Inside the Impact Alliance

Hello everybody. Kim, Ali, nice to see you again. Had a bit of a break from summer. Vanessa, thank you so much for joining. It's wonderful to have you. Let's jump in. You're the project director of the Impact Alliance between Save the Children, Mercy Corps and Care, which is an initiative that came about at some point last year. Why don't you tell us a little bit about it? Where did it start and what is the Impact Alliance?

Sure. Thanks so much for having me. It's really great to be here and be part of this conversation with you. I have been working for the Impact Alliance for about a year. It started before that. I know you've discussed in previous episodes so much the kind of shock that hit our sector in January 2025. That's where the Impact Alliance was born. The three CEOs, from Save the Children US, from Mercy Corps, soon to be known as Prosper Global and Care, they came together in what I've come to understand was a moment of solidarity. I think initially that conversation was how can we work together? How can we help each other survive this immediate crisis?

Very quickly it changed. It changed from how do we become these passive objects of the change happening? How do we get in front of this? How do we become part of the solution and part of defining what life is going to look like for our NGOs coming out of this? How it took this moment of scarcity and fear and grief because there was a lot of grief for our work, for our purpose, for our colleagues and most importantly for the communities that we'd committed to serving that we no longer could to the extent that we wanted. Out of all of that came a conversation of optimism and collaboration.

So the conversation switched to what can we do? How can we do something that is far better than anything anyone of us could achieve alone? We can't should we compete? How are we out of this? Let's collaborate. And so the CEOs gathered some senior colleagues and they started talking about what could this look like? And it was a long list of legend has it there was already something ideas on a white board somewhere and that was before my time. And then that gradually got whistled down as other colleagues were sort of invited to give their views to a small number of things where these three agencies believe that one we can have a far bigger impact together and two we can really help innovate and do things differently than how they always have been.

And that's necessary because the funding is scarce and different and the kind of access to doing things is different and more scarce and the need is ever growing. So that is with the origins.

Fascinating. I'm really glad that there was a moment of coming together for CEOs. We've pondered and speculated about the need for that level of leadership to start talking with each other and to start having that sense of camaraderie and critique, reflection, discussion, where are we going next? It's not just as you said a survival in a competitive way. It's also a realization, a recognition. Things are not what they were. And so what we do is not what we will do moving forward in the future and brew an iterative and emergent process. It sounds like I love that sort of folklore story now of whiteboard and 80 ideas on there and whittling it down.

And this is one of the things that emerged. Who knows maybe others from that list of 80 will also gain traction later. But this is one of the things that's emerged from that thing. So in terms of a partnership between the three organizations, how is this now changing the way that they operate or that staff encounter the organizations on a day-to-day basis?

I think when the idea was first communicated to staff, it probably went down like a lead balloon. If you think about where staff were at that time, very stressed, very anxious, very sad, grieving. They probably lost a number of their colleagues. They were taking on more work because capacity was reduced. A lot of uncertainty and just navigating extreme complexity. We work in a sector where shocks and stresses are part of the reason why we exist. We're used to doing things that we hadn't planned for, but this was different. This really went to the kind of part of our organizations. And it wasn't an external shock that it was affecting others that we had to respond to.

This was one that colleagues were having to manage and internalize themselves. So in the midst of that, asking people to collaborate is a challenging one. But what was created out of that was a space where while so many conversations were about what we would have to stop, what we would have to cut back, what we could no longer do, this became a space where we talked about what could be possible, where we were creative and ambitious. And I'm not talking about large amounts of money because the impact alliance so far has not been about mobilizing huge funds. It's about thinking big about how we can do more with less essentially, but in a more creative way.

Over time, as staff started working together, you saw trust emerging, you saw creativity, you saw people coming, developing new teams and new colleagues having lost many others. And my experience initially observing and then being part of that has been, I've just been so impressed by the way that staff across the three organizations have embraced it. Now, this isn't at large scale, this isn't a merger nor is there an intention for it to be that. I'm sure we'll talk about this later. We've identified three ideas that we think are really strong, that we can work on together. Now, some colleagues across the organizations are not part of that currently and it doesn't affect how they work day to day.

But we have committed to coming together as three organizations in a way that is different than we have done before. INGOs have always worked together, but it's often been time bound and very issue focused and transactional, a consortium project in Country X doing malnutrition or coordination on a humanitarian response or an interagency technical working group. This is different. This is really building trust and sharing capabilities, sharing ambition, learning from each other, being open to trying new things together in a way that feels extremely different from collaboration as it was before. And it takes out that edge of competitiveness and I think that's what's fundamentally different. We're not here kind of competing and trying to one each other.

We're working together to be better together.

I'm so happy. Over here, oh, this is like what I do every day. Vanessa, these are the waters that I swim in and it's such a good example of something that is so hard and that everyone's like, why doesn't this happen a year and a half ago? And it's so, so hard. So let me just throw all my initial thoughts and then all of us, we can just make whatever makes the most sense. The first question or thing that came to mind was how physically does the change take place? Because it's so easy to do the talk and it's so hard to switch to the action.

And that's kind of the intersection that I often sit at, how trying people to move from the 80 things on the board to the, okay, what are the three things we can do in the next six months? That's really hard. So how did the change take place? And specifically, how does collaboration take place in a environment that is designed to keep us fragmented, to keep us competing, where there are so many structural barriers to living those values. So all of that, I have questions about where values comes into play here, how you all are kind of living those values when things get hard. I always talk about values under pressure.

And then where like in my work world, we are often talking with organizations who are trying to find ways to work smarter, to be more collaborative, to have stronger partnerships with other organizations. And the hard fact remains is that it sounds good in principle, but when you kind of lift up the hood and you look at the engines, it's just so hard. You know, systems don't work, platforms don't work, missions don't 100% online. And then all too often, people just end up walking away. So what was different here? Pick whatever makes the most sense for those are all of the thoughts that are like in my head.

I want to start off by saying, I am by no means saying we've got it all sorted, and that we figured it out. We are practicing our way into what the future will look like. We're all talking about what the future of INGOs is. Instead of theorizing it, the CEOs decided to just do it to give it a go. And there's trial and error in there. And we're still learning as we're going. We don't claim to have it all worked out, but we do promise to be transparent about what we're learning. So I'm really grateful to have this opportunity to share some of that along the way.

So I just want to kind of sprinkle that generous helping of humility and self-awareness over this. So to go to your questions, I think, I'd like to start by being honest about what the challenges have been. Initially, there's a really kind of honest tension around that collaboration, because working together, it's slower, and it's harder, and it's less intuitive, particularly in the context that I outlined at the beginning. And so there's internal resistance, why this takes longer, particularly with these overstretched teams and coming from this culture of embedded competition. And those things do not change overnight, and it seems that have come a long way, but we're still working on.

And I'll come in a minute to how. And then there's initial ambiguity, three CEOs going, we're going to work together, we're going to figure out some really great things that we're going to do together. But of course, in the early days, they didn't know what they were going to be. So a high-level vision was there, but agreeing the roadmap and putting the detail on that is more complex and takes more time and trial and error. And then, of course, as you pointed out, in their structural complexity, we have multiple reporting lines, different systems, policies, risk, appetite, cultures, and that is something that you have to take the time to learn along the way.

And even the simplest things, organising a meeting in the Alliance, I can't see anyone's calendars from different organisations, so I have to send a poll. Very silly things like that, the transactional costs of collaboration are higher than if you just stick with your colleagues. And every time you have to learn a new process, a new decision-making route, so it's slow in the beginning. And then also making hard decisions is tough. If you're going to adopt an agile kind of test and learn approach, being prepared to stop things that you've started, again, that's tricky across three organisations. So how have I seen it work? I think there are four things that I would highlight if I were going to encourage others to do the same.

Leadership matters. We've talked about culture, we've talked about bringing people along with a change. The three CEOs, I mean, it really helps that they're really genuine, inspiring leaders. They're three women who get on well together, who are straight talking, who really want to change, who have the humility to hear from others and do things differently. And they set that tone, and they're very involved. I'd say it's one of the lightest touch governance projects I've ever worked in an INGO, the line between the work and the CEOs is very short. There aren't layers and layers of governance structures, that leadership. And then a level down from there, the chief strategy officer is also amazing.

Those early adopters who set the tone and accelerate momentum and build a shared vision, that's crucial, and that can't drop off. It's not about saying a few nice things at the beginning and then leaving it to others to work out. So that's been one. And I'm immensely grateful for the leadership that I benefit from in needing this work from the CEOs and the strategy officers. And the second one is trust. And it sounds obvious, but it's so complicated. It's key. And it takes time and deliberate effort to build a culture where you have psychological safety, where people feel safe to experiment and fail together to be honest about their strengths and their weaknesses with people or organizations that until now they've been set up to compete against.

The third thing I would say is ambition and boldness. It's very easy to start up here and say we're really going to do things differently. And then over time, you kind of projectize things and you get dragged into a very tactical space. And that's happened. So keeping ourselves honest and keep challenging ourselves and saying, is this really transformational? Is this what we set out to do? Is this different than what we were doing before? Is this different than what others are doing? Do we really believe that we can have a bigger impact together doing this thing? And that leads me to the last one, which is prioritization based on learning.

And I think this is the most savage prioritization I've seen in NGOs. NGOs generally, in my experience, are not brilliant at prioritization. Or they're good at defining priorities, but not sticking to them. Because we're excited and passionate and we want to do so much and we want to have the biggest impact. But actually, when it comes to the Impact Alliance, we came together as a leadership group with colleagues from the three organizations in May. And we really whittled down to three things that we think we could do together. And really finding places where that synergistic impact is most likely and showing promise. So we've started a few things that we haven't then accelerated and being comfortable with that.

It's tricky. And I think it's critical because in this resource-constrained environment, we can't do everything. So leadership, trust, ambition and boldness and prioritization with learning the house that I, a year into the role, would highlight.

I just, maybe I want to take a step back and share some of the first impressions I got when I read the news and also when I shared it with others. I think a couple of people, including myself, were asking, what's the difference between this and Pledge for Change, for example, or the ActiveLines or the other initiatives that they were already in place to achieve something similar, like impact perspective and the key headlines. And the second impression I got from so many people when I shared the news was a question, is this a merger?

So the second one is an easy answer, no. It's absolutely not a merger. And the beauty of it is that each organization brings and retains its own strategy, its own identity, its own history and values. And that's really important because we need those different perspectives. And it means we're able to work with different partners, reach different types of target groups, work with different stakeholders. And there is no intention to undermine that. And it's getting the best of both worlds. We get to work together, learn from each other's strengths, learn from each other's weaknesses, which we're transparent about, but without undermining the individual strategies and progress that they're all making.

How it's different, maybe it would be helpful if I talked about the three things that we're working on, which I think, when you hear them, will feel quite different from some of the interagency collaborations, which, by the way, all three organizations still participate in. And this isn't intended to replace other coordination for either at global or country levels. Those very much still have their place. Is that okay, Ali, if I go into...

Yeah, sure. I think that's the point. The point is that to unpack it, but I would prefer to give airtime more for the impact that it aims to achieve rather than exactly what does it mean or something like that?

Yeah. So, from the legendary 81 possible things, the three things that have been sort of tried and tested slightly and which we're really excited about are these. The first is collaborative procurement. The largest humanitarian spend is on third parties. It's on procurement, not just in our three organizations, but in the sector. And so the conversation was, well, if we can even reduce that a little bit, that's an awful lot of money that could then be going directly to communities. So we have looked at all of our different spend areas, and we've been piloting a few areas globally and in country offices, initially around IT, hardware and software, and then also fleet, vehicle sharing, vehicle purchase, vehicle renting.

And we're also looking at a feasibility study for a potential joint procurement organization, an entirely separate organization to do that in the future. And I do want to flag that on this work stream Plan International is part of the work with us. We have line of sight of over the next year, about $10 million that we think we can save on these spend categories. We're in a process of figuring out how to do that, building that collaborative muscle. And once we've done that and got some proof of concept and seen whether those estimates of savings are correct, we'll start to look at different spend categories as well.

So some of our programmatic spending, for example, it's, I think that's extremely exciting and a potential model for other shared services. The second area is something we're calling our community insights engine. This is accountability, but not as you know it. We started with, we had this, I found really impactful workshop in Colombia, where we're piloting this, where we looked at how we do accountability at the moment, and the honesty and the openness to share whether challenges was quite astounding amongst the three organizations. We don't routinely ask communities what their priorities are. We often collect feedback on our projects. And it's project-bound. Yes, when there's a humanitarian response, or we're designing any proposal, we ask general questions about them.

But largely, how are we doing? Those are the questions. Did the training meet your needs? Where's the cash transfer, right? That sort of stuff. This is about asking, how are you doing? What is, what are your concerns? What's changed in your context? What are you doing about it? What do you need others to do about it? And opening a dialogue, using technology in a way that it just hasn't been possible now. One, in terms of what's that voice note, etc. And then two, in terms of AI, in gathering, synthesizing and analyzing all that, a fraction of the speed that it would previously have taken to do manually.

And then the other bit that's really different is rather than that going into a kind of INGO black hole where we use some of that data that we've extracted to report to donors, our aim is to turn that into actionable, accessible local language products that local actors, communities can use for their own local development. Now, we might still use those insights ourselves for our own decision making, etc. But the intention is to put that data back in the hands of the communities that provide it and use it to support their own, their own development. And care has had some really solid examples of doing this elsewhere.

And then the last piece is something that we call scale works. And this is about taking interventions which already have an evidence base. But for whatever reason have not been taken to scale. And these are not necessarily interventions that any of us came up with or has even implemented. It's about working with others to identify what evidence is out there and what are the barriers to scale. And the intention is not for us to then try and get funding for a massive project at scale and implement this ourselves. It's to start immediately working with governments who have the interest to scale up interventions like this and to support them to crowd in expertise funding that they need.

So the examples we're looking at are firstly, anticipatory cash, cash before a crisis. So that which we, you know, there's plenty of evidence there that shows that that it leads to a much more effective and cost effective response. But it isn't done habitually. There are barriers to that being done in a timely way. And the second one is incentivizing vaccines. So vaccine courses, if a child needs to have a course of three or four vaccines for various reasons, oftentimes the vaccine isn't the all parts of vaccine courses are not delivered. So it's offering an incentive to complete the course. So these are conversations that we're already starting with various governments to look at how we can support them to scale up, which we think is quite a different approach from the standard sort of INGO, do a massive project, then start to talk to governments about how you can hand that over.

So the middle one you were talking about, so all three of us are involved in some way with Pledge for Change. And so it's the the one you're talking about around knowledge capture, collecting data, turning it back around, etc. That feels like that aligns with the the partnership, equitable partnership pledge, for example. And I'm looking at you, Ali, because we've talked about this quite a bit, right? Like how do you, how do we, how do we not just take the pledges and the commitments, but actually then action them? But then also, how do we notice when they're happening? Because all all sorts of interesting things are happening across the sector.

But all too often they happen in pockets. And then people aren't kind of tagging them, if you will, they're not labeling them. Well, this is part of that. And it doesn't really matter about getting the credit. But what it matters is about telling that story, and developing almost a catalog of examples so that others can use them and learn from them. And so that's made interesting because all of us are engaged in the pledge and engage with the three organizations that are part of this impact alliance. I don't know that I've seen that connection being made in the rooms that I'm in already. So that's just one observation, Ali, I can see you thinking.

It's just, I actually, I think for me, when I look from practical side, I work with the three organizations before either directly or indirectly. So knowing the three organizations and the governance and processes and programs and all that, I think they have the foundation to create something impactful. They have the resources definitely and the connections with local partners and local actors. When I look at it from, let's say, realistic point of view, I think what comes to my mind, the WhatsApp groups, I'm part of some WhatsApp group for country directors at country level. And I see them practicing that, you know, like they ask some WhatsApp group, like the other day, a country director was saying, oh, we need a guest house, we have some visitor coming, we need this, we need to do a field trip, we need some kind of vehicles to go on a convoy and taking a stand for some access restrictions.

Like when I started looking at the translation of the things that you mentioned to practical country level, country director, program director, et cetera, it means like a WhatsApp group, it means like some kind of like basic things, those conversations after the meetings or before the meetings. So I really hope that this impact alliance is also looking at those simple, practical, country level, field level solutions that are already there and scale them up or something like that.

Yeah, it's interesting. Kim, I'll come back to your point about Pledge for Change, but it's interesting talking about the country level solutions. So these ideas started with leadership and were transparent about that. There was, you know, there was a moment leadership, sort of leaned in to meet it. Now, the three things we'll be focusing on now, they are certainly not the only things that we could do that meet those objectives of having a much bigger impact together than we could alone and offering something transformational to the sector. And probably the ideas for what could be additional are out there and they're not in London or Washington, they're in one of our country offices.

So we have recently launched a process to invite ideas and experiences from our country teams to share exactly that. What have they seen that's work or what ideas have they gotten and seeing if we can connect them with some seed funding to take them forward. So we're really excited to see what comes out of that and to hear from what our colleagues in country offices based on their experience of coordination with their peers, with their partners, with their staff have to offer. It came on Pledge for Change. One of the things that we started, which we're continuing, but not to the same extent as the other three, was some work around partner due diligence and passporting, which I know is something that the pleasure retainers talked about a lot.

And we assumed when we started that we had a number of partners in common and we were asking them to jump through the same hoops three times. Actually, when we looked into it, we didn't. The overlap in our partners was only two percent, which we saw as a good thing. It means that we're working with one, a large ecosystem of partners and two, probably quite small women's groups, youth groups, small CSOs that aren't working with three, four, five INGOs. But it gave us pause to rethink what is it that we can do in the due diligence space because we know it is burdensome for local organizations and there are barriers to them accessing funding because of processes.

So that we've conducted an initial study and that's going to be shared through the Pledge for Change group immediately. And there's some additional work where we're looking at it as an alliance to see what we can do to collectively lighten our processes and learn from others on that.

You're going to connect offline. You can have that chat. I know, Kim, you had a request for Vanessa offline about another event as well. I've got a billion thoughts because this is the sort of inspirational, thought-provoking initiative that gets a lot of brain juices flowing. The quick one, and forgive me if this sounds cynical. It's not meant cynically. I can understand a very practical point to this. On the procurement piece, that first thing you mentioned, which I found very interesting. I remember back 2017, Somalia Famine Prevention response and Save, I was with Save the Children at the time, they've got a multi-million pound British government award, emergency response, the single largest emergency response award we'd ever had.

And it required us to purchase, I think, about $8 million worth of Plumpy'Nut like that instantly. And we were like, wow. And I mean, it shows the scale. That had to go all the way up to CEO level signatures. It just blew every threshold for procurement that anyone could sign. And then we went to the manufacturers and they were like, yeah, sure. But you'll have to wait because actually we've got UNICEFs and we've got WFPs and you could add zeroes, multiple zeroes on to the end of the procurement that we would have. And so, what for us was a nominally large procurement was actually small fry when it came to the pipeline of stuff.

And it kind of just was a realization in terms of where we actually sat in that sort of very insular aid ecosystem of very recognizable stakeholders. We thought we were a big player in that environment. It actually turns out we were quite a small one. So I can totally get why the idea of combining procurement across three of the larger NGOs makes the procurement a far more efficient and competitive and your purchasing power with manufacturers suddenly starts to go much higher, which means you can start to have a little bit more certainty and you can do your own pipeline procurement. You can get your own supplies in your own warehouses and you become less reliant on other pipeline and other procurement systems, etc.

So I guess there's a part of me that's thinking is this a kind of an effort, an attempt to kind of ring fence to try and insulate the NGOs from the larger procurements, which may well be as the ecosystem of aid shifts, may well start to kind of push the like save and care and mostly call to one side with UNICEF going direct to national partners and country-based pool funds being very much more localized and with that sort of direction of travel. Is this an initiative, an attempt to safeguard prominence and relevance and market position as one idea? That's one thought. My other thoughts are very different.

So let me stop on that one. What do you think on that? Am I being too cynical?

The short answer, no, I don't think so. I think it's a fair question. I think the short answer is no. That's not the objective. The short answer is we recognize procurement is our biggest spend area. And if we want to be more efficient, because we have to be, the funds that were there before are not there now. And if we want to have the same impact or more for children, for women and girls, for communities affected by disaster, then we need to become more efficient. And the way we, one of the ways that we see being able to do that is to collaborate. And we believe that particularly on procurement rather than each of us having the staff, the processes, the systems and the time to procure individually, it's better to do that together.

And it puts us in a stronger negotiation position to do that together. So it is not about, this isn't about survivalism. This is about changing the way we work to have a bigger impact.

Let me just say, and the survivalism thing is an interesting point. And let me just like put a pin in that for a second. But let me just say that the procurement side of things, it's a whole, it's one of those things where it is harder than it sounds too. I can say that pre COVID, he mentioned that the membership association had this idea and it seems like it's a no brainer, right? We have a membership of 300 organizations where everyone's doing similar things. Why don't we pull it together, pull it, and then everyone gets, gets, you know, cost savings through scale. We worked with an external provider that was going to help us.

We put it out to the membership. I would say it was like 50 people came to the initial webinar, whittled it down, whittled it down, eight people said, okay, we'll be part of the pilot. To the point where they spent, you know, they, they dedicated resources to sharing, to sharing numbers, which, you know, I and yours don't love to do, right? So sharing back, back and numbers, all of these different things, none of them panned out. None of them did. Even though the idea was sound, the, in theory, it made sense the practical barriers to collaboration and cooperation are so high. And now pre COVID, maybe the incentive, the financial incentives, as you said, Vanessa, there was probably more, a little bit more money now.

The incentives weren't there. So there was a little bit of that, but really basic things like, well, our contract ends in two years. So come to me in two years, how do you get the critical mass when you're not there? You know, these are our requirements. These are your requirements. We can't find the alignment or the overlap out of 300 organizations. We couldn't do it. And we were doing things like shipping, like it wasn't like shipping credit card, things, these types of things. You couldn't figure it out. I got really burned on that one. So when you brought up procurement,

I'm sorry to hear that. I'm sorry to hear that. And perhaps some of the colleagues who were involved in that have taken some of those lessons and are still with one of the three organizations and are using them. What I would say is different and more optimistic is, well, first of all, going back to my initial sprinkling of humility, we're doing a pilot. So let's see. I am not claiming that we have solved that problem and aren't facing any of the challenges that you did. We're doing a pilot. We are optimistic, but we haven't yet got the savings to say, yes, it works. Some of the things that are different, there are four of us.

So Plan, as I mentioned, not 800, not 300. And this was never intended to be a closed shop. But in the early days, keeping a small group helps us get some proof of concept and things under our belt that isn't possible with a much larger group. The leadership point that I raised earlier, I don't know if you have that, but when things are CEO driven and have the support of CSOs and other SLT members, it's a different ball game. In Ethiopia, for example, we have now an agreement to share vehicles where it's possible, where it can be compliant amongst donors. So it's happening. We have RFAs out for vehicle renting in Sudan, I believe.

So it's happening. It's not stored at concept. And we do have some structural safeguards in place. We have an NDA because we're sharing data, which is sensitive. We have an MOU, which underpins the trust that we display for each other. So I think those are some of the things that give me confidence that this isn't one of the things that's going to trip, but actually is going to result in substantial savings. And I hope in the next couple of months,

we'll have some proof of concept to share. But I think it's really encouraging that we're

just going to start starting. We don't need to have this map. We're just going to start starting and find ways to do it. And that's the only way to do it.

There's something very pivotal you just said there, Vanessa, I think, which was about when things are CEO driven. So I think that speaks volumes to just how rigid and inflexible organizations are. If ideas are plentiful and intention is just rife everywhere. And Ali, you brought up an issue earlier about country directors just trying to work amongst themselves. And Kim, you said about he meant some of the effort. I remember when I led the regional ICWG, we were looking at how we can enforce or procurement and finance systems and all the rest. But nothing got traction. Nothing went beyond just a little good idea because it wasn't top down driven.

And so I think there's a reflection point there. If genuine agility is what's necessary, why is it still that it's CEO driven? And I'm not expecting you to be able to answer this, Vanessa. It's just a reflection. The organizations need to maybe think about how much leeway and bandwidth and how output versus outcome orientated the day-to-day business practice is becoming. I just thought that was a very interesting reflection.

I would flip it on itits head. I mean, you can see the CEO engagement as a reflection of that kind of culture. I'd flip it on its head and say we're in the early stages. We're in year one of this. I don't expect, and I hope we'll still be going strong five years from now as an alliance. I don't expect that same level of engagement will be necessary. They are not engaged in sort of the day-to-day business of these three pilots, but it's creating that culture because leaders do set the tone and they create the culture. And they are setting that culture saying we will collaborate.

We know it's hard, but we will do it and we believe it's worth it. And we support and encourage you to do that. Well, Thomas, I've heard you talking about these things in your own kind of leadership and coaching space. You have to reinforce messages. It's not good enough to just say things once. It doesn't feel genuine. I think you do need leadership to embed a culture, and that takes time, especially when you're doing something as potentially risky, scary, transformational as really a fundamental collaboration across organizations.

And that's actually my biggest takeaway. I wasn't trying to suggest that the alliance was being CEO controlled. I thought it's an example that sort of proves that rule previously, right? That once the CEO does allow something to happen, that can go off and it can gain traction and things like that. So maybe that could be allowed elsewhere as well. But there was another thing you said that I found fascinating as well in terms of that partnership mapping that you did and the awareness that you only had 2% overlap. The fact that there was that much trust and willingness to share data in that sense, share lists of partners, and have the intention to go into the data analytics of all that, that shows an awful lot of collaboration as well.

And I'm just wondering, I mean, as you said, alliance is early days, let's see where it goes. But if, and this is a very low bar, and I'm sure you've got much higher measures of success that you're hoping for, but if that low bar, if nothing else, if this initiative can just prove that there are other ways to do things that actually collaboration and working, you don't have to be as defensive, you don't have to be as insular in your thinking and your positioning, then maybe in 5, 10 years time, that actually has paved the way for things to be a lot more interconnected, a lot more interdependencies to be embraced and for organizations to actually start thinking a little bit more expansively in terms of how they work in partnership and mutual partnership, not contractual partnerships, right?

Thinking of value chains and understanding that you're in certain links, not every link, right? And so there's a mutuality that's required in how you engage. If this is a sort of testing bed for that type of mindset, then phenomenal, fantastic. I think I wish it every success, I really do.

Thank you. I couldn't agree with you more and I'm hopeful of that too. Going back to the example I shared at the beginning about the meeting that happened in Colombia of our kind of this exercise at the beginning where they mapped out the value chain of accountability, of how they gather information from communities, from other local stakeholders, how they process it, what they do with it, how that's fed back in. And as they mapped that process, they had to map problems with it and where they thought they were strong or where they thought they were pitfalls, where stuff just took way too long, where there were black holes, where they didn't have good systems in place.

And at first, everyone was sort of a bit hesitant looking to each other to see how honest they were being. And then it ended up being almost quite therapeutic. And they were saying, why don't we do that? On the one hand, they were saying, it's so nice to hear Mercy Corps, that you have the same problem as us, CARE. We thought we were messing this bit up on our own, but actually you were struggling with it. Well, what are you going to do about it? And then someone else saying, well, we've sort of nailed this piece of the puzzle. And I was going, how, you know, we find that really hard.

And they said, why don't we do this? We have learned so much from each other in this conversation, because we're not set up to write and competing proposals. And the learning that happened. And then actually later in the process, they invited some representatives from some of the women's agriculture organizations that they were working with, they were from from a care project. And they bought them in to hear from them what their experiences have been and what they were happy with and what they weren't. And it was it was a breath of fresh air, the openness, the humility and the willingness to be honest about not what's not working and hear from others what was.

And the fact you're right that that isn't standard practice, because we've not been set up and incentivized to do that. And so yeah, if we can if we can create some good examples for for how that could work, then that is something we're really excited to share.

Yeah, I have two two reflections, not questions, just on the spot reflections on what what you mentioned. The first one, when I look at initiatives in general, I look at innovation, competence and scaling. And of course, you mentioned AI and those digital solutions. And I'm aware of those three organizations, capacity and portfolio and all that. So for me, I could see the indicators around innovation, I could also see the indicators around competence. The question and the reflection that I have in mind will be scaling the solutions that you already exist. Of course, I know, procurement is a challenging question. But I'm aware, there are so many solutions right now at country level, we just need to scale them up, you know, like as I mentioned, guest houses, fleets, offices, even like digital solutions, conversations with Microsoft or AWS or multiple other conversations, like they are already there.

And then it's just a matter of creating the governance around it and scaling it up. That's my first reflection. My second question, and it's something I noticed frequently when I engage with international NGOs, think we have to distinguish between efficiency and transformation. Because from my perspective, saving time and cost, the efficiency is something I think when we look at processes, policies, tools, structure, we can achieve that. But for me, the hardest question around that transformation, and here I'm not talking only about organizational transformation, I'm talking about the ecosystem, the systems, country level, regional level, HQ level. So once the alliance make a couple of steps, hopefully in the near future around efficiency, I think the bigger question will be around the transformation, how that alliance could create, hopefully some kind of wave that could start doing that step-by-step transformation toward this wider ecosystem transformation.

Those are two reflections came to my mind.

I really agree with you, Ali. And just to be clear, we don't see it as sequential. We're not saying we're only going to focus on efficiency. And then we'll think about how things like localization come in. Localization is something that these three organizations and many others have committed to for a long time. And in some areas of that, there's progress. And in others, the progress isn't what one would have hoped by now. That is at the heart of everything that we're doing. And we challenge ourselves to have that as a key component of each of the work streams. So for example, this work around community insights, we are building that with the intention of providing something useful to local organizations when whether we use those insights is secondary.

And we will. But that is not the primary use. The primary use is to create something useful to support local development. And hearing from local actors what that would look like when it comes to scale works. It's exactly that. From day one, we need to talk to local partners to surface what are these interventions that should be scaled and have conversations with governments about A, whether they want to and whether they agree that that's something that should be scaled up and then B, if so, how they want to go about that and see if they want to do that with us. So it's really flipping on its head the natural order of things that INGs have done previously.

So we take that kind of ecosystem piece, particularly when it comes to localization really seriously. And that's something that we challenge ourselves to put at the heart of what we're doing. The extent to which we're successful remains to be seen. And it's something that that we'll keep an eye on. But the intent is certainly there.

So the way that you that I kind of had like a little bit of a light bulb there when you were saying, okay, efficiency versus transformation, because oftentimes right now when I talk to organizations, they're using the same sentence, right? They're used in the same breath. And the reality is because think about your three horizons, right? Horizon one, we need sufficiency right now to survive. And then, you know, oftentimes the experiments, the pilots, etc., are getting towards the transformation. But the reality is that until this, until we can prove to ourselves and to the system that the transformation is in everyone's best interest, it's just going to be, it's just going to be, it's going to be a values based ethical decision.

And that only takes us so far. We knew that before 2025, we've been talking about this for decades. But it only took us so far that by saying this is going to do the right thing. So the thing that is going to get built into the new system, where transformation and building something new in a different way becomes the norm, is when it serves all of the interests, including the impact, you know, the impact we have to the communities we serve, to the missions that we have, and frankly, to the survival and the health of an organization. Now, what I find about your example, Vanessa, in a small T transformation, maybe not systems wide transformation, but small T transformation is what we're learning in real time about collaboration.

Because I do think collaborating in a system that is designed for fragmentation is radical, is transformative or has the potential to be transformative. And everything that I'm doing in my work at the ecosystem level, at the network level, these lessons are all coming out, right? How do we live up under pressure? What is the role of leadership in setting the tone in the culture, but then also setting up those other feedback loops within a system. So the leaders that's the culture, but then the doers are given the freedom to do it. And then the examples that you're seeing, like at the country level, Ali are feeding up and there are healthy feedback loops of information, so that all of that can feed it up.

It is so much easier said than done. And so just starting to start, I think, is at this point a win and committing to working out loud.

And I think I've had a very similar thought. To me, listening to this conversation, this impact alliance, if you look at it within the context of the wider moment that all organizations are facing in a minute. And right at the beginning, you said that each individual maintains their own identity. And I'm sure that's true. But it's not as simple as that, because each of their individual identities are currently being questioned. They're currently being threatened. And they're currently being actively in some cases kind of questioned and revised, right? The kind of revisioning exercise around where they go and who organizations are in the next five, 10, 20 years are very, very practical, very tangible conversations taking place now.

So in many respects, and I don't know if this has been spoken about or not, but given the prominence of this alliance within the CEO and the C-suite executive of all three organizations, and well, more than that plan included, if they're involved in some way as well. It kind of acts, this alliance is a bit of a canary in the coal mine type initiative, almost, in terms of how organizations are willing to change, right? Not necessarily kind of the, you know, we've set out our plan for the alliance and if long as we walk that plan and it succeeds, we'll consider it. But in terms of that ability to reach outside, that ability to be humble, that ability to say, actually, we're going to let control of some things have influence by others, right?

If the spirit of the alliance, not the practicalities of it, if the spirit of the alliance can survive and can be lent on and can start to permeate into other elements of organizational thinking, then I think it'll be a phenomenal high success. If suddenly it gets too hard and too difficult when organizations actually start sidelining it and start saying, actually, no, too risky, we're not going to lean in there, we're going to go back to where we were before, that's a red flag that needs to be recognized in the moment as well.

So it's a really bold initiative, but yeah.

It is. And I'm an optimist and I do believe this is going to transform the way at least these three organizations work and hopefully the sector, because my early observation is that it is permeating down, people are inspired, they are seeing the benefits of collaboration. In the beginning, it was why would we collaborate, and now it's why wouldn't we? It seems so obvious. I think, Kim, what you outlined in terms of what's needed to make it work, you put it really nicely and I agree, and there's two things that I would add. Firstly, funders need to support this kind of collaboration. They haven't in the past, funding actively disincentivizes it, and we are extremely grateful for the seed funding that has enabled us to stand this up through a range of largely non-traditional donors and individuals and trusts and foundations and corporates as well as those who've offered their services to us at low or no cost.

They're doing that because they want to be part of seeing what the sector can do next, and that needs to continue, so with huge thanks and with an encouragement for that to continue. And then the other piece is this dialogue, we are wholeheartedly committed to sharing what we learn. We are transparent that we have not got it all figured out, and I was open about some of the early challenges that we've been through. I'd love to come back and tell you how we're doing once we've got some results. We have a lot more engagement planned. There's going to be some events going on in the coming months, we'll be at UNGA, we'll be at NetHope, we'll be at various other places.

We're planning to organize some kind of practitioner level webinars, and then towards the beginning of next year when we actually have some results, I think we'll start finding ways to share those. We've been very happily collaborating with Bridgespan who are supporting us to understand and capture the lessons along the way. That is as much as what we're delivering. The learning along the way is a key piece, and the interest that we've received from many of our peers since starting has been great, so we really need to make that dialogue much bigger than the three of us, and hear what others are doing around collaboration. I'm sure there's lots more examples out there that we want to hear, so the more we can foster that

conversation, the better. You mentioned you're going to be at UNGA. Is that three organizations going as the Alliance to UNGA, or are they going individually, and the

Alliance is going separately? No, I'm talking about a side event, an Impact Alliance side event, so both. I'm going back to what I was saying before. Of course, each organization has its own agenda at UNGA, but as a side event, we will be having dialogues with others as a collective, and that's okay, and to attend before like NetHope or others to do that individually and collectively, there isn't a conflict there.

And you mentioned you've heard sort of response feedback from others as a result of this. I know we're probably running out of time, but in a couple of words, a couple of sentences, what has that general reaction been to this as a point of disruption?

This is really cool. Tell us more. Can we be involved? It's essentially what people have said, to which the answer is, thank you very much. Yes, certainly at some point at the moment through dialogue, because like I said, to get anything done in the early stages, we need to focus on a few things and do them as a three, but as we start to get some proof of concept and a work stream level, I'm sure we'll be reaching out to others to see where additional collaboration or replication might be possible, but it's been really encouraging to hear that others see the value of this, and if it's encouraging or inspiring, then that's brilliant.

I have to admit that I really like this conversation and this dialogue way more than the press releases and the pages that you have on the websites. Like to be totally honest, I think the pages that you have on those different websites and that op-ed about the alliance, the communication and focus teams fingerprints all over it. I feel this is a bit genuine. It's also like speaking from the heart and sharing some things beyond just talking points and messages and all that. That's not all the people actually understand, especially at the country level. The second thing, I really encourage you and the team also take risks.

It's totally fine to break some things on the process. It's totally okay if you need to do some kind of firing in the process or do radical change here and there in the process, because I feel the moment things start getting a bit more censored, trying to make everyone happy, everyone satisfied, and looking at those legacy XYZ, that impact that we all want to see and we will be cheering for you and the rest of the team, it gets a bit challenging to see. The last thing that I want to say that I would, of course, I hope that you come again to this conversation in the future, but I really think it's very important to speak about this more at multiple levels.

Of course, they are those global macro things, but also injury or form. As you mentioned, knit hope and multiple other platforms. This is very, very important for everyone to hear.

Thanks, Ali. I really appreciate that and you will see more. To be honest, we've been finding our feet, building that muscle and culture of collaboration, getting to know each other, deciding what we're actually going to do and sticking to a few priorities. It's now that we've gone from concept to operationalising those ideas in the early stages that we're starting to feel that we have something worthwhile to share and start talking about. You will see more of us collectively. The CEOs, the two strategy officers, me and hopefully other colleagues in various for sharing more, the bad, the ugly, and the optimism that we all share.

Excellent. Vanessa, thank you so much. It's been a real pleasure. Like Ali said, really thoroughly enjoyed this conversation and I wish you and the Alliance all the best luck. Thank you very much.

Here's to be forward and to brag about optimism.

Thank you. Thank you so much for having me. I've really enjoyed it as well. I look forward to bringing you up to speed on the next chapter once we've got some more of the story to tell you. Fantastic. Look forward to it. Thank you. Take care. Bye-bye.

Wow. So, very interesting chat from Vanessa there. What did you think?

I felt like I was holding back. It could have been a one-on-one for three hours, but there were so many of us. It's such an interesting example of all of the things that we've been talking about and thinking about for so long. And there is danger that we put all that pressure on one example, right? But it is also just so interesting to see it come together.

Yeah. Very similar thoughts. I was both equally excited and frustrated, by the way that Vanessa was positioning it. And I think my excitement is coming from the intentionality behind and the spirit behind the Alliance. And it seems like their early initial steps in towards practicing it are very much in line with that spirit. And I hope that they do carry that on and lean into it even more because, as we've spoken about a lot before, the INGOs do need to shift their fundamental way of being. And this is one example of being able to do that. But I was equally frustrated because there wasn't anything in the conversation, anything in the Alliance there that suggested that the INGOs are going to start looking outside of the traditional environments with which they have always been occupying.

It seemed like a, how do we keep doing what we were doing before, but in a different way that's more appropriate to the times? As opposed to thinking a little bit more expansively in terms of where humanity is in the world today, what role different actors play in the way that they should be occupying and existing in different spaces. And I didn't hear that coming out. Now, that's not necessarily the Alliance's job. And so my frustration is probably a bit misplaced and there's probably a little bit more abstract and forward thinking than that. And these things have to start somewhere, don't they? And this Alliance seems like a good starting point for wider change in how INGOs can exist.

Yeah. Of course, for me, I had so many questions, but like 40 minutes, 50 minutes is not enough. And of course, there are so many details around governance and the processes and looking at the organization's mandates, they are not the same, like Mercy Corps, more development, long-term early recovery, et cetera, and care and save the children. It's a bit more to the side of humanitarian emergency, et cetera. So I think there are so many questions. And it's totally okay not to have the answers or even have the time to ask them. But from my perspective, the spirit of this Alliance, it's already living at country level.

And I'm saying that because I have seen so many examples of colleagues as country director, program director, area directors or program coordinators at country level, they are already practicing those things around procurement or supply chain, taking a stand on advocacy, negotiating access and multiple other things, even like exchanging information around partners. I've seen that, I've lived that, I had like firsthand experience. I think for me, the interesting thing will be how to bring that from country level, scale it up. And at the same time, which is not easy to do, how to make us excited again and really inspired. Because this is not the first time we hear about an alliance or initiative or something like that.

There are so many people in the sector who've seen this movie so many times already. So you know, like this kind of like push something.

Ali, I mean, so you all know one of my favorite systems frameworks is the is panarchy, right? Where you have like individuals, organizations, ecosystem sector, and there's all these feedback loops. And that's what I mean by saying, okay, you have the CEOs that have made this commitment. And it's so important to make the commitment. And it's so important to signal internally, okay, when these are not just performative words, this is real. And then it's also important to have at the director level, systems, processes, experiments, initiatives, and it's also so important at the individual team level, etc., to have the relationships. But are all those three things connecting?

That's often where it breaks down, right? Like, is what you're saying that happens in the WhatsApp channels being recognized and codified. And I don't mean that in a negative way of saying, like, let's co-opt and whatever. I mean, let's give it recognition and power and give and name the thing that's already happening so that we can learn from it is one thing. And then what I'm hearing from you, Thomas, is true, which is like, we want to be excited. We want to have, you know, we want to champion all this. But we've just been burned so many times from these types of stories that really the proof is going to be in the, okay, this is a great idea.

It's a great story. It's a great initiative. And no one doubts the intention. But when push comes to shove, when values are under pressure, what is going to happen? When it's more than three small things, when competition comes in, when all these systems pressures come in, what decisions and choices are going to be made? And that's where the rubber meets the road. And let's be clear, I don't think any of us or none of us should be finger pointing at the first mistake, because that's how you 100% agree, right? And it's my canary in the coal mine piece.

This is exactly what I said. I was like, when it does get hard and tough, do they stick to the spirit of it? And do they lean in more to this type of thing, right? As opposed to like you said, dabble with it, get burnt fingers and scared when it happens happens. And I also think I agree with both of you that, you know, there is a sort of fatigue out there of, oh, it's just another collaboration. It's another initiative. It's another consortium based thing. Why is it different to anything we've had in the past? I don't think they'd be naive to that. I think they'll probably be very, very aware of that, knowing some of the individuals behind it.

And they've just got to, you know, action and example is the only thing that's going to prove that wrong. So they've just got to keep doing it.

It isn't any individual actor or organization's job to fix the sector. No, it's not. It's everyone's job to do within their sphere of control, to, you know, regenerate the soil that they're planted in. And then it's sometimes people like us to connect those dots and say this is the pattern that we're seeing. And this is the direction of travel that we're moving in. And to hold people to account and to ask good questions and all of these different things. But if everyone can just do their bit and move in that direction, that article that you all shared, and we can put it in the, in the comments section when this is, when this is put up on the interweb, you can tell who does the tech on this side, I guess.

You print out the transcript. Don't you, Kim?

In the interweb. The article that you all shared, I mean, it says it so succinctly, which is,

you know, we can't just be pointing fingers and trying to kind of in a wonky type of way be rebuilding aid 2.0 when really the fight is we should be, you know, having a united offensive or defense saying this is the argument for aid in the first place. Because if we are all debating the intricacies of who's doing what and how it's going to happen, meanwhile, there's a whole another conversation out in the real world saying, well, let's just take all the money away because we don't need it. And we just forget that that is an argument that needs to be had. And so these kind of detailed conversations are very important, but we need, we can't forget about, you know, that bigger picture.

So we wish the Alliance well, basically, but it's without its pitfalls, right? It's got lots to, it's got lots to overcome. We'll watch with eager anticipation.

Yeah, I think we should, in a couple of months, we should have an adult conversation. You know, it's like, yeah, it would be nice to be interested.

Yeah, either. Yeah, one side of the year-end break would be an interesting time to to do that. Well, we'll invite Vanessa back. Cool. Thanks, both.