RINGO Phase 2: The What, How, Why and Who

What’s new with RINGO?

Last week the RINGO team launched Phase 2 of its sys­tems change work to reimag­ine the INGO! We shared our emerg­ing strat­e­gy at an Open House ses­sion with near­ly 200 peo­ple inter­est­ed to hear about our emerg­ing plans. It was an oppor­tu­ni­ty for us to share what we col­lec­tive­ly achieved in the past two and half years, and, most impor­tant­ly, to talk about how these learn­ings are dri­ving the influ­enc­ing agen­da that takes cen­tre stage for our next phase of work.

The RINGO Social Lab is a diverse but cohe­sive com­mu­ni­ty of change mak­ers. We have been on a jour­ney of inquiry, prob­lem iden­ti­fi­ca­tion, and solu­tion-build­ing, and have thus far been exper­i­ment­ing with eight pro­to­types, try­ing out new things across dif­fer­ent areas of prac­tice. The Lab has come a real­ly long way and we now have a wealth of learn­ings and insights to share across the sec­tor that we think can gen­uine­ly trans­form our rela­tion­ships and there­fore our impacts.

So, how will we do it? 

The orig­i­nal the­sis of RINGO was that in order to reimag­ine and redesign the enti­ty of glob­al civ­il soci­ety to be more equi­table, the process of change needs to be root­ed in and locat­ed with­in the wider ‘sys­tem’. All of us –  whether we’re fun­ders, INGO lead­ers, nation­al and local civ­il soci­ety lead­ers and oth­ers – have a role to play in shap­ing and shift­ing the sys­tem. This the­sis remains intact: the enti­ty of the INGO itself can­not change unless the flows, rela­tion­ships, forces and norms around it per­mit or enable this change. The INGO will not and can­not change alone.

There­fore, as we plan how to share the learn­ings from the RINGO Social Lab, we do so ful­ly cog­nisant of the whole sys­tem that forges and affects the INGO. Build­ing from where we end­ed our work togeth­er last year, we recog­nised that we need­ed to strength­en our influ­ence as a com­mu­ni­ty of change mak­ers. In order to do this, we need more hands on deck work­ing to influ­ence the change we want to see on the ground by INGOs. There’s no point in inno­vat­ing if we can’t ulti­mate­ly embed our inno­va­tions in the entire sys­tem.

We have there­fore decid­ed to direct our ener­gy for shar­ing learn­ing par­tic­u­lar­ly towards the parts of the sys­tem that have the most influ­ence, in par­tic­u­lar focus­ing on influ­enc­ing two sets of actors: Fun­ders and the Boards of INGOs, and we need every­one in RINGO to be a part of this.

Why Fun­ders and INGO Boards?

Con­sis­tent­ly through­out the two years of the RINGO Lab enquiry, fund­ing was iden­ti­fied as absolute­ly crit­i­cal. We learned that the nature of fund­ing, the way it is direct­ed, the deci­sion mak­ing process­es, pow­er dynam­ics, per­son­nel, geog­ra­phy, due dili­gence sys­tems, report­ing and mea­sure­ments, all play a pow­er­ful part in shap­ing glob­al civ­il soci­ety.

INGO Boards, mean­while, were iden­ti­fied because of their obvi­ous pow­er, respon­si­bil­i­ty and over­sight roles – and their inter­ac­tion with the fund­ing space. How­ev­er, we also heard that in spite of their pow­er­ful role, Boards had lit­tle space or even the knowl­edge in which to play or dri­ve a re-imag­in­ing role, as com­pared to sup­port giv­en to staff and exec­u­tive teams. We want to encour­age, chal­lenge, accom­pa­ny and inform Boards along the way of this ‘re-imag­in­ing’ process. A space that RINGO could help to fill.

What does this mean for oth­ers in the RINGO ecosys­tem? 

We do not for a minute think that we are now lim­it­ing our con­ver­sa­tion, rela­tion­ships and explo­rations to these two sets of actors. Not at all. RINGO is a grow­ing, vibrant and dynam­ic com­mu­ni­ty, con­nect­ed with many oth­ers across the sec­tor. We will con­tin­ue to organ­ise, mobilise and inte­grate per­spec­tives and voic­es from local and nation­al civ­il soci­ety enti­ties in our influ­enc­ing work. Indeed, we are plan­ning an exten­sive research study to engage CSOs in Africa, Asia and Latin Amer­i­ca which will feed into our influ­enc­ing strat­e­gy.

We will also cre­ate plat­forms where we can sup­port each oth­er and stand in sol­i­dar­i­ty. We are con­tin­u­ing to devel­op the pro­to­types along­side our organ­i­sa­tion­al hosts – through which we expect to find new ways of doing things, bet­ter ways of doing things. And those new ways will be tak­en on by the hosts and mem­bers of the pro­to­type team, and infused into the sec­tor. In all of this work we will be proac­tive­ly and con­scious­ly seek­ing the advice, insights and rela­tion­ship of civ­il soci­ety col­leagues from across the globe. We are deter­mined to leave no civic actor behind.

We hope you’ll stay on this jour­ney with us…and bring your friends along to the par­ty!