A Powerful Testimonial
“This is SUCH an important conversation. When I was co-leading The Finance Innovation Lab in the early years, 2010, the only reason we survived was because a funder explicitly funded us as ‘infrastructure for systems change’. Everyone else was keen to pick their favorite project and back that.
Since then, I’ve been training systems leadership and hosting peer learning programs for people leading systems change projects internationally. A key challenge that emerges is space to stop, think, to learn together, and to work out the next emergent strategic step. You can’t do this if you’re also managing the accounts, updating the website, [and] replying to emails from key stakeholders.
Funding the learning, funding the admin and the ‘boring bits’ of work gives you the space to do the very difficult work of systemic change- building relationships, bridges, adapting strategy to what is actually happening.”
We had at least one person in every cohort who had been through burn out or was in the cusp. This is the cost of doing a bad job at supporting infrastructure for systems change.”
– Rachel Sinha, Co-founder of the Finance Innovation Lab and Director of the Systems Studio