What it looks like when funders work together
Interview with Mark Surman about international telecentres, building global capacity in civil society, and how funders can collaborate more effectively.
By Gillian Kerr, RealWorld Systems
The information in this article is current as of November 1, 2005.
Last week I spoke to Mark Surman, founder of the Commons Group and now Managing Director of telecentre.org, an international community development program launching on November 17 2005.
Mark has years of experience in evaluating and building capacity in civil society organizations. In his new job, he is helping to increase the capacity of social development networks worldwide by making community telecentres more effective.
I asked Mark to share some of the insights he's been gathering during his travels over the last few months. Our conversation below is paraphrased.
What's the telecentre project about?
According to Wikipedia, a telecentre is "a public place where people can access computers, the Internet and other technologies that help them gather information and communicate with others at the same time as they develop digital skills. While each telecentre is different, the common focus is on the use of technologies to support community and social development - reducing isolation, bridging the digital divide, promoting health issues, creating economic opportunities, reaching out to youths. Telecentres exist in almost every country on the planet, although they sometimes go by different names (e.g. village knowledge centres, infocentres, community technology centres, community multimedia centres or school-based telecentres)."
Collectively, telecentres represent an enormous investment in social development worldwide from a multitude of different funders. However, many telecentres are isolated from each other. Even though they are, by definition, hooked onto a global communication technology network, they are not taking full advantage of the resources available from the potentially massive social network. The telecentre project at IDRC aims to mobilize the collection of telecentres into a functional collaboration network, and to make individual telecentres more successful in their local work by linking them into a broader community.
Most of the money going into telecentres from their various funders are going to one or two people in a village, to enable them to run a community resource. The centres are terrific investments as far as they go, but the community managers may not have an external social network or training or support to help them do a better job. An important part of the telecentre.org approach is to provide training and mentorship, shared resources, collaborative tools and so on. On a broader scale, telecentre.org hopes to link these national networks into a global learning system.
telecentre.org is a partnership between Canada's International Development Research Centre (IDRC), Microsoft, and the Swiss government.
How do funders usually collaborate?
Funding partnerships are pretty common but Mark, who has worked for many funders, says this one is different. Most funding partnerships (in my experience) involve one or both of the following:
- Funders go to meetings and discuss common issues
- Funders contribute money to a common project
And that's about it. The meetings tend to begin with high hopes and involve senior people in the participating organizations; after a couple of meetings, the senior folks stop attending and they are replaced by staff lower in the hierarchy. Activities such as information sharing and updates and discussions can go on for months or years. (This is me talking from painful experience, not Mark.)
As for contributing money to shared projects, funders may create a new funding envelope and call for proposals, and stop funding in one to five years when one or more of them lose interest.
Either of these approaches may have positive impacts, but as models of collaboration they are not stellar.
A better way for funders to work together
In the telecentre.org initiative, Mark is seeing another, far more effective approach. The three funders are "setting aside their brand names and corporate egos" to take a collaborative approach to the resources they control.
For example, Microsoft has incredible visibility in the philanthropic world. It has people all over the world working on its funded programs, and can use its reputation to develop new contacts. IDRC, on the other hand, has expertise and credibility in culturally sensitive international development and research. IDRC has many more African contacts than Microsoft does, while Microsoft has more contacts in Asia (including a full time person in Sri Lanka). The Swiss government can use its UNESCO links as a channel for collaboration.
Mark, in his telecentre.org work, has access to the networks of all funders, and can build on the existing hubs they have developed. This approach takes advantage of the expertise that is already in the community, and adds richness to what's there instead of creating competitive agencies. It also means that telecentre.org can quickly reach out to isolated places and populations as long as any one of its funding partners has links to them.
Here are some of Mark's suggestions for funders:
- Human service funders should learn from successful approaches to business collaboration. If two businesses collaborate to serve a market better, they don't spend all of their time in meetings; they differentiate roles and negotiate access to each other's resources, whether it be skills, capital, market knowledge, or access to social networks. The focus is on how to maximize shared assets to be more effective, and it's results-driven. Collaboration is not a value in itself; it's a means to an end. Funders need to become more creative about defining their resources and sharing them with partners. In the case of telecentres.org, the funders have access to each others' staff. Like a business ecosystem, there are multiple points of contact and coordination.
- telecentres.org has been inspired by Movement as Network, a web site that attempts to re-imagine the environmental movement as a network of people and organizations. It states that the fragmentation of the environmental movement "stems [partly] from a lack of diversity in organizational models, which leads to competition for resources and resistance to building the kind of collaborations and value-added networks prevalent in newer industries within the private sector." An effective network has many actors in differentiated roles working together in multiple, shifting alliances. Mark points out that funders need to understand the many resources that they have access to, and use them more skillfully using networking principles, rather than merely handing out money.
- Some hypothetical examples: One funder might be able to support a training program in India for qualified computer operators, and another funder might offer the graduates' services to social programs in another country. A service model may be developed and tested in one country and rolled out in another, with one funder taking on an R&D role and another funder specializing in implementation. The global network can become a platform for moving assets around, with funders taking on the various roles of infrastructure providers, venture capitalist, trainers, and so on, working together to achieve common key outcomes.
- Everyone needs to get better at sharing and screening for useful information, including funders.
To keep up with telecentres.org, or to contribute to (or learn from or collaborate with) them, you can subscribe to Mark's RSS feed or check out telecentre.org.
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Gillian Kerr, Ph.D., C.Psych.
President, RealWorld Systems
gkerr at realworldsystems.net
Read my weblog at http://blog.realworldsystems.net
