DEAL/ DISC REPORT

A number of our interviews were with public and private funders and we decided to explore their interest in an ongoing learning circle to explore, through their perspectives and experiences, the question of how to help catalyze more effective learning practices and frameworks for themselves and for the organisations that they fund. [...] DEAL/DISC REPORT PREPARED BY: AJAH AUGUST 2023 PAGE 6 ABOUT THE CHALLENGE We wanted to convene a group of funders, and other important stakeholders, to discuss THE LEARNING learning in the non-profit sector. [...] With this group, we aimed to change the focus from a CIRCLE potential solution (information infrastructure) to the problem (lack of shared learning within the nonprofit sector) focusing on three main questions: • What are the learning systems like in the non-profit / philanthropy sector? • How could we improve them? • How do we develop a learning sector not simply learning organizations? OUR APPRO. [...] The objectives of this work were to 1) develop tools that could be useful for different types of sector stakeholders by collecting and organizing information from public sources, 2) create a demonstration of the opportunities for collective approaches to data and information, compared to one-off projects, and 3) help provide tangible examples of data infrastructure to support the other workstreams. [...] Specifically, the prototype focused on data about the entities in the sector (identifying the organizations working in the sector), the activities (the projects and funded work those organizations engaged in), and learnings (contained in documents about those activities.