Capacity Builders Convergence

 in Network Centric Resources / Upcoming Events  tagged Capacity Building / CapacityCon / Virtual Workshops (updated 25 days ago)

FabRiders and Aspiration co-organize an ongoing series of Capacity Builder Convergences.

These community meetings are envisioned as a collaborative and supportive environment to connect the broad range of practitioners who enable other organizations and individuals to strengthen their strategies, principles, practices and sustainability. We aim to explore and promote open principles and participatory approaches while sharing methodologies and practices that can be applied to our work.

You might identify as a capacity builder if you:

  • Work with organizations to help them develop and strengthen internal and external capacity in their programmatic and operational work
  • Provide mentoring, training or advising to NGO management and/or staff
  • Offer on-demand or ongoing support to civil society organizations addressing security, financial or other organizational health needs
  • Develop open resources to be used by those working for social and racial justice

If you are interested in meeting, sharing and collaborating with others working in the broad range of practice areas collectively known as “capacity building”, Capacity Builder Convergences aim to connect interested practitioners and map what our field looks like and envision what it could be. Who is doing this work, and who is missing? Who are we serving or failing to serve? Who is benefiting from our collective capacity-building activities, and how can we do better in terms of centring equity, maximizing inclusion, and increasing our collective impact?

is envisioned to strengthen the field by better understanding the support that practitioners ourselves need and in turn, identifying means to build solidarity across all of our practice areas.

Get involved!

We welcome you to join this growing community in ongoing peer knowledge sharing:

  • Join our collaborative, non-noisy mailing list, where questions are always welcome and upcoming convergences are announced and planned.
  • The next convergence will focus on January 17th, from 3pm to 5pm UTC and focus on “How do we know if our work is making a difference? Comparing approaches to measuring the effectiveness of capacity building work we do”
  • Reach out and let us know what kind of support and collaboration you are looking for, as we welcome new ideas and very much want to support a broad range of needs and interests. We are always up for a conversation to discuss the field or learn about your interests and needs.
  • Help us spread the word about these convergences using the hashtag on Twitter and Mastodon.
  • Follow @AspirationTech on Twitter and @FabRiders on Mastodon.

Background

Across nonprofit and civil society ecosystems, a range of organizations and practitioners self-identify as “capacity builders”, working to strengthen the sustainability and resilience of individuals and organizations so they can more fully participate, contribute and lead in justice movements and movement building.

Capacity builders do this work out of a passion for teaching, supporting, serving and building. We are often generous with knowledge and focused on collective impact and network solidarity. We welcome opportunities to compare practices, share knowledge and deepen relationships with others doing related work.

As ubiquitous as capacity builders are across the NGO sector, it is too often the case that we don’t identify or operate as a field, or as a rich and diverse community of practice. We are often placed in competitive rather than collaborative circumstances with one another due to the funder-driven nature of service delivery. Resource constraints can also incline relationships between capacity builders and clients to be more transactional rather than oriented around mutual aid or solidarity.

We think we need to hang out more to discuss all the above and share skills, knowledge, experiences and visions.

While some discipline-specific communities exist to connect those working in areas such as digital security and data literacy, there are not many broad-based spaces for capacity builders to connect and explore the full range of relevant knowledge domains, from business models and client relations to intellectual property practices, self-care and ongoing learning.

Capacity Builders Convergences

The first Capacity Builders Convergence took place in April 2022, online.

Since then, we have convened online about once per quarter on a range of themes:

  • The June 2022 convergence focused on peer skill sharing and collaborative knowledge exchange on various topics.
  • The theme of the September 2022 Convergence was “The business side of capacity building“, making space for conversations about “paying for the work” and “making the work pay”. Conversations were developed to benefit both those operating as independent consultants or small service organizations, as well as those operating within larger organizations.
  • The November 2022 theme was “Facilitating Power and Power Dynamics“. As capacity builders, we often mediate across and through power spectrums. Sometimes this involves buffering those with more power, and other times it involves centring and lifting those with less power. We also experience power dynamics every time we negotiate for our services, define our agency and role in projects, or evaluate our impact on programs and interventions. We focused on how to observe, name and address individual power, organizational power, and other power dynamics and shared practical tactics and approaches for modulating, countering and inverting the same.
  • The February 2023 session focused on “All Things Facilitation“. Many in our network have indicated that conversations about facilitating meetings, events, discussions and processes are a priority, so we dedicated the February session to building and sharing those skills and practices.
  • The May 2023 session explored “Navigating and Nurturing Organizational Culture” – tackling the ins and outs of envisioning, contributing to, and maintaining healthy organizational cultures.
  • The July 2023 session focused on “Time management“: In an ever-more time-sliced, multi-tasked, over-scheduled world, the art and science of managing the minutes and hours of each working day has become more of a challenge. What practices are people using to be sustainable and effective in how you manage your time and others’?
  • The October, 2023 session focused on “Philosophy, Practice and Purposes of Our Capacity Building” and explored why we do this work and how that informs how we approach our practice.

The agenda for each convergence is co-created with confirmed participants in the time leading up to the meeting.

To participate, just email us and let us know about your current capacity building work, how this convening could be useful to you and what you might learn and share with other practitioners. There is no charge to participate.