CASE STUDY
Imagine Foundation
Imagine Foundation is a highly relational grant-making foundation working with smaller charities, social enterprises and community projects serving vulnerable people. The Curiosity Society has been working with Imagine since 2013 on issues of impact, learning and direction setting, helping build a learning ecosystem amongst its grantees.
The Client: backing relationships as well as activity
Imagine Foundation typically starts working with projects or organisations when they are younger and becomes a supporter and partner for the longer term. Rather than using grants to create activity and solve problems, it uses money to create relationships. Part funder, part coach, Imagine Foundation gets to know its grantees very well, at a personal level as much as an organisational one. From this direct relationship, it moves to weaving connections between the organisations it supports.
The Challenge: thinking like a node not a hub
As a comparatively new, and relatively small, foundation, the challenge for Imagine was to figure-out how to have the most impact in line with the experience and values of the founders. Imagine knew it wanted to build relationships with people working on the front line with limited resources, and it didn’t want to copy the more bureaucratic and less personal ways of processing grants. The first few years were more about trying things out and refining them. Then, as thinking and practice stabilized, the number of grantees and relationships increased, leading to questions around how to create a stronger network across organisations, that was less centred on Imagine. This mirrored what Imagine was learning about its own funding: it was often providing early support and money that became less significant if an organisation grew and found additional sources; but the stable and long-term relationship was highly valued. Imagine deliberately made its funding more flexible and attached fewer strings, to get the most from that.
What We Did: connections, networks and ecosystems
Imagine Foundation has brought out the best in the Curiosity Society as a learning partner: working both with the Foundation and with many of the charities and social enterprises it supports over the long term. This has made learning and design into a continuous loop, with the Curiosity Society bringing a positive external perspective to Imagine’s work.
At the grantee level, the Curiosity Society helped organisations to understand the difference they want to make in the world, and design and calibrate measurement tools to help them see and interpret impact. In some cases, these have been the basis for making decisions about how to adapt their models in pursuit of transformation. Over time, the Curiosity Society has built the capacity of Imagine to do more of this work itself, more efficiently, by sharing the tools and techniques it has developed.
Annual gatherings for grantees held by Imagine both revealed and encouraged the desire for a stronger network. The Curiosity Society facilitated the co-design of this network for mutual support among all of Imagine Foundation’s grantees as well as facilitating conversations to discern the role the foundation should play. Imagine now supports this ecosystem as a learning community where knowledge, ideas, tools and conversations flow around the network as much as through the foundation.
Some of our visual note taking for Imagine. Meetings don’t have to be boring!
What Happened: learning becomes the why as well as the how
A little like nature conservationists switched from saving animals to preserving habitats, Imagine has moved from a portfolio of separate, singular connections with grantees, to investing in the health of the ecosystem in which grantees thrive.
That switch has made learning the currency of the ecosystem Imagine supports. Learning has become the why as much as the how. At the foundation level, the Curiosity Society helped Imagine make strategic organisational decisions based on this rich learning including, for example, reshaping funding and advocacy work to better serve the health of the ecosystem as well as individual grantees.
What’s next? As a relational grant maker with an ecosystems-view of the world and money as a tool, Imagine Foundation is thinking about how it shares its experiences with other funders, bringing not just its own perspective but helping to represent that of the smaller charities and social enterprises it works with.
“The Curiosity Society helped us to develop real clarity about our desired impact and to shape our strategy, decision-making and resources around that. We found this so helpful that we engaged them in the co-development of our learning community and the support for our partner organisations. We value the knowledge and expertise that they bring from engaging with a wide spectrum of organisations and their ability to generate ideas and solutions that are appropriate to the size and resources of the organisation they are working with. To be clear, they do not just bring a set of tools, they open up conversation, listen well and work with partners to shape bespoke solutions that fit the partner’s needs.
“We enjoy being stretched by their questions, insights and understanding of the wider systems of which we are a part. The Curiosity Society has helped us get to where we are, but they also lift us to be more adventurous in our vision and to have much more fun in working it out!”
Diane Eyre, Chair of Trustees