Exploring three-way partnerships for organisational development with MAVA Foundation
July 1st 2022
By Liliana Dias, Stone Soup Principal Consultant
Although we have at Stone Soup a clear internal process of project evaluation, capturing lessons learned and sharing case studies inside the community, and outside in the social ecosystem communicating on our work, we often lack the moment to really dive in the learning process with a client on how we are making the organization or their partner organisations more robust and sustainable.
Our client MAVA Foundation made this incredible learning plunge possible.
The challenge
During its last phase of activity (2016-2022) MAVA has invested in organisational development (OD) partnerships with some of its closest partner organisations in conservation, to better prepare them for the predicted ending of their support at the end of 2022.
Aligned with its strategic goal to reflect and share the foundation’s learning with the entire ecosystem and in order to inspire donor strategies and best practices in conservation, MAVA invited Stone Soup to design a collaborative learning process with two concrete outputs: a participative workshop and a publication.
The challenge implied that we would collect stories and perspectives, review outputs and documentation from the Organisational Development (OD) partnerships MAVA implemented through the perspectives of the three main stakeholders of the process: the donor (MAVA), the partner organisation (Fundação Tartaruga, Turtle Foundation, and Fundação Maio Biodiversidade were considered for this exercise) and the consultants (Rosa Matos, Mathilde Bullot and Cláudia Pedra). The main goal was not only to assess this type of OD partnership design, impact, processes, and best practices, but also to challenge along the way.
Organisational development is a true passion for us Stone Soupers, it’s in our core mission, it embodies every project we implement. Working directly with MAVA in some of these OD partnerships we discovered that the way we were working and collaborating within this partnership triad presented a lot of benefits and gains but also some constraints and challenges.
Agustina O’Farrell and I started to work closely with MAVA and all stakeholders considered in September 2021 and were ready to share with the world the results of this learning plunge in Three-way OD Partnerships with MAVA signature by the end of March 2022.
It is with great pleasure that we invite you to learn more on how to create and nurture OD partnerships between a donor, a partner organisation and a consultant by reading our co-authored booklet: ‘Tips of the Triangle – Exploring three-way partnerships for Organisational Development’.
Do reach out to us to know more about how to implement Three-Way partnerships in OD and diversify your support approach to your partner organisations.
