Introduction
Oak Foundation allocates its resources to address issues of global, social and environmental concern, particularly those that have a major impact on the lives of the disadvantaged. With offices in Europe, Africa, India and North America, Oak Foundation grants to organisations in approximately 40 countries worldwide through its 8 programmes: Environment, Housing & Homelessness, International Human Rights, Issues Affecting Women, Learning Differences, Prevent Child Sexual Abuse, Special Interest, Brazil, Oak Foundation Denmark, India and Zimbabwe.
Oak views organizational development as means of enhancing its core business of grant-making. The Foundation supports its partners to maximize their abilities and capabilities in order to be able to meet their mutual missions by having access to, and benefit from, quality organizational development programmes. This work is led by a cross-programme team, supported by programme representatives.
The calling
Oak Foundation has been continuously evolving its approach to organisational development and needed support in updating its strategy for non-financial support to grantees. The goal was to ensure that it remained aligned with best practices in the field and responsive to the needs of partners.
Results
As a result of this process, we redesigned the Theory of Change for Oak’s organisational development work.Through this, we were able to bring clarity to the problems the Foundation is solving and the impacts it generates at various levels,, including Oak itself, its grantees, the peers in the Philanthropy Field and Organisational Development Practitioners.
We also reviewed the scope of Oak’s work in the organisational development area, the guiding principles for its non-financial support and the types of organisational strengthening services offered. All these elements were carefully redesigned considering the inputs from the recently conducted grantee perception survey, best practices and trends in the philanthropy field and the perspectives of relevant internal stakeholders.
The process also included the development of a monitoring and evaluation framework to assess the evolution and contribution of their organisational development support over time, a framework that can be used in yearly planning and a strategy document that consolidates all of the elements of the new strategy to be used in internal communications.
Process and Methodology
The process included:
Document analysis focused on understanding the previous strategy and the results of the recently conducted grantee perception survey
Interviews with internal stakeholders to get different perspectives about the current and future vision of the organisational development work
Benchmarking with 13 organisations in the philanthropic sector that also provide some kind of non-financial support to their grantees, in order to understand trends and good practices that could inspire Oak’s strategy in this area
2 day in-person workshop in Oak’s headquarters in Switzerland with the organisational development team and programme officers to work on redesigning the strategy
Virtual workshops with Oak’s organisational development advisory group to evolve the strategy and its key elements
Recurring meetings with the organisational development team to steer the process and work on refining and detailing the new Theory of Change and auxiliary strategic documents
