Learning together – notes from our Evidence Building grantholder meet up

The Ideas Fund was set up to test new ways of funding community-led collaboration with research, and the ways we learn and share what we find out are central to our approach. We recently announced we had made some Evidence Building Grants to a cohort of our Ideas Fund projects, which will have a more explicit focus on demonstrating what’s possible when communities and researchers work together and on sharing their learning. The previous week, we got people from all these groups together online to meet with each other, catch up, and share the ways in which each of us captures and shares learning in our work, both individually and in our organisations.

With an explicit focus on learning in this next phase of work, we thought it was a good place to start. We wanted to share some thoughts from that session – both to summarise the ideas that surfaced during the discussion, and also some wider reflections.

Some reflections from running the session...

1. Convening people and giving them space

Throughout The Ideas Fund, we have tried to create spaces for the funded projects to come together and share reflections or solve problems in each area. We recognise the time commitment involved in this from projects, but we’ve consistently heard how much people value this connection. We knew that with this Evidence Building grant cohort, providing the time and space to come together from across all four locations was going to be important – to build relationships, to share success and to reflect together as part of the whole picture. They’ve been on this journey with community-led engagement with research for a while (and some long before we started to fund them) and are also involved in a broad spectrum of wider work aligned to their own organisational missions, so they have a lot to share with each other.

In this session, we provided some time for groups to meet in small groups with no agenda beyond sharing something of themselves and their work. We hope that some connections – either for sharing or for collaboration – will form that outlive our funding, and there is some evidence that those kinds of connections are already emerging. We’ll want to capture these threads as these emerging relationships develop.

It seems to us that this is an important role that funders can play - to convene, connect and facilitate. We think there will be tangible value to doing this with our Evidence Building grantholders who are geographically remote from each other but who are all considering the same questions or trying out similar methods.

2. The use of digital spaces

We’d previously heard from the projects we support that the use of digital tools like Miro or Padlet wasn’t always accessible to everyone when we brought them together remotely. In this session, we offered two discussion spaces; one using Miro to capture ideas and thoughts, and one with just facilitated discussion where everything would be captured by us. Most of the attendees wanted to join the facilitated discussion – but some chose the more digital route to capture their contributions. Offering both felt like a good way to strike a balance between people’s needs and preferences and a need to capture the richness of ideas and practices. We’d be interested to hear how other people are doing this in digital spaces!

A note on the ways people are learning...

1. Routine recording

Lots of attendees seemed to dedicate time and space to capturing reflections . For some, this was journalling every day, with others using voice notes or photographs. For lots of people this was a routine, built into each day or week as a regular reflective practice. We think there’s something important about this – learning isn’t just what happens when you get to the end of something, it’s an ongoing process and we often forget to capture the things which might seem small but accumulate over time.

2. Using frameworks and forms

While some people’s reflections could be relatively freeform, others liked to use the structure of a framework or a tool to collect their thoughts. These included a project or organisational theory of change, evaluation forms or frameworks, polls or simply asking “what worked well?” after events. We’ll be using our Impact framework to help structure our reflections over the next couple of years, along with our Learning Questions. You can read more about both of these, along with our learning so far, here.

3. Reflecting together

Along with individual approaches, most people also reflected on learning with others, either informally or as a structured part of team time. Having a walk and a chat to gather their thoughts, using one to ones and team meetings all came up during the discussion. We’re hoping to bring together our Evidence Building grantholders regularly over the next three years to reflect together, because we agree that there’s something valuable in capturing learning alongside others.

4. Using digital tools

People were keen to share the tools which worked best for them. We know there’s such a range of things out there, and everyone has a different level of comfort with the various apps and with AI more generally – but our sense from the discussion was that some people are finding these invaluable for capturing learning and insights. Padlet, Trello, Miro, Otter AI, Canva, Mentimeter, Basecamp and more were all namechecked in the discussion both as collaborative tools and also as helpful additions to their individual practice. We’re interested to see how these get used to capture and share learning among these projects – and to try out ones that we’re less familiar with!

5. Creativity and the arts

As well as digital methods, lots of people talked passionately about creative and artistic approaches to both capturing and sharing learning. Recording people sharing stories and using photography came up a lot. People were also very interested in using more creative methods for sharing knowledge – plays, music, performance were all mentioned. We agree that there isn’t just one way to share what’s being learned (or one type of knowledge!), and are very excited to discover how these groups will approach sharing the impact and learning from their projects.

What’s next?

These Evidence Building Grants are just starting – often building on the momentum of the projects which have been running for a couple of years already. We’ll be bringing them all together twice more this year, and will share how the discussion unfolds as we unpick different aspects of our learning and impact. We’ll also be sharing how some of their individual projects are progressing through our Learning Stories.

We’re always keen to speak to people interested in similar questions, or doing similar work.

Get in touch with the team at hello@theideasfund.org