We’ve been a little bit quiet externally, but the RINGO team has been pretty busy behind the scenes over the past couple of months, getting the building blocks in place to run a systems change lab.  Here’s a summary:

  • Getting the community involved: We went out to recruit participants in December and January, and received over 80 applications from across the system. It’s taking some time to curate the core group, as we want to make sure we have the right balance of stakeholders, both north and south, representing diversity organisations, but also gender, race and ethnicity, too.
  • Recruiting our facilitators and designing the process: We’re pleased to report that through a competitive process, we have now recruited Reos partners as our systems change facilitation experts. We’re working with them to design the process, to make sure it includes not just the core group, but also a wider group of stakeholders who may not be directly involved but have an important role to play.
  • Finished our first benchmarking research. Alongside our partners at WACSI, we completed some initial research that explores the ‘demand-side’: how do southern CSOs experience INGOs and what would they like to see from re-imagined INGOS? We received over 600 responses from Southern civil society actors.  Key findings include that 85% of southern-based CSOs found that their relationship with INGOs was not mutually beneficial and that 86% of respondents find that the western-designed systems and models that are imposed on them have a high negative impact on their organisations’ efficiency and sustainability of their operations. The full research report is being launched on 4th March 2021.
  • We have some initial funding from the Ford Foundation but we’re actively meeting with interested fundraisers to help invest in the full core process and prototypes. Interested funders should get in touch.

What’s next?

In March we’ll be finalising the design of our process. We’ll also aim to with everyone know who has been selected to be part of the core process either 1:1 or in small groups.

By April, we intend to host our first convening of the core participants and launch some of our Action Research Pods.

 

Go back to RINGO project page.

 

Photo by Andy Holmes on Unsplash