In 2023, Minderoo Foundation launched its 2030 Strategy, which embeds a systems-led approach to our work by understanding the systems landscape and tackling the conditions holding the problems in place. It also aims to strengthens our commitment to collaboration by building and fostering stronger relationships with partners and peers to maximize the impact of our resources.

We were also incredibly fortunate as our founders, Andrew and Nicola Forrest, donated an additional AUD$5 billion to the Foundation’s endowment in the same year. We recognise what an absolute privilege and responsibility it is to steward this gift on behalf of our founders.

In the reflections stimulated by the strategic planning process and this gift, we realized that to be more effective we need to concentrate our efforts on building capacity for our partners to deliver and deploy our resources more intentionally. To do this well it is essential to understand how our grantee partners think and feel about collaborating with us and what they require to be successful in achieving our shared outcomes.

We are an evidence-based organization and we demonstrate this through the research we undertake and fund in our focus areas, but we didn’t have access to the same level of quality data when it came to our own operations.

That’s why we turned to CEP. The Grantee Perception Report (GPR) was an amazing resource for us to be able to source honest and candid feedback on Minderoo’s impact on our grantee’s fields, communities, and organizations.

Although measurement and learning are cornerstones of our organizational practices, we had never before provided an avenue for our partners to give feedback in a systematic and anonymous way, so this was a new territory for us. Being able to see how we compared against other funders from across the world through benchmarking data was very important to us. We wanted to understand where we fit among our peers and make sure that we are constantly trying to improve. We can always do better, but we can’t do it on our own.

Read the full article about setting strategic direction by Alice Mei, Kristen Stevenson, and Kho Yin Go at The Center for Effective Philanthropy.