Supporting our partners beyond funding

Alongside our grant-making, we strive to be purposeful, supportive partners. To this end, we work with our grantee partners to provide additional support if needed. This includes both organisational development support, which helps strengthen the areas our partners consider necessary to deliver their missions, and child safeguarding support, which helps our partners protect children. We also have a monitoring and evaluation team that helps us better understand how we can improve our grant-making, and a communications team that ensures transparency around our grant-making and elevates the great work of our partners. Read on to find out more.

Organisational strengthening & effectiveness

Oak Foundation is committed to supporting our partners to become stronger and more effective. This includes organisational development grants and direct capacity-strengthening support, so that our partners are able to address organisational challenges in the best ways they see fit.

The Organisational Development Fund (OD Fund) provides financial support for capacity strengthening. Swiss Philanthropy Foundation, which is managing the fund on behalf of Oak, supported 30 Oak partners with OD Fund grants of between USD 5,000 and USD 30,000. Grants supported capacity-strengthening and child-safeguarding services, amounting to USD 427,200 in total. The capacities that partners most asked for support in were leadership and child safeguarding training. Other OD grants focused on helping to build communication capacities, as well as fundraising, governance, and diversity, equity, and inclusion efforts. Grants were allocated to organisations based in the US, Zimbabwe, UK, Ethiopia, South Africa, and Uganda.

In 2023, we also provided capacity-strengthening help in strategic communications. Through a grant to Spitfire Strategies, 20 partners were able to participate in a year-long programme to develop their communication strategies and incorporate new communication skills. The programme consisted of two in-person trainings and mentoring from communications experts throughout the year. During these activities, participants were able to work on their elevator pitch, identify key audiences, and craft messaging tactics. Partners also received personalised support to work on their communication strategies or coach their staff. This programme helped them to develop critical communication capabilities and gave them an opportunity for peer-to-peer learning.

In 2023, we asked interested partners in Zimbabwe to participate in a facilitated self-assessment process, with the aim of providing tailored support to meet their needs. Local experts carried out the process, giving our partners the tools they need to help build sustainability within their organisations. For many, this was the first time they had an opportunity to reflect holistically on their organisations, or had the time to think about their development needs.

Following the results of the assessment, our partners designed a plan that stated clear organisational strengthening goals for the short, medium, and long term. The objectives of some related to fundraising, staff training, staff well-being, and board governance, while other organisations developed new strategies entirely. This was a valuable opportunity for us to support our partners in mapping out their individual needs and develop plans that can be implemented with Oak’s financial support and expertise. Congratulations to our partners who embarked on this journey – we are eager to hear about your results in the near future!

At Oak, we believe that support for organisational strengthening projects is essential for the sustainability of our partners. We want our support to be more than just funding. If you are an Oak Foundation partner, please speak to your programme officer to find out more about the support you can receive.

Child safeguarding

We are determined to put children first in all that we do. In the interest of protecting all children everywhere, we ask our partners to do the same. For us, this also means working internally on our policies and collaborating with our partners around the issue.

We regularly train our own staff on safeguarding at Oak, both within and beyond the foundation. This type of training helps us to continue accompanying our partners on their safeguarding journeys as best as we can, offering support and resources.

In November, we welcomed Alice Gentile as the new Adviser for Safeguarding and Organisational Development. Alice will be in touch with many of you to introduce herself if she hasn’t already. In the meantime, if you are a partner of Oak Foundation, please speak to your programme officer to find out more about the support you can receive.

Please see page 49 of this report for our Organisational Strengthening and Child Safeguarding grants.

Monitoring, evaluation & learning

At Oak Foundation, we strive to maximise the impact of our grantmaking and work with our partners to achieve the changes we want to see in the world. Collecting, consolidating, analysing, and seeing evidence of the impact we contribute to, understanding what works or does not, and embedding reflective practice in our routines are essential to achieving this and to guiding our strategic decision making.

During 2023, our programmes continued to create spaces for reflection and learning – both internally and with our partners. We’re also working to improve our ability to collect and use data on the results achieved.

When needed, Oak’s programmes commission external reviews and evaluations to better understand the rapidly changing context and to find realistic solutions that match reality.

We have been exploring the most effective ways to learn together with our partners, for example by engaging locally based learning partners to work with us in our learning journey. Internally, we continue to improve our reporting approaches and tracking systems, so we can understand whether we are making progress, without increasing the reporting burden on our partners. We believe in engaging and collaborating with other actors in the philanthropic field to stay abreast of best practices when it comes to monitoring, evaluation, and learning. We also seek to promote equitable and trust-based approaches that shift power to our partners and the communities they work with.

In 2023, we welcomed our new adviser for impact, Silvia Guizzardi. Throughout the year, she has continued to work with other funders and re-granters to streamline reporting requirements and share best practices, based on what we are hearing from our partners. We value our partners’ feedback and ideas, and we believe it will make us better funders.

Communications

Our communications team plays a central role in Oak’s operations. In addition to our twice-yearly Oak-wide newsletters, our annual report, and our social media channels, the stories page on our website aims to bring to life the work of our grantee partners and their efforts to make the world a fairer, safer, and more sustainable place.

In November, we organised our first global partner call so that we could jointly celebrate 40 years of Oak’s grant-making. Over 700 of our partners attended. We provided an overview of Oak’s history and shared our current aspirations. It was a great occasion, and we were so pleased to see so many of you on the call. Outside of this, we know that good communication helps ensure transparency around our grantmaking and elevates the voices of those who are the least heard. It is our honour to be able to raise the voices of the people that benefit from the great work of our partners being carried out around the world.

Oak values communications as a vehicle for social change and provides funding for communication initiatives within our programmes. We also support organisational-strengthening work that seeks to expand global and local efforts to improve communications. Please contact your programme officer if you are an Oak partner and would like to hear more. We love to hear success stories from our partners so please reach out to the Communications team at commdept@oakfnd.org and we will be happy to share. We are also open to feedback – so please let us know if you think we can improve our communications.