A Participant’s Journey Through the Strategy Design Cohort
When Maya* logged in to the first session of the Strategy Design Cohort, she was tired of the word “strategy.” As programme director at a small organisation working with partners across borders, she had a half‑finished strategic plan, international donors asking for “clear direction,” and local partners overwhelmed by day‑to‑day crises. She hoped for a better framework. Instead, she found a different way to approach strategy through her networks and communities.
*Name changed; story based on several participants’ experiences.
From lone planner to convenor of many voices
Maya had always experienced strategy as something written in a central office and then rolled out to country teams and grassroots partners. In the cohort’s early sessions, she was invited to map everyone touched by strategic choices: staff, national and local partners, community organisers, allies in other movements, and funders.
Seeing that ecosystem on paper made an uncomfortable truth visible: previous strategies had mainly reflected the perspectives of those closest to power and resources. “If we wanted people on the ground to own the plan, they needed to see themselves in how it was made,” she realised.
Instead of presenting a finished vision to colleagues and partners, Maya began convening conversations: What are you already doing that our current strategy doesn’t recognise? Where does our agenda crowd out others? What should we stop doing so that you have more space and resources?
“I stopped thinking of myself as the person who has to deliver ‘the strategy,’” she said. “I started seeing my role as bringing the right mix of people into the room and helping them find shared direction.”
Naming whose power strategy currently serves
A key moment came when the cohort focused on power. Using simple tools, participants were asked, “Whose priorities shape your organisational strategy today?” Whose knowledge counts as evidence? Who carries the risks when you decide to change course?
For Maya, the answers were confronting. Donor reporting cycles had quietly become the metronome for her organisation’s work. Grassroots partners picked up new initiatives and risks with little say, while being framed in plans as “beneficiaries” rather than co‑leaders.
“Once I saw it, I couldn’t unsee it,” she said. “Our so‑called ‘global strategy’ was often a translation of donor language, lightly adapted to partners’ realities. Naming that was painful but necessary.”
Together with her team and a group of trusted partners, she began to rework the strategy as a power‑shifting tool: committing to bringing community‑based groups into annual planning, budgeting for alliance work that had previously been treated as “extra,” and being more transparent with donors about where local priorities needed to lead.
Treating plans as living agreements across levels
Like many CSOs and networks, Maya’s organisation had a polished theory of change diagram—frequently used in logframes, rarely used in decision-making. In the cohort, participants translated these diagrams into plain “if… then…” statements and asked how they played out in different contexts.
Maya realised that what looked neat on a slide in London or Geneva broke down at ground level. Pathways to change varied dramatically between partners. Rather than imposing a single universal model, she began treating the global theory of change as a shared backbone and inviting partners to sketch their own local versions alongside it.
“The cohort helped me see our theory of change as a set of working agreements we revisit with partners, not a doctrine we hand down,” she said. “That shift alone made our strategy feel more honest across different countries.”
Planning for turbulence, not stability
For grassroots groups and international NGOs alike, the context is volatile: shrinking civic space, sudden funding cuts, political swings and overlapping crises. Maya feared that any new plan would be irrelevant within a year—something many in the cohort recognised.
Through stress‑testing exercises, she learned to design a strategy that anticipates turbulence. With colleagues and partners, she identified key assumptions (about funding, safety, movement priorities), explored “what if” disruptions, and agreed in advance how they would protect core work and who needed to be at the table when things changed.
“We wrote a short ‘when the ground shifts’ section into our strategy,” she explained. “It’s not long, but it says: here’s how we regroup across levels—from local partners to global teams—when a big shock hits. It’s given us something to hold onto together.”
Finding peers facing the same tensions
What Maya talks about most now is not only the tools but the sense of solidarity. In the cohort, leaders from grassroots groups, national coalitions and international NGOs compared notes on board pressures, donor demands, safeguarding community power and staff burnout.
“It was the first space where I could say out loud that I felt pulled between what donors wanted to see in a strategy and what partners were asking for on the ground,” she said. “Hearing others from very different organisations describe the same tension made me feel less alone—and more able to push for change internally.”
Six months on, her organisation’s strategy is shorter, more network‑centred, and more explicit about shifting power toward the people and movements it exists to serve. “Strategy is still hard,” Maya says, “but now it’s something we practice with our partners, not just something we write about them.”
If you are holding a strategy role in a grassroots organisation, national civil society group, or international NGO, and you want structured, supported time to rethink how strategy is done with your partners and communities, applications are open for the next Strategy Design Cohort, starting mid-September 2026. You can read more about the cohort here and apply using the short form here.
