{"id":5605,"date":"2018-10-03T15:38:01","date_gmt":"2018-10-03T15:38:01","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/gophilanthropic.org\/?p=5605"},"modified":"2019-05-03T20:55:45","modified_gmt":"2019-05-03T20:55:45","slug":"encouraging-innovation-collaboration-at-the-grassroots","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/gophilanthropic.org\/encouraging-innovation-collaboration-at-the-grassroots\/","title":{"rendered":"Encouraging Innovation & Collaboration at the Grassroots"},"content":{"rendered":"

Encouraging Innovation & Collaboration at the Grassroots: GoPhil Seed Grants in Nepal<\/strong><\/span><\/h1>\n

by Emily Bild, GoPhilanthropic Director of Global Programs <\/span><\/em><\/p>\n

Trafficking, particularly of women and children, is a critical issue in Nepal. Despite the efforts of many government departments, UN agencies, INGOs (International Non-Governmental Organizations) and NGOs, it is a problem that is growing rather than shrinking. Over the past three years working in Nepal, GoPhil has raised concerns over a lack of collaboration, coordination and resulting duplication of efforts between varying organizations working in the arena.<\/span><\/p>\n

As GoPhil\u2019s Director of Global Programs, I attempted to understand more of the landscape by researching and conducting extensive Skype calls to meet with a wide range of NGOs and networks in Nepal working on trafficking. It led us to realize there are indeed a number of existing efforts to promote collaboration and coordination amongst organizations (particularly within the Nepalese NGO sector) yet there was definitely room for improvement in terms of the effectiveness of their efforts. Many reported that there was \u201cmore talk than action\u201d and that any organized networks or trafficking alliances were not known about by their peers and didn\u2019t have sufficient funding to act.<\/span><\/p>\n

Network Mapping<\/span><\/strong><\/h3>\n

GoPhilanthropic Foundation has a long history of encouraging organizations to network, share and cross-learn. It\u2019s the third prong in our mission to IDENTIFY, INVEST, and SCALE the work of grassroots efforts providing access to education, health and human rights for marginalized people. In hopes to fuel more of this \u201cscaling\u201d we proposed taking our cross-learning efforts in Nepal in a new direction. Rather than continuing to develop more partnerships with individual organizations, each working on their separate agendas related to trafficking, we decided to develop a pilot program with seed funding that would specifically encourage and promote\u00a0<\/span>more effective collaboration amongst the organizations working on this issue. This rather unique notion was set forth by June Holley in her \u201cNetwork Mapping\u201d work. GoPhil had the honor of being guided by June as we set out to apply her concepts in the human trafficking NGO world in Nepal.<\/span><\/p>\n

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June introduced us to The Leadership Learning Community (LLC), a non-profit organization transforming the way leadership development work is conceived, conducted and evaluated, primarily within the nonprofit sector. They had already run a successful seed grants initiative. They shared that in 2017 they had funded three seed grants\u2014each around $8,000 each (not huge amounts) and explained that their original idea behind this was to create funds with few strings attached so that organizations could learn and experiment. Grant applications were simple and easy to fill out and the time frame for the grant cycles short<\/span> (8 months).<\/span> Then they focused on bringing back and sharing the lessons of success and challenges from their collective experiences. This would encouraging innovative ideas that are usually not given the space to be tried out. For more information about their process, please visit: http:\/\/www.leadershiplearning.org\/blog\/miriam-persley\/2017-04-27\/how-leadership-development-programs-can-harvest-social-change-though-<\/a><\/span><\/p>\n

Selecting our Grantees<\/span><\/strong><\/h3>\n

Once we had developed a Call for Proposals that emphasized all the core criteria (anti-trafficking, innovation, collaboration, maximum grant size $3,000 per project) we circulated this widely amongst our networks. We received a large number of very strong proposals from a wide range of NGOs across the country, both big and small organizations, many of whom we had never met before. Given the high quality of applications received, selecting the successful four projects was a challenge and involved reviews and discussions across the GoPhil team. Grantees were chosen on the basis that the project seemed \u2018do-able\u2019 within a budget of $3,000 per grant and could be completed with in the six month time frame (January – July 2018), Most importantly though, they needed to highlight a strong element of innovation within their chosen project and display a genuine desire to learn and collaborate. We selected four projects that were employing very unique strategies to tackle trafficking and were located in different parts of the country.<\/span><\/p>\n

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Using a spider web ice-breaker exercise to demonstrate the power of collaboration.<\/p><\/div>\n

In July of this year, after the projects had been completed, I had the privilege to travel to Nepal to meet all of the organizations involved in our seed grant initiative and to facilitate the sharing of their unique learnings. It was enormously inspiring to meet all the people who had been working hard to tackle trafficking in their communities and to see them exchange their experiences, successes and challenges with each other. Every organization had approached their project differently, with the seed grant initiatives ranging from capacity building within an existing network of anti-trafficking NGOs to producing a short animation to raise awareness of the risks of volunteering in an orphanage (and the link to trafficking of children to orphanages). Each of them had achieved far more than we even expected in the short six month window and every one of them planned to continue their efforts. Amazingly the seed grants had kicked off new programs of work and brand new collaborations between organizations working for the same goal. <\/span><\/p>\n