The David and Lucile Packard Foundation is a private, family foundation that provides grants to not-for-profit organizations. The foundation's goals, through the use of grants, are to "improve the lives of children, enable creative pursuit of science, advance reproductive health, and conserve and restore earth’s natural systems.

CONTEXT FOR THE PHICUS ENGAGEMENT

Packard Foundation was looking to help a cohort of Population and Reproductive Health grantees working in adolescent and youth sexual and reproductive health and rights in India. The objective was to understand and learn about their organizational capacity and to inform the design of a longer-term initiative to strengthen capacity over time. The long-term goal is to strengthen these organization’s effectiveness, sustainability, and ability to deliver mission impact, as well as to support effective collaboration among the groups.

THE COLLABORATION

Packard Foundation collaborated with Phicus to work with 6 of their grantee organizations in the space of adolescents and sexual reproductive health and rights.

Based on the life cycle stage and bandwidth of the organization, Phicus customized an organizational health check process to identify capacity building needs for the immediate, short and long term.

These capacity building needs were evolved keeping in mind the organization’s current performance and the future goals. The process followed was a combination of online questionnaire, review of documentation and/or a 2-day visit to the organization to speak with key leaders and program managers. Each of the 6 organizations received a detailed report that highlighted the health of their organization and capacity building needs for the future. These reports were discussed in detail with the leadership team and key priorities were identified as per the growth agenda for the organization.

Phicus also consolidated the capacity building needs across the 6 grantee organizations and shared recommendations to shape the design of a longer-term capacity-building and organizational strengthening initiative led by Packard Foundation.

All 6 grantee organizations were invited for a one day workshop facilitated by Phicus. The objectives were to reflect collectively on key findings from the assessments and explore potential opportunities for shared learning. Through the workshop, the 6 organizations distilled top 5 priorities for the organization. Specific areas were identified by the organizations were cohort learning could be leveraged.