5-17+Preface+Funders+Guide

=The "Ask"=
 * //We'd love your thoughts / reflections on the preliminary outline of the guide, specifically://**
 * 1) General reactions: what works? what didn't?
 * 2) What’s missing?
 * 3) What's not needed / what can we drop?
 * 4) What additional examples / experiences from your work or others might we include to illustrate ideas?

=PREFACE=

Are you supporting coalitions, alliances, and/or networks? Can your grantmaking to these groups be more effective?

Are the communities and grantees you’re supporting working in isolation? Could their work add up to more than the sum its parts?

Do you want to connect people and groups working in the areas your foundation invests ﻿ in﻿ ﻿ ﻿ so they can tap into new opportunities and resources?

Do you want to make a bigger impact than your foundation can do on its own? Are you looking for ways to change systems?

If you answered “yes” to any of these questions, this guide is for you.

**__ A Letter from the Network Weaver __** Since early 2007 I’ve had the privilege of working with funders who are experimenting with ways to increase their impact by catalyzing networks. Some grantmakers I’ve been in conversation with have been investing in groups of organizations and individuals, convening grantees and pooling funds. Others are brokering connections among leaders in a field, initiating conversations online and in-person and spreading their reach by using social media. The approaches are many.

The problem is that there aren’t best practices yet. Effective ways to catalyze network impact are being invented today and shared conversations about this work are few. So it’s hard to get up the learning curve as fast as the work deserves and demands in today’s turbulent environment. On top of that, it’s not easy to communicate why networks matter for philanthropy in language that’s meaningful to colleagues who may not naturally work this way. or even to those who do SM

To address this challenge, in early 2009, the Monitor Institute formed a community of practice for grantmakers who are intentionally supporting networks and trying to weave connections between people, ideas and resources. It was the brainchild of Chris van Bergeijk, VP of Programs at the Hawaii Community Foundation who was looking for peers who were also trying to support networks.

Around the same time, my colleagues and I had been working with the Packard Foundation in a multi-year partnership to understand how the foundation and the field could tap network potential. We’d been running a number of pilot projects to develop network-centric program strategies, visualize networks and assess network effectiveness. Engaging with the community of practice was the natural next step for Packard. In addition to Hawaii Community Foundation and Packard, early leadership also came from the Annie E. Casey Foundation and Grantmakers for Effective Organizations and the process of weaving a group that is now called “Network of Network Funders” (NNF) was underway. The NNF has since engaged about 40 funders from private foundations, community foundations, and donor intermediaries, as well as individual donors, with people coming and going over the two and a half years and growing numbers linked to our “periphery.”

Participants came into the Network of Network funders for different reasons. They wanted new strategies for engaging stakeholders. They wanted to open up their foundations to the outside world and experiment with greater transparency and engagement in online conversations. They wanted to better understand network dynamics, what this means for their role as funders and what they should invest in. They wanted to step back and assess what’s working with their networks work. While their entry points were diverse, they shared an interest in nurturing networks for good—making connections that lead to better shared understanding, coordination, and access to resources, and creating space for collective intelligence and action to emerge.

Alongside the evolution of the individual and collective work of the Network of Network Funders, there has been a parallel set of conversations going on in the field of philanthropy about a number of related topics like understanding ecosystems, stakeholder engagement, social media for social change and collective impact. [i] All of these are pieces of the puzzle that members of the NNF have been connecting together in their efforts to catalyze networks for good. Done well, the work requires a deep awareness of the systems in which you’re participating and convening. It requires listening to and engaging diverse stakeholders. It can be enabled by interactive and multi-way communications using social media tools, it can be focused on aligning stakeholders around a shared vision and collective indicators of impact, and more.

This guide is an early attempt to put these pieces together and articulate a set of principles and practices that can help funders catalyze networks for good. The ideas here were generated by members of the Network of Network Funders as well as others linked to our learning network. It truly was a collective effort. Everyone who touched the Guide is in the contributors list below.

This community is still actively inventing this space. Our understanding of catalyzing networks for good is still forming, and the guide is a first stab at organizing what we know. Think of it as a version 1.0. The guide will be successful if funders are inspired to apply some of the concepts, develop new and better approaches and share them with their peers in philanthropy. We look forward to many subsequent versions and iterations on the practices on described here.

[include URL here for where the content lives online]

__Contributors to the Guide__
Catalyzing Networks for Good was co-created by: [list to be completed] Julie Kenny Drezner - Janet
 * || Lori Bartczak || Gale Berkowitz ||
 * Jeff Bryant || Lynn Carruthers || Jeff Coates ||
 * Warren Cook || Roberto Cremonini || Tom David ||
 * Steve Downs || Susan Fairchild || Noah Flower ||
 * Ellen Friedman || Katherine Fulton || Mary Lou Fulton ||
 * Claire Gibbons || Jessica Gheiler || Heather Grant ||
 * June Holley || Jenny Johnston || Audrey Jordan ||
 * Beth Kanter || Gabriel Kasper || Tom Kelly ||
 * Barbara Kibbe || Eugene Kim || Rafael Lopez ||
 * Jane Lowe || Kina Mahi || Stephanie McAuliffe ||
 * Deborah Meehan || Sofia Michelakis || Pi’ikea Miller ||
 * Bo Norris || Mayur Patel || Susie Polnaszek ||
 * Rick Reed || Kathy Reich || Claire Reinelt ||
 * Kaki Rusmore || Adene Sacks || Marie Sauter ||
 * Janet Shing || Carrie Shoda-Sutherland || Beatriz Solis ||
 * Chris Van Bergeijk || Suzanne Walsch || Kate Wing ||

**__Who is this guide for? What are its goals?__**
Funders enter into this conversation for different and, often, multiple reasons:
 * They want to use their social webs to **connect** people, ideas and possibilities.
 * They want to **invest** their resources in catalyzing positive network impact
 * They want to **learn** from these investments and stance toward leadership, so their own work and others’ efforts to accelerate network impact can improve

This guide is for the Investor, the Connector, and the Learner. It’s for grantmakers who straddle all three types and want to step back and think about how to increase their effectiveness, and it’s for those who are just dipping their toes in the water in any one of these categories.

Regardless of your entry point-or points-and regardless of where you are at in your learning journey, we hope you come away with:
 * A network lens to apply to you work,
 * A better understanding of work you may already be doing to catalyze networks for good, whether intentional or accidental,
 * Language for talking about and understanding network impact; and
 * New opportunities for harnessing network potential.

__ How this Guide is Organized __
We don’t expect that readers will settle into a comfortable chair, put their feet up and read //Catalyzing Networks for Good// from start to finish—though we certainly encourage it! We expect that readers will dip in and out, grabbing principles and practices that are most relevant and needed at the time. To this end, we tried to organize the information so you can easily access what you need, using the navigation tool below. While most of the ideas and practices can be read in small chunks, we do urge you strongly to take the time to read the introduction which outlines the core assumptions on which these practical nuggets are based. [Navigational tool here – alternative table of contents]

[i] Reference Dees (ecosystems), IISC (stakeholder engagement), collective impact (FSG), social media for social change (Kanter & Fine, Acker)

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