Strategy and Learning Consulting
We’ve partnered with Omidyar Network to provide support to their New Data Economy and Private Trustworthy Message teams as they apply a systems approach to their strategy development and internalevaluation efforts. We are excited by this partnership because it lays a new path for our strategy and learning consulting and work on complex social change. We’re always exploring ways to engage foundations in creating, sustaining, and measuring systems change using causal loop mapping and systems thinking tools.
Our goals are to collaborate toward a better understanding of the systems they’re working with(in), the complex dynamics, patterns, and behaviors of the systems, create causal loops maps, and understand how power and equity show up in these systems.
Practices we’re applying to this partnership: systems thinking, systems change, causal loop mapping, emergent and participatory learning
Resources we’re drawing from: The Omidyar Group’s Systems Practice Workbook, Lost Causal: Debunking Myths About Causal Analysis in Philanthropy
We’re partnering with Oregon’s Meyer Memorial Trust—an organization that is working to accelerate racial, social, and economic justice for the collective well-being of Oregon’s lands and peoples—as they work to make their grantmaking more trust-based and community-informed. Between January-December 2022, we will collaborate with staff and leadership to grow their culture of learning.
Our goals for this work include developing participatory ways of learning and processing information as an organization, operationalizing learning tools with staff and community, and refining their strategy to include outcomes and indicators of impact that align with their community engagement. At CEI, we’re excited by this partnership because of the trend toward more equitable, community-centered grantmaking and how this approach might strengthen the field of philanthropy.
Practices we’re applying to this partnership: emergent learning, community engagement, deep listening, trust-based philanthropy
Resources we’re drawing from: Toward a Trust-Based Framework for Learning and Evaluation; How to Ask Powerful Questions; 5-A-Day: Learning By Force of Habit; How Leaders Affect Evaluation Capacity Building in Foundations
Co-founded in May 2020 amid the uprising for racial justice, the Minnesota Black Collective Foundation envisions a game changing, culturally rooted, community-led foundation that creates the conditions for a thriving and connected ecosystem of Black-led change. The Collective partners with changemakers who are working to realize a just Minnesota where Black people are holistically well and live with dignity and prosperity.
CEI is partnering with the Collective as they build a community-led foundation that can drive transformative change. The Collective is being designed as a learning organization. We are gathering wisdom on centering Black lives in the ways funds are invested to create change in Minnesota and beyond. Our work includes developing a community-informed, shared definition of Black-led change and racial justice to inform how philanthropy invests in the ecosystem of Black-led change in Minnesota. We will be developing a wayfinding guide as a learning and evaluation tool for changemakers.
Practices we’re applying to this partnership: emergent strategy, and learning, radical imagination
Resources we’re drawing from: Mismatched: Philanthropy’s Response to the Call for Racial Justice; Toward a Trust-Based Framework for Learning and Evaluation; The Price of Civil Rights: Black Lives, White Funding, and Movement Capture; YPC 2022 Sustaining Momentum: Racial Equity in Philanthropy
Miami Workers Center