Scaling Success: Lessons from Adaptation Pilots in the Rainfed Regions of India

"Scaling Success" examines how agricultural communities are adapting to the challenges posed by climate change through the lens of India's rainfed agriculture regions. Rainfed agriculture currently occupies 58 percent of India's cultivated land and accounts for up to 40 percent of its total food production. However, these regions face potential production losses of more than $200 billion USD in rice, wheat, and maize by 2050 due to the effects of climate change. Unless action is taken soon at a large scale, farmers will see sharp decreases in revenue and yields.Rainfed regions across the globe have been an important focus for the first generation of adaptation projects, but to date, few have achieved a scale that can be truly transformational. Drawing on lessons learnt from 21 case studies of rainfed agriculture interventions, the report provides guidance on how to design, fund and support adaptation projects that can achieve scale

Gaining Perspective: Lessons Learned From One Foundation's Exploratory Decade

Ten years after launching an ambitious strategy, the Northwest Area Foundation asked FSG to identify lessons learned from a decade of community-based work. In the period from 1998 to 2008, the Northwest Area Foundation made a big bet on an innovative approach to reducing poverty. Before that time, the Foundation awarded relatively short-term grants in a variety of program areas. In 1998, the mission was sharpened to a single purpose: to help communities reduce poverty. At the heart of the new strategy was a set of placebased, long-term commitments that were conceived as partnerships with entire communities.

ExpandED Schools National Demonstration: Lessons for Scale and Sustainability

Can schools and community organizations come together to provide children with critical enrichment activities that enhance knowledge and expand horizons beyond core academics during the school day? This report by Policy Studies Associates, Inc., highlights some ways in which they might.The report investigates schools' use of the ExpandED Schools model, which seeks to use partnerships between public schools, community organizations and intermediary organizations to increase enrichment opportunities for children. In the model, regular school staffers focus largely on core academics, while a community-based organization offers enrichment activities during expanded school hours. A third, intermediary organization often coordinates and supports the effort.Researchers studied the use of this model in 10 schools in three cities—New York City, Baltimore and New Orleans—over four years. In this report, they identify the parts of the model that were easiest for the schools to implement, parts that proved more challenging and strategies schools used to overcome hurdles along the way.It finds that the partnerships were generally most successful in adding new activities to an expanded school day and were able to coordinate efforts between school staff and community organizations. But many schools struggled to find reliable sources of funding and to use data to drive programming and instruction

Respite Partnership Collaborative (RPC) Innovation Project Evaluation: Final Report

The Mental Health Services Act (MHSA)—funded by Proposition 63—supports five unique components: (1) Community Services and Supports, (2) Prevention and Early Intervention, (3) Workforce Education and Training, (4) Capital Facilities and Technology, and (5) Innovative Programs. In September 2010, the Sacramento County Division of Behavioral Health Services (DBHS) initiated a community planning process to develop Sacramento's first Innovation Project. DBHS convened an Innovation Workgroup that developed the Innovation Plan and the Respite Partnership Collaborative (RPC) Innovation Project.Through a competitive selection process, Sacramento County DBHS awarded Sierra Health Foundation: Center for Health Program Management (the Center) a contract to administer the RPC Innovation Project. The RPC Innovation Project is a public-private partnership of the Sacramento County DBHS and the Center. The Center uses MHSA Innovation funding to support the RPC, whose members are from the community at large. RPC members make recommendations for respite service grants to community organizations. The RPC's goal is to increase local mental health respite service options to offer alternatives to hospitalization for community members experiencing a crisis in Sacramento County.American Institutes for Research (AIR) conducted an evaluation of the RPC Innovation Project from April 2013 through March 2016. Evaluation objectives were to assess the extent to which the RPC Innovation Project achieved the following:1. Promoted successful collaboration between public and private organizations (i.e., DBHS and the Center) in Sacramento County2. Demonstrated a community-driven process3. Improved the quality and outcomes of respite services in Sacramento County This report presents findings from evaluation activities, which included stakeholder interviews, RPC member surveys, and document reviews.This report emphasizes data collected in the third year of the evaluation after June 2015. The report begins with a brief history of the RPC Innovation Project. Next we describe evaluation objectives and methods for conducting the evaluation. Finally, we present findings, organized by evaluation objective

Outcome evaluation of research for development work conducted in Ghana and Sri Lanka under the Resource, Recovery and Reuse (RRR) subprogram of the CGIAR Research Program on Water, Land and Ecosystems (WLE).

This is the main report of an external evaluation of the Resource Recovery and Reuse Flagship of the Water Land and Ecosystems (WLE) CGIAR Research Program. WLE commissioned the study. The Evaluators interviewed researchers and partners in two countries, Ghana and Sri Lanka, and in Ghana visited two sites. They also interviewed key international partners and analyzed a wide range of documents, reports and publications. The evaluation was focused on understanding how and in what ways the research and other activities carried out by IWMI and supported by WLE contributed to the outcomes. In essence, the purpose was to understand the specific impact pathways from research to outputs and outcomes

A3 thinking approach to support knowledge-driven design

Problem solving is a crucial skill in product development. Any lack of effective decision making at an early design stage will affect productivity and increase costs and the lead time for the other stages of the product development life cycle. This could be improved by the use of a simple and informative approach which allows the designers and engineers to make decisions in product design by providing useful knowledge. This paper presents a novel A3 thinking approach to problem solving in product design, and provides a new A3 template which is structured from a combination of customised elements (e.g. the 8 Disciplines approach) and reflection practice. This approach was validated using a case study in the Electromagnetic Compatibility (EMC) design issue for an automotive electrical sub-assembly product. The main advantage of the developed approach is to create and capture the useful knowledge in a simple manner. Moreover, the approach provides a reflection section allowing the designers to turn their experience of design problem solving into proper learning and to represent their understanding of the design solution. These will be systematically structured (e.g. as a design checklist) to be circulated and shared as a reference for future design projects. Thus, the recurrence of similar design problems will be prevented and will aid the designers in adopting the expected EMC test results

A review of GIS-based information sharing systems

GIS-based information sharing systems have been implemented in many of England and Wales' Crime and Disorder Reduction Partnerships (CDRPs). The information sharing role of these systems is seen as being vital to help in the review of crime, disorder and misuse of drugs; to sustain strategic objectives, to monitor interventions and initiatives; and support action plans for service delivery. This evaluation into these systems aimed to identify the lessons learned from existing systems, identify how these systems can be best used to support the business functions of CDRPs, identify common weaknesses across the systems, and produce guidelines on how these systems should be further developed. At present there are in excess of 20 major systems distributed across England and Wales. This evaluation considered a representative sample of ten systems. To date, little documented evidence has been collected by the systems that demonstrate the direct impact they are having in reducing crime and disorder, and the misuse of drugs. All point to how they are contributing to more effective partnership working, but all systems must be encouraged to record how they are contributing to improving community safety. Demonstrating this impact will help them to assure their future role in their CDRPs. By reviewing the systems wholly, several key ingredients were identified that were evident in contributing to the effectiveness of these systems. These included the need for an effective partnership business model within which the system operates, and the generation of good quality multi-agency intelligence products from the system. In helping to determine the future development of GIS-based information sharing systems, four key community safety partnership business service functions have been identified that these systems can most effectively support. These functions support the performance review requirements of CDRPs, operate a problem solving scanning and analysis role, and offer an interface with the public. By following these business service functions as a template will provide for a more effective application of these systems nationally

Hard Lessons about Philanthropy & Community Change from the Neighborhood Improvement Initiative

Between 1996 and 2006, the William and Flora Hewlett Foundation invested over $20 million in the Neighborhood Improvement Initiative (NII), an ambitious effort to help three neighborhoods in the Bay Area reduce poverty and develop new leaders, better services, more capable organizations, and stronger connections to resources. On some counts NII succeeded, and on others it struggled mightily. In the end, despite some important accomplishments, NII did not fulfill its participants' hopes and expectations for broad, deep, and sustainable community change. In those accomplishments and shortcomings, and in the strategies that produced them, however, lies a story whose relevance exceeds the boundaries of a single initiative. Our goal is to examine this story in the context of other foundation sponsored initiatives to see if it can help philanthropy support community change and other types of long-term, community-based initiatives more effectively.As we began to review materials and conduct interviews, we learned of NII's accomplishments in each neighborhood, including new organizations incubated, new services stimulated, and new leaders helped to emerge. We also quickly discovered multiple, and often conflicting, perspectives on NII's design, implementation, and outcomes that were hard to reconcile. Some of this Rashomon effect is to be expected in a complex, long-term community change initiative that evolves over time with changing players. Some can also be attributed to the different dynamics and trajectories in each of the three sites.We have tried to describe all points of view as accurately as possible without favoring any one perspective. Moreover, we have tried to look beyond the lessons drawn exclusively from NII and to position all of these varied opinions within a broader field-wide perspective, wherever possible.The frustrations of NII's participants and sponsors are mirrored in many other foundations' major initiatives. Indeed, our reviewers -- who have been involved in many such initiatives as funders, evaluators, technical assistance providers, and intermediaries -- all underscored how familiar they were with the challenges and pitfalls described here, both those related specifically to community change efforts and those pertinent to other initiatives. Because the opportunity to discuss the frustrations candidly has been limited, however, they often are relegated to concerns expressed sotto voce. So it was particularly important throughout the review to solicit from our interviewees ideas or suggestions for improving their work together. We offer these along with our own observations as a way to stimulate further reflection and debate, because we believe that philanthropy has an important role to play in improving outcomes for poor communities and their residents. Few foundations have been willing to contribute to this level of honest and sometimes painful public dialogue. But by commissioning this retrospective analysis, the Hewlett Foundation demonstrates a desire to help the field learn and move forward, and we applaud that

Strengthening Managing for Impact in Eastern and Southern Africa : Grant Completion Report

The Strengthening Managing for Impact Programme (SMIP) was a pilot initiative established to test the extent to which the use of the Managing for Impact (M4I) approach could enhance the impact of pro-poor interventions for greater development effectiveness. This programme was implemented in the Eastern and Southern Africa region (including French speaking countries) from 2006 till the end of 2009 and was largely funded by IFAD. A partnership was developed between Wageningen UR Centre for Development Innovation (formerly part of Wageningen International), Khanya6aicdd, IFPRI6IKCD (formerly IFPRI/ISNAR) and Haramaya University (in a joint partnership ‘Carmpolea’); and the Impact Alliance