Changing Systems: Learning, Power, Resources
Over the next decade we will help places facing inequality build the power, evidence, relationships and investment needed to make long-term systems change possible.
Our four strategic challenges
We have organised our strategy around four persistent challenges that hold back long-term change. They connect and overlap. Together, these four challenges give us a simple question to keep asking – what conditions must exist for people, places, organisations and the wider system to take action together, learn, make decisions and sustain change over time?
Relationships
How might we build the infrastructure for collective action
Power
How do we move from participation to power
Evidence
How do we turn evidence into a shared capacity to learn
Investment & Resources
How do we change how resources flow in place and the wider system
What we will do
Changing Systems: Learning, Power, Resources
We help our partners understand contexts, make power dynamics visible, build capabilities for shared learning, and redesign the relationships and resource flows that shape what becomes possible. Our core practice is focused into five areas of expertise:
- Learning partnerships
- Evaluation
- Research
- Co-production
- Strategic facilitation
We combine them differently depending on the challenge we are helping our partners to understand and work on. We also often explore new ideas in collaboration with others, to contribute to developing practice and ideas that push civil society towards increasingly systemic and equitable practices.
Over the next ten years, we will help funders, government, charities and communities learn, design and act together, using evidence and participation to shift power and create lasting change.
We do this in four connected ways:
Understand change as it happens
Through evaluation and learning partnerships, we look beyond outcomes to understand what is shaping change and why. We pay close attention to relationships and power, including challenging traditional ideas about whose knowledge is valued and what counts as evidence.
Design with communities, not for them
We help communities and organisations shape services, programmes, funds and wider approaches to change together.
Through co-design and co-production, we bring lived and learned expertise into the same process, paying attention to whose knowledge is valued and where power sits.
Build collective practice
We use research, frameworks and models to make learning useful to others so stronger practice can spread and develop over time. We will create and grow spaces for shared learning, including our Community of Practice, where people involved in this work can explore challenges together.
Shift how resources flow
We help create fairer ways for funding and resources to reach communities and give people greater influence over how they are used. Our direct experience of participatory funding and community-led funding through The Giving Lab and Renaisi Innovation’s CIC, and fiscal hosting, we understand how decisions about resources can be made differently. We provide the infrastructure needed for community-led groups to access and manage funding that may otherwise be out of reach.
