RFP described what I'd call a traditional research project: the consultant would go off, conduct desk research and interview other funders, and deliver a report with recommendations for how to proceed. But in my experience, recommendations from an outsider who isn't holding an organization's context and values rarely make for a rich or useful strategy process. So, Optimistic Anthropology proposed a different approach: shifting from a research project to an Emergent Learning process. We would still do the research: desk research plus discussions with funders and movement leaders working in and with the Global South. But instead of me going off to study the question and coming back at the end of the work to deliver answers, the program team became co-learners and decision-makers who were making meaning of what we were hearing throughout the process.
If you've spent time working in or with philanthropy, you know that strategy work like this can easily stretch over a year. And when time gets tight, listening to and learning from external folks is often the first thing to go. So, it was excellent that the funder was so committed to hearing from others. And with a timeline of just ten weeks from start to finish, it was going to be a whirlwind!
As we shaped our timeline and approach, Optimistic Anthropology started from two of its strengths: qualitative research grounded in feminist participatory methodologies, and Emergent Learning. Many Emergent Learning processes start in the same place: a Framing Question. This is the one powerful question a group is trying to answer together through its work. (If you're new to Emergent Learning, my posts What the Heck is Emergent Learning? and What the Heck are the Principles of Emergent Learning? are good places to start.)
Over the ten weeks, we used four foundational Emergent Learning tools to support our work of clarifying the funder's revised approach to its cross-movement collaboration funding stream: an Emergent Learning Framing Question, a Learning Log (with associated learning memos), Emergent Learning Conversations, and Action Hypotheses. Here's what that looked like…
