Islands of Coherence: Life, Work, Promise and Shadow
This learning journal is the final publication of the Systems Innovation Learning Partnership (SILP). It brings together reflections from grantees, community grant makers, funders and the facilitation team, all of whom were exploring ways of funding and working grounded in trust, emergence and shared learning.
SILP set out to function as an experiment that generates learning about systems change, rather than merely as a mechanism for delivering experiments. The journal looks at how this shift played out in practice.
A facilitated learning cohort brought participants together across contexts and gave them space to experiment and reflect alongside one another. Requirements were simplified, reporting became more relational, and setbacks were treated as a source of insight.
The journal also looks at the limits of this approach. These include the friction between flexible practice and institutional compliance systems, the effort needed to sustain this way of working, and the challenges of stepping back once an initiative has been set in motion.
Rather than presenting a model to replicate, the journal offers a reflective account of what became possible in a protected space, and what would be needed for such spaces to be sustained more widely.
We hope it supports funders, intermediaries and practitioners to reflect on the conditions they create, and on how power and decision-making are shared.
I remember explaining that this is exactly what makes it an experiment. At the end of the day, if we had failed on one aspect, it didn’t make sense to stick rigidly to that aspect simply because that was what we signed up to do. Instead, we needed to ask: ‘What is emerging from the experimenters themselves? What is coming from the women?’ Because that is what should help steer the wheel in the right direction.
Marion Iceduna
Join for Water
What really bubbled up on me was having the capacity to input money and time and collective effort into something that I knew was giving me the space to choose bravery in the day-to-day actions.
Antonia Brock
Power Compost
Many times, what happens, especially when you are going towards scale, you forget to take a pause and reflect and look back [at] what’s not working out or what’s happening. And sometimes you face these challenges, and you don’t know how to respond to them because you’re not sure where it’s coming from. That’s where the pause really helps. That was the essence that we got from SILP.
Rashmika Das
Development Alternatives, India
I recently started to feel into learning not as a knowledge production, but relationship production or relationship creation. And think about learning not as an extract, again, not as an extracting knowledge, but creating the mycelial networks that can be mutually nourishing.
Agnieszka Bulacik
New Visions
