Facilitation Tip #1: Role Play

Roleplaying exercises are helpful for all partners to step into the “shoes” of another partner – whether that be a social impact organisation, funder, or government – to reflect on their priorities and perspectives, and build empathy for the context and constraints they are working in. This approach is particularly helpful when certain partners are not present in workshops as it allows participants to gain some understanding of their perspectives, even in their absence.

In our pilot workshops, funder participation was a key challenge. A social impact organisation reflected that: “many funders would traditionally want to keep out of the operational aspects […] it requires time to get them on board”. Roleplaying was therefore a key technique that enabled us to bring in a funder’s perspective in other ways.

Facilitation Tip #2: Imagining Failure

During the workshops, we asked participants to imagine it being 5 years into the future, and that sadly, their efforts to embed and sustain the intervention in the government system had failed. We asked them to consider: Why did the partnership fail?

As a result, participants were able to voice their biggest concerns and imagined risks, co-develop plans to mitigate against these concerns and tackle challenges collectively as opposed to viewing certain concerns as one partner’s problem.

Facilitation Tip #3: Centre Government Voices

A huge barrier to success is lacking a deep understanding of government perspectives, priorities and systems. By continuously circling back to government partners, social impact organisations shifted their mindsets to see themselves as an ally to their government partner; someone who can support the efforts to build buy-in across different governmental levels and departments, rather than this challenge being left to the government partner to tackle alone.

One social impact organisation in the pilot workshops noted: “The workshop reinforced the importance of communicating, not just with the district level, but with the central level ministry and informing other government stakeholders and working groups, to inform them about what we were working on and what it looks like.”

Bringing all partners together in an open, safe space to share experiences is a critical step in shifting towards a more collaborative partnership. Protecting the time to come together as partners outside of day-to-day activities can be challenging but the results are worth it.

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