Empowering Grantees Through MEL: Building Capacity in Philanthropy’s Expanding Landscape
Written by: Kaitlyn Scannell
What if MEL could be more than a process? What if it was a cultural practice that fosters agency and drives innovation and hope?
A collective sense of agency is the foundation for strong, resilient organisations and effective impact. Lack of agency drives indecision, disengagement and burnout, weakens accountability, stifles innovation, and reduces organisational effectiveness.
How grant makers approach measurement, evaluation, and learning (MEL) contributes to the sense of agency in their own organisation but also in the organisations they fund. This article explores how grant makers can approach MEL through the lens of agency and offers some ways to consciously foster a greater sense of agency in grantees.
Grantee Agency
Grantee agency is the ability of grantees to make decisions, manage resources, and adapt their work independently of funders. Grantee agency is critical because it drives:
- Accountability – a sense of responsibility and a proactive mindset
- Innovation – allowing ideas to move quickly from conception to execution
- Hope – a belief in a better future and the power to shape it.
Trust-based funding models
Increasingly philanthropic organisations are shifting from traditional top-down funding models to more collaborative, trust-based approaches. In more trust-based approaches, grant makers focus on giving greater autonomy and flexibility in how funds are used. Adopting a trust-based approach requires a fundamental shift in mindset and a commitment to align ways of working with a trust-based worldview. This often requires us to rethink old MEL approaches, which were built to operate under a vastly different paradigm.
When you think of MEL, often the first thing that comes to mind is reporting. What information will the grantee provide to us, and when? What information will we provide to the board, and when? But MEL is so much more than that. MEL also includes how a grant maker:
- Thinks about rigour and accountability
- Understands progress, success, and failure
- Approaches conversations
- Drafts agreements
- Collects and uses data
- Makes choices and decisions
- Communicates impact and learnings
In short, MEL is a cultural practice with the power to shape all aspects of a grant making organisation and the relationships with grantees.
So, how can grant makers build grantee agency?
Start with MEL. MEL shapes the relationship between grant makers and grantees and the conditions needed for grantees to feel a sense of agency. MEL is the frame through which both parties understand and communicate progress, share data, learn, problem solve and make decisions to maximise the impact of the grant.
So, as a grant maker what are some strategies you can deploy to build grantee agency through MEL?
- Start with principles – Principles are a way to guide good practice while still allowing you to adapt practice to context. Get clear on the principles that guide you, and then design an approach which will uphold these principles.
- Encourage participation – Find ways to involve grantees in the ongoing design and implementation. Be transparent about your organisation’s MEL approach (and what else it influences).
- Remain open to change – It’s so easy to get attached to an approach when you’ve invested so much in its creation. Practice healthy detachment and remain open to:
- New MEL practices, tools and platforms.
- Different sources of rigour and accountability.
- Simplifying the approach as you go. Often what seems simple and elegant in design, becomes much more complex during implementation.
- Watch for unintended consequences – Knowing how much can be influenced by your MEL approach, embed practices to help notice and quickly address harm or unintended consequences.
- Invite tailored MEL approaches for grants – Invite grantees to design and manage the measurement and learning approach for each grant in a way that best meets their needs. This may mean trading off your own MEL needs.
- Build capacity and capability – Understand where there are gaps in MEL capacity and work proactively and flexibility to address them. These could be gaps in your own organisation, a grantee organisation or across a sector.
- Learn together – create space for collective reflection, sense-making, deliberation and decision-making.
Creating a MEL approach that fosters agency can be challenging. It requires trust and ceding of power. MEL shapes, and is shaped by, organisational culture and readiness to embrace different ways of being, doing and knowing. Often, the hardest part is to be honest about where your organisation is at and whether you have the conditions you need to take the next step or whether you need to patiently spend more time building the foundations of trust, awareness and shared language. You will encounter resistance. You will make mistakes, and you will need to learn your way through. You don’t need to do it all at once. It is often the small simple changes that have the biggest impact.
A sense of agency is key to building strong, resilient organisations and for-purpose sectors. How you, as a grant maker, approach MEL will either foster agency or stifle it.
I’d love to hear what challenges you’re experiencing as you create MEL approaches that foster agency for grantees?
Wikimedia Commons. Photo: pfctdayelise