Fay Twersky, vice president at the William and Flora Hewlett Foundation, recently launched The Listening Post, a monthly note dedicated to lifting up exceptional ideas, voices, and questions that can help all of us become more effective in our philanthropy. She’ll also share what the team at Hewlett is learning alongside its grantees.

An excerpt from the February edition is below:

Successful funder collaborations were created to achieve three goals:

Scaling specific organizations. This thesis is about bringing proven practice to scale. Collaborative funds like Blue Meridian Partners have structured themselves as an investment platform to scale nonprofits in specific fields, providing both due diligence for co-investors and strategic-planning support for investees. In doing so, they’ve pioneered a model for scaling organizations that others are adapting.

Building a field. This thesis is at the heart of newer philanthropic initiatives such as the India Climate Collaborative (ICC), just launched by Shloka Nath of Tata Trusts along with a growing group of Indian funders. The ICC’s purpose is to inform, influence, and mobilize efforts to combat climate change in India. Another example is when six years ago, the Effective Philanthropy Group at Hewlett joined forces with other funders to create the Fund for Shared Insight to build the sector’s feedback field and create systematic ways for funders and nonprofits to listen and consider the views of those they seek to help.

Achieving a milestone. This thesis aligns strategies toward “winnable milestones,” often in pursuit of policy or population-level change, such as disease eradication. For example, The Global Fund to Fight AIDS, Tuberculosis and Malaria was co-founded in Geneva in 2002 by funders including the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation and has catalyzed meaningful reduction in all three diseases.

Read the full Listening Post by Fay Twersky. Subscribe to the mailing here.