Organisational Strengthening and Effectiveness Update

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Following the results of our 2022 Grantee Perception Survey, Oak’s Organisational Development team has been working to refresh their strategy with the help of Sense Lab, a team of consultants from Brazil. We did this because of your feedback on the need for more tailored support, that is locally relevant to the contexts where partners work, and created in collaboration between you, our partner and us, the funder.

While our main goal of strengthening Oak’s partners and networks stays the same, we have adapted it to better support our partners to thrive and deliver on their mission. For example, one of the objectives we aim to achieve is increasing Oak’s internal capacity to provide organisational strengthening support. To do that, we will continue providing training for Oak staff and make available curated content and resources to guide their work with grantee partners. In addition, we intend to support service providers in the locations we provide grants, so that our partners can have access to local support.

In that vein, we are currently working with an organisation called the Nonprofit Builder to provide high quality organisational development support to our partners wherever they are in the world, on any topic, with local consultants who understand the respective contexts in which they work. The platform gives partners access to a curated list of providers based in the countries and regions where they work and in their language. From this list, they can choose the most suitable service, according to their specific organisational needs.

Nonprofit Builder can help partners with most aspects of building a successful and impactful organisation – from strategy, communications, fundraising, monitoring and evaluation, and more. It can provide support in the following ways:

• Short consulting projects, with an expert of your choice, to help implement important projects, like reviewing your strategy or clarifying organisational structure and roles.
• Training courses with small group sizes of 6-12 participants that offer personalised and meaningful interactions with peers.
• Leadership coaching to help leaders with self-confidence, self-limiting beliefs, decision making, and stress management, enabling you to lead your team to success.
• Capacity coaching on how to build your organisation.

If you are interested in receiving this support, please reach out to your Oak programme officer!

Finally, another important result from the strategy refresh that you may have noticed is the new name for our team! We are now called the Organisational Strengthening and Effectiveness team. We feel that our new name better reflects our purpose: to support organisations so they can become strong and effective.

You can learn more about the new strategy on Oak’s website here.