Course: Learning infrastructure for systemic change

You run a project that is committed to creating systemic change. Your strategy involves learning as you go, what works and what doesn’t to inform the next action you take.

But learning keeps falling off the long to-do list. You need to capture the learning of your work to do things like:

• Make sense of where you are, so you can set new strategic direction
• Hold one yourselves accountable to continue learning as a team around an issue like - ‘how are we doing at DEI?’ or ‘is our strategy really systemic?’ But you don’t know how to do this.
• You are so busy it’s hard to find time to think together as a team or as a group of collaborators.
• You need to bring people along with you, but they are not used to working in a participatory way
• You need to share your progress with crucial external stakeholders like funders or community partners

Learning infrastructure is a key system change strategy, practice and methodology. It shifts project implementation from top down strategic linear plans to an emergent strategy. Systemic learning infrastructure facilitates collective seeing and sensemaking, shares insight across a team or systems, gathers feedback to iterate and take action, and gathers data for evaluation and strategy development. It is a mechanism to support ecosystem wide learning by doing.

This workshop is designed to give you the theory and importantly, the tools to set up learning infrastructure across your systems change initiative.

You will leave with:

• A fresh understanding of the theory behind building learning into your work.
• A plan you have started to build during the workshop, with live coaching support from Rachel & Tatiana, which you can continue to deepen when you get back to your desk.
• Confidence that you can do this quickly and simply and get started today.

The team behind this program are first and foremost practitioners of systems change, so they understand the very real challenges of managing multiple priorities in systems change work and have designed this program specifically for the hardworking systems leaders they know need this support.

We know that you don’t have time to do this course and that you also know you need to do this for your work to be as powerful as it can be.

This workshop is designed to be very practical and leave you with a plan, rather than a theory. It is also designed in Sanctuary Style, a culture of care, which weaves intersectionality throughout and creates a space to stop, think and breathe amid the busyness. You will meet great people who are doing something similar to you.

Agenda

• Learning as a Theory of Change
• Pedagogy and practice: Introduction to theoretical frameworks underlying collective learning.
• The Practice of Emergence
• Gettings started on implementation: Building frameworks and structures for learning across your work
• Workshop: Build your learning infrastructure plan, with live feedback from the Sanctuary team.