A Creative and Strategic Learning Partner for Climate-Focused Philanthropies

The reason for philanthropies to address climate change is clear: a warming atmosphere puts pressure on the very causes and actors that philanthropies most want to support. And while most investments in climate will come from intergovernmental organizations and governments, philanthropy has a clear mandate and imperative in tackling climate change.

We believe that integrating a climate lens into all philanthropic work has become mandatory in order to truly tackle the interconnected issues philanthropies are best positioned to support.

Many philanthropies believe that they should keep their overhead at an absolute minimum so they can dedicate as much of their resources as possible to their partners. We understand this from a values perspective and agree with lean, effective philanthropic operations. But over the past decade, philanthropies have gone too far and have created organizational environments that do the opposite of what they intended: staff turnover is high, psychological safety is low, learning and strategic thinking is compromised, and partners are often suffering as a result.

That’s why we believe that philanthropies succeed when they are healthy themselves. Because when their grantmaking operations are excellent and their strategic learning processes are organized and transparent, they are better partners. And that’s when they unlock impact, together with their partners.

Philanthropies often commission evaluation after evaluation without taking the time and doing the hard work of digesting the valuable information they gathered, learning from it, and developing a strategic path forward. We get it. We’ve been there!

We believe that philanthropies can multiply their impact by as much as 10x when they reconfigure their resources to tap into the existing knowledge at their fingertips.

Many philanthropies are structured similarly: they often split out key overlapping functions (strategy, learning, human resources, grantmaking excellence) which prevents them from connecting the dots and seeing the big picture. As a result, philanthropies often work in silos and struggle to learn across their internal functions.

We believe philanthropies should be centered around a learning philosophy if they want to achieve ongoing success.

Traditional evaluation and learning practices just won’t cut it for the pace of work that today’s philanthropies operate within. We understand. The world moves at full speed and it can be difficult to allocate the time needed to learn and adapt.

We believe that modern philanthropies need to adopt real-time, micro-learning techniques and experimental evaluation practices to meaningfully embed learning into their decision-making practice.

Coaching helps philanthropies shift their mindsets to seek and celebrate positive change. When coaching is embedded in evaluation, learning, and organizational transformation, it results in new systems that set up philanthropies for lasting success. And when you look at what underlies transformation — agility, adaptability, innovation, resilience — you realize that fundamentally it is the ability to learn how to do new things. And we believe that coaching can unlock that learning much more quickly and meaningfully.

We sense your hesitation. It can be challenging to involve someone in your internal processes. It’s valuable to include a coach to spark creativity and imagination in your transformation work who has your best interests in mind while maintaining an outside perspective.

It is our belief that the solutions that will truly transform our planet can only be found through thinking and acting systemically. For philanthropies, this means collaborating with peer funders more frequently and strategically. It also means supporting nimble and growing networks of partners that work in tandem with philanthropies to address key issues.

We understand you may be skeptical. We know you hear “systems change” thrown around all of the time. It is our professional belief and practice that philanthropies who are in the business of climate change must also be in the business of systems change if they want to see real impact. And we are here to help you measure, learn, and adapt as you go.