What Does Co-design of Capacity Building for Advocacy Organizations Really Mean? Openness, Flexibility, Risk-taking, and Results

A guest column by Susan Misra of TCC Group

------------------------------------------------------

When you’re leading a capacity-building initiative, are you willing to listen to other viewpoints, incorporate them into decisions, and even change course mid-stream? 

Recently, our team had the chance to grapple with this question through an initiative funded by The James Irvine Foundation, The William and Flora Hewlett Foundation and the David and Lucile Packard Foundation.  Strengthening Organizations to Mobilize Californians involved 27 nonprofits working with underrepresented communities (for the full evaluation, click here.)  The Initiative focused on improving organizational capacity and, ultimately, increasing civic participation.

We quickly recognized that the Initiative had to reflect this overarching philosophy. Our team convened 17 grantees, who suggested that capacity building should not be imposed by a funder but created through the close collaboration of participants.  We agreed and used their feedback to create an outline of the Initiative. A design committee of seven grantees was assembled to refine the Initiative’s 32 learning activities including peer exchanges, trainings and convenings. The committee provided critical feedback, such as the desire to meet in person instead of virtually and the need to focus on themes like communications and fundraising.

Our team believed that we had to stay flexible and open to insights that emerged throughout the Initiative. We kept going back to members of the design committee, interviewed each participating organization’s executive director, and surveyed registrants for each activity. Perhaps most dramatic of all, we undertook a significant re-design after our first peer exchange, when participants spoke of what it really takes to share power and lead alongside others inside their organizations.  We made shared leadership a theme, to one degree or another, in all of the Initiative’s activities (for an article on what we learned, click here.)

This process wasn’t easy, and we had some internal debate about whether making such a large change at this stage was the right path.  Were we being too responsive to the detriment of long-term impact?  Ultimately, we concluded that if we really believed in co-design, we should follow the group’s energy and identify how shared leadership intersected with our goals of increasing adaptive, leadership, and management capacity.

In the end, involving participants in such a deep and authentic way became a working model of the change that the Initiative sought to enable.  We measured a number of success indicators, finding that 82% of participating organizations reported improving their capacity and 78% said they improved specifically in shared leadership.

As for our team, I think I speak for all of us in saying that we wrapped up the Initiative with an even deeper appreciation for what participatory design actually means.  We saw what could be gained by staying flexible and responsive, even when doing so made our work more complicated.

Susan Misra is Associate Director of Program and Grants Management and Capacity Building at TCC Group, a national consulting firm that provides planning, evaluation, and capacity-building services.