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CAPACITY BUILDING

What is 'Capacity Building'?

Capacity building supports the development of organizations. Every organization needs a strong financial management system, a plan for mobilizing resources, a way to monitor and evaluate programs, and the capacity to adapt programs based on past performance and projected need. These functions all require good organizational leadership, strong administrative systems, and skilled staff and/or volunteers.

Firelight’s Capacity Building Program helps organizations evolve and grow stronger over time and through changing circumstances.

To track their capacity strengthening progress, the Firelight program team evaluates organizations on the following criteria:

1. Community rootedness
2. Holistic, broad approach
3. Demonstrated reflection and program adaptation
4. Strong organizational identity (including the strength of vision and agency)
5. Sound management structure, systems, and leadership
6. Strength of external relationships and networks

What is Firelight’s approach to capacity building?

The goal of Firelight’s Capacity Building Program is to support the organizational development of grantee-partners into strong, sustainable community-based institutions working effectively for the well-being of children and families.

Integrating capacity building into our Grantmaking Program has a direct role in helping to prepare our grantees to sustain their own programs and mobilize other resources to help their eventual transition from reliance on Firelight funding.

How does Firelight offer capacity building to our grantees?

Capacity Building Grants
Firelight supports grants for specific areas of capacity development based on organizations’ own assessments of need. These grants help our grantees become stronger organizations over the course of their partnership with us, and ultimately lead to better and more effective services for children and families.

Networking
In southern and eastern Africa, there are thousands of local organizations that are helping vulnerable children and their families. More established organizations have much to share with newer organizations in terms of their experiences with implementing programs for children, families, and communities to deal with HIV/AIDS and poverty.

An important way to strengthen organizations is to help them learn from each other. Peer-to-peer learning offers the most relevant and supportive capacity building. Firelight frequently funds learning circles, exchange visits, and mentoring relationships to facilitate the sharing of on-the-ground experiences among peer organizations.

Training
Firelight's monitoring and evaluation training module for community-based organizations is an important step forward in building the capacity of our grantees to measure their own achievements in a more meaningful way.

Our program monitoring training is specifically tailored to the needs of small organizations. Conducted by the South Africa-based consulting firm, Insideout, the training reached more than 40 grantees in Lesotho, Malawi, and Zambia in 2007 and 2008.

Firelight continues to support the monitoring and evaluation work of these partners through a network of on-the-ground resource people. This approach has enabled our grantees to reflect upon their work and has ultimately resulted in improved programming, reporting, fundraising, networking, and advocacy within their organizations.

Weekly "Newsflash" Links Grantee-Partners to Vital Information
To enhance the work of our grantees and provide access to important information to community-based organizations, especially those working in isolated rural areas, we share information with our active grantees via weekly "Newsflash" emails.

These bulletins include information on relevant resources, publications, funding opportunities, donor profiles, upcoming events and conferences, tips and tools to enhance programming, and news of grantees' special accomplishments.

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