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FOCUS ON...Seeing differently? Donors as learning organizations

Funders talk about listening to their grantees and their beneficiaries, and spend time and money on evaluating their programmes, but what lies behind the rhetoric? Do they really absorb the lessons that their work throws up or is organizational learning simply one more item on the list of neglected good intentions?

In this Alliance special feature, guest editors Jenny Hyatt and Allan Kaplan set out their ideal of a learning organization and suggest that many funders are failing to live up to it. In response, a number of donors look at their own organizations and describe the means, formal and informal, by which they seek to profit from their own and others' experience. Contributors include the Bernard van Leer Foundation, Dutch organization SNV, the Carpathian Foundation, South Africa's Social Change Assistance Trust, Oxfam and IBM. Lizzie Zobel, founder of the Philippine Sa Aklat Sisikat Foundation, looks at the issue of learning from the grantee's point of view.

The issue also includes Jo Andrews explaining the nature and purpose of the newly established Sigrid Rausing Trust Strategic Funds, Celso Grecco on his attempts to replicate the Brazilian social stock exchange, and Michael Liffman on the Asia-Pacific Centre for Philanthropy and Social Investment's grantmaking course.

CONTENTS

• Editorial 2
• Letters 3
• News from around the world 4
• What's new at … 11
• Conference reports 15
• Spotlight on business in South Africa 18
• Opinion 19
• Books 56

ARTICLES

A small but telling weight in the balance of a country's future
Jo Andrews explains the nature and purpose of the newly established Sigrid Rausing Trust Strategic Funds 20

New maps wanted - work starts yesterday FREE ARTICLE
Celso Grecco on his attempts to replicate the Brazilian social stock exchange 22

Effective giving for all?
Michael Liffman on the Asia-Pacific Centre for Philanthropy and Social Investment's grantmaking course 24

Space for learning? FREE ARTICLE
Jenny Hyatt and Allan Kaplan set out a paradigm for the learning organization and argue that donors' practice generally falls short of it 26

Interview
Lizzie Zobel of the Sa Aklat Sisikat Foundation, Philippines 30

Donor organizations: learning to learn
Five donors discuss their learning practices in the light of Hyatt and Kaplan's arguments 34

Who is 'we'? Devising an explicit learning agenda
Peter Laugharn on leveraging learning in the Bernard van Leer Foundation 38

Swimming against the tide
Naa-aku Acquaye Baddoo on learning to use the space for learning that exists in SNV's world of plans, systems, indicators and measurements 41

Inventing the wheel
What do you learn from when you have no precedents to guide you? Sándor Köles talks about the work of the Carpathian Foundation 44

Listening to local communities
Greg Erasmus on how South Africa's Social Change Assistance Trust (SCAT) has been able to adapt and survive 45

Being the change we want to see?
Belinda Duff of Oxfam on the tensions between learning and being an organization with a strong value base and a conviction that it is doing the right thing 48

IBM's model for corporate philanthropy
Celia Moore 50

Not learning from beneficiaries
David Bonbright on the findings of a recent Keystone survey 51

Beyond learning for learning's sake
Phil Buchanan on how the Center for Effective Philanthropy's grantee perceptions report can contribute to foundation learning 52

Continuing the conversation
Guest editors Jenny Hyatt and Allan Kaplan mull over some points arising from this special feature 54

From Alliance, Vol 11, No 2, June 2006

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