Supporting our partners beyond funding

Alongside our grant-making, we strive to be a purposeful, supportive partner. Therefore, we prioritise working with our grantee partners to provide additional support if needed. For example, we provide organisational strengthening support, which targets the areas our partners consider necessary to deliver their missions. Our child safeguarding officer helps protect the children our partners come in contact with. Our monitoring, evaluation, and learning specialist helps us better understand how we can improve our grant-making. Our communications team helps ensure transparency around our grant-making and elevates the great work of our partners. Read on to find out more about our work in 2024.

Organisational strengthening & effectiveness

In today’s challenging and rapidly changing environment, organisations must continuously adapt and strengthen their capacities to remain resilient and effective. This is why we provide capacity-strengthening support through our organisational development (OD) fund, managed in partnership with Swiss Philanthropy Foundation since 2020. This fund has proven to be an invaluable tool for many organisations, enabling them to enhance their operations and achieve long-term sustainability.

The OD fund supports a wide array of organisational development needs, including strategic planning, board development, fundraising, child safeguarding, leadership, and communication efforts. By offering grants that range from USD 5,000 to USD 30,000, with project durations from three months to one and a half years, organisations can hire external consultants and build internal capacity in key areas. This support has led to significant improvements in financial operations, fundraising strategies, strategic planning, and child-safeguarding policies and procedures.

Organisations which received OD grants report long-term benefits such as: increased self-sufficiency; improved service delivery; enhanced organisational resilience; stronger financial health; and a shift towards building internal expertise. One partner highlighted the importance of its strategic plan, developed with OD fund support: “Having a written strategy that the entire team collaborated on has been hugely helpful; it’s allowed us to focus on what we want to do, turn down ideas that don’t fit strategically, and also clearly explain to others where we are aiming to go.”

Our partners appreciated the quality of support and collaboration provided, both by Oak staff and external consultants. Partners appreciated that the grant management process, managed by Swiss Philanthropy Foundation, is smooth, efficient, and transparent. This positive feedback underscores our commitment to being a flexible donor partner, dedicated to supporting organisations in building their resilience.

Our partners have made several recommendations to further enhance the effectiveness and impact of the OD fund. These include: increasing grant amounts and durations; providing more flexible funding that can be accessed on a rolling basis for unexpected OD needs; enhancing communication and transparency; facilitating peer learning and knowledge sharing; and offering in-kind support such as technical assistance in programme development, finance, operations, and governance.

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 and ensure their organisations are safe for children. For us, this also means constantly improving our knowledge, our policies, and our collaboration with our partners.

Oak staff are trained yearly on child safeguarding. Our 2024 training focused on our organisational policy and processes, including how Oak supports its partners to assess their child-safeguarding systems and access expert support when needed. Recently we identified new experts, notably in the United States, to better support partners.

At the end of 2024, we integrated the child safeguarding self-assessment into our grant management system (GMS) to ease the administrative burden on our partners and improve our internal processes. Going forward, our partners will be able to complete their self-assessment within our system, when submitting their applications and reports. The validity of this self-assessment has been extended from one to three years.

If you are a partner of Oak Foundation, please speak to your programme officer to find out more about the support you can receive.

Monitoring, evaluation & learning

At Oak Foundation, we strive to maximise the impact of our grant-making 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, and embedding reflective practice in our routines is essential to achieving positive change and to guiding our strategic decision-making.

In 2024, our programme staff continued to: improve their ability to collect and use data on impact; use their learning to inform decision making and enhance the effectiveness of our programme strategies; and create spaces for reflection and learning – both internally and with our partners.

Oak’s programmes commission external reviews and evaluations when needed, to better understand rapidly changing contexts, help find fit-for-purpose solutions, and inform us and our partners on where and how we can be most effective. We continue to improve our reporting approaches and our tracking systems, so we can understand whether we are making progress, without increasing the reporting burden on our partners. For example, we have been partnering with other funders and intermediaries in the climate sphere to rethink reporting, including through the design and use of joint reporting templates to minimise the number of reports needed.

In collaboration with the communications team, our senior adviser for impact trained programme staff on impact storytelling underpinned by strong evidence. This training aimed to help develop a storytelling mindset at Oak by sharing knowledge and approaches that can enable us and our grantee partners to develop compelling narratives about our grants, backed up by robust evidence. 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.

To this end, in 2024, our senior adviser for impact conducted a review of available evidence on the impact of core funding. She has shared her findings widely through an article on our website, blogs, and webinars. We continue to seek to promote equitable and trust-based approaches that shift power to our partners and the communities they work with.

Communications

We know that good communication helps ensure transparency around our grant-making and elevates the voices of those who are the least heard. It is our honour to raise the voices of the people who benefit from the great work that our partners carry out around the world. 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 share stories of their success in making the world fairer, safer, and more sustainable.

We worked with programmes across the Foundation to share two scoping studies seeking to identify and promote opportunities for funding partnerships in Africa, Asia, the Caribbean, and Latin America. The studies contain detailed philanthropic landscape analyses, profiles of prospective partners, and essential principles and practices for effective support. We value collaboration, and actively seek partners in our collective efforts to contribute to a better world. We hope that the results of these studies also inspire you and support your efforts. Please check out our LinkedIn account if you would like to know more.

Oak values communications as a vehicle for social change and provides funding for communication initiatives within our programmes. We also support organisational-strengthening efforts 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: please reach out to the communications team so that we can share more about your success. We are also open to feedback – so please let us know if you think we can improve our communications.