Written by Aditi Gupta, Awo Ablo, Doris King and Olivia Leland
Every other year, we ask our program partners to tell us, directly, how we’re doing. We do this because it’s core to what we value: listening with humility, using evidence to improve, and staying accountable to the leaders closest to the communities and systems they’re working to strengthen.
This year’s feedback comes at a moment of significant disruption. Across the contexts where our partners lead, many are navigating rising inequality, shrinking civic space, climate instability, and growing anti-rights movements, often alongside declining or withdrawn foreign assistance and wavering international commitments. And still, what we continue to hear from locally rooted leaders is steady and clear: these challenges aren’t new; they are getting on with the work and it‘s working.
We’re deeply grateful to our program partners for engaging so thoughtfully in this process, and for their candor. Their insights sharpen our practice, push our thinking, and help us show up better.
To gather this feedback, we invited all current program partners to participate, including both long-standing and newer partners, and those who only participated in the design phase with us, as well as those who moved onto longer term funding relationships. The Centre for Effective Philanthropy team conducted an online survey and followed up with in-depth interviews to add nuance and context. To support language equity, interviews were conducted in English, Spanish, and Portuguese. Below, we share a short summary of what we heard most consistently, and what we’re doing in response. You can access the full CEP report here.
Overall, we are pleased to note many areas in this report that remain a constant as compared to the 2023 survey. We were especially encouraged to see that partners who’ve been with us longer rated Co-Impact more positively than in the last survey, showing progress over time in those same areas.
Here are a few strengths that came through consistently:
- Partners continue to describe Co-Impact as a thought leader in systems change, and as deeply committed to gender equity. They experience it as a practical asset that supports their strategic growth. They have shared that this approach enables innovation and risk-taking, supports longer-term change and keeps focus on root causes.
- Many partners went beyond discussing initiative outcomes and spoke to organizational impact: how the partnership and the additional capacity-building support have helped them establish stronger systems and processes, and take a longer, more strategic view. That’s exactly what we hoped for. Sustainable systems change requires institutions that are resilient, well-led, and able to learn and adapt over time, especially in uncertain environments.
- Partners overwhelmingly continue to describe the design phase as a unique opportunity for deep thinking and strategy development. They value the methodology, the dedicated time, and the chance to invest in their own organizational development as they shape big, long-horizon strategies.
- Partners consistently described relationships with Co-Impact staff as positive, respectful, useful, and trusting. We don’t take this lightly. Trust is foundational to collaboration, honest learning, shared problem-solving, and navigating inevitable complexity together.
- The majority of partners use at least one type of support beyond the grant, and they appreciate the value of Co-Impact as a connector, both across partner organizations and with others in their sector.
“It’s very rare for organizations like us to be able to just take time off to conceptualize something. All the time we’re running and already implementing before we have the chance to conceptualize. So, I really want to appreciate that.”
Design Grant Partner
We recognize just as important as what’s working is what we can improve. We’re grateful to our program partners as this kind of feedback is essential to learning, especially in a moment when local leaders are navigating profound uncertainty and rapid change.
Taken together, our partners’ recommendations, and our responses, cluster into four main areas:
- Continue to deepen our understanding of partners’ contexts: Partners want us to build an even richer understanding of the environments they operate in, both the macro realities shaping the landscape and the local dynamics that determine what’s feasible and effective. In response, we’re strengthening how we stay grounded in context by engaging country-level advisors to deepen our understanding of macro conditions and sector-specific realities. We’re also building on our locally rooted teams and continuing to evolve what “contextualized engagement” looks like in practice – this includes spending more time with partners and, where appropriate, their communities. This matters even more right now: while some global funders may hesitate in periods of disruption, locally rooted leaders are continuing to deliver, adapt, and build coalitions that make systems more responsive and resilient. Our responsibility is to meet that leadership with partnership that is informed, grounded, and useful.
- Streamlining our processes and being clearer on timelines: Partners asked for more simplicity, clarity, and predictability, especially around process and timing. In response, we’re continuing to streamline key grantmaking processes, increasing transparency on steps and timelines, and building in adequate buffers so partners aren’t squeezed by avoidable delays.
- A specific shift in how we sequence funding and design: We also want to speak directly to an issue that surfaced in our last CEP results. In our most recent funding round, uncertainty about when financing would be secured contributed to delays during the design phase. We all heard that clearly, and it has pushed us to refine our approach. Historically, our model has been to raise pooled funding and deploy it as it becomes available – a deliberate choice intended to move quickly in response to urgent needs, rather than waiting until every dollar is finalized before we begin. It reflects our belief that philanthropic capital should move with urgency, and that strong, partner-led initiatives should be ready to activate as soon as resources are committed. Going forward, we’re making an important shift: we will begin the design phase only once funds are fully secured, so program partners aren’t delayed while financing comes through. We hope this provides greater reliability for partners. For those who’d like to fund collaboratively with us, the message remains constant: we are prepared to move quickly, with a strong pipeline of initiatives ready to activate as soon as commitments are made.
- Doing more to elevate and amplify partners’ work: Partners also told us they want more support in elevating and amplifying their work across the broader funding ecosystem. In response, we’re exploring more partner-informed ways to spotlight leaders and share what’s being learned—while staying grounded in what partners want, and what’s safe and strategic in their contexts. We’re extraordinarily proud of what our partners are achieving, and we want to help ensure their leadership and results are seen, understood, and supported by others committed to systems change and gender equity.
“Learning what they’re seeing from across the world…them sharing these stories, them sharing this evidence to the larger political world, as well as the donor world, the philanthropy world will have a significant impact in the sector.”
Anchor, Domain, SC, WiL Grant Partner
This feedback is a gift and a responsibility. We’re committed to keeping the bar high on trust, partnership and systems change ambition while making it easier to work with us and continuing to improve how we show up in support of our partners so they can lead through complexity and advance lasting, inclusive change at scale.
More about what they said:
“[Co-Impact] is one of the most feminist funders that could possibly exist… you guys have sort of incorporated many of these feminist principles in the ways in which you work… through a principle of care, right, through a principle of empathy.” – Design Grant Partner
“They are funders, so their understanding is, of course, limited. But given that among funders, I would say they’re among the most sophisticated in terms of understanding organization change, like we are regularly talking about how, as we try to get more system change throughout our work, internal change strategies and things like that, which almost no funder asks about.” – Anchor, Domain, SC, WiL Grant Partner
“Knowing the schedule, all the schedule before starting work would be helpful.” – Design Grant Partner