Building and Growing Networks for Social Impact

As GSF becomes an independent charity our Chief Executive Officer Aashti Zaidi Hai reflects on what we’ve learnt from our first 4 years as a network organisation.

It’s hard to believe that the day has come when GSF formally spins out of Ark and becomes an independent charity. These last few years have seen us grow to a community of 64 members, across over 52 countries in Africa, Asia and South America. These members run or support 30,000 schools providing 5 million children with access to education. And while I am not quite sure when we stop being a ‘start-up,’ or in fact, whether we ever want to, the journey over these last four or five years as a social impact organisation has been marked by some important lessons.

Know who you are and why you are here. It goes without saying that our members are the heart and soul of what we do. The privilege of bringing together this network and community drives me and the GSF team – and continues to be at the heart of what we do. Very early on, when I was putting together the first strategy for GSF, one of our member CEOs said that “Setting up schools is hard and lonely work,” and that bringing together a community of like-minded peers doing similar work was long overdue. Those words – and the wider implications around the importance of building and sustaining communities – has in many ways been our lodestar. We build up and out from education practitioners ‘on the front lines’ rather than down and in from donor voices and global institutions, giving us a unique and sometimes unheard perspective.

And our members, like us, are passionate about ensuring that all children have access to quality education. This singular focus has pushed us to ensure that our programmes – Learning & Development; Policy & Partnerships; and Impact & Innovation – are always in the service of our members and the wider education sector. As we grow and iterate our model and explore new avenues, we always come back to whether we remain core to our mission and to our members

Change is the only constant. And yet, we remain comfortable with new directions, failure and taking risks. Not everything we have done to support our members has worked, and not all of our policy initiatives have had the desired result. However, our organisational culture reflects a certain comfort with risk and a strong commitment to continuous improvement. There is no blueprint to the work we do other than a sense of responsibility to our members and to our mission, and as a result, we are comfortable trying new things, innovating with the design of member offers, assessing their impact with our members, and walking away from what does not work. This also means that we are almost always collecting data and inputs on what we do – from our members, from our team, and the wider community to feed into our design.

Find people and organisations that believe in you and your mission. The support I received from our initial supporters was immeasurable. To take a bet on seeding something new, to see the opportunity to grow it, and to provide close and ongoing guidance and mentorship along the way was extremely important for me at the early stages of start-up. For this, I owe immense gratitude to Ark, Omidyar Network (now Imaginable Futures), UBS Optimus Foundation, and Pearson Affordable Learning Fund. Others that came on board along the way have built on that support, whilst continuing to push us to test new ideas and be ambitious about our scale and impact, and include IDP Foundation, Vitol Foundation and Jacobs Foundation.

It takes a village. Another one of our core values is being collaborative, building bridges, and making connections. As much as network organisations require strong supporters, they rely significantly on friends, partners and collaborators. There is way too much duplication and replication in education; hence rather than creating something from scratch that has already been done well, the team at GSF is comfortable in putting our hand out and seeking partnership where we can. Increasingly, partnership for us is working with our members and other organisations based in the global south who have a strong understanding of, and roots to, local communities. Collaborating and learning from organisations like Dignitas, Education Development Trust, Global School Leaders, Hippocampus, Teach for All and T4 has been an incredibly rewarding experience and we will continue to forge ahead to develop new and rewarding partnerships in the coming year.

Patience is a virtue. The last, and perhaps most important lesson, was the importance of taking time and enjoying the ride. Education is a life-long endeavour and requires an investment of time. Building networks as well requires time, trust and shared sense of purpose and values. Putting those things together cannot and should not be rushed. In our initial years, we focused entirely on building our community, and supporting them through our Learning and Development platform. It felt like the right thing to do. We then added our work focused on Policy and Partnerships. And finally, now that we have a shared understanding of our member needs and feel like we are pulling in the same direction, we are launching our work on Impact and Innovation where we harness the innovation that resides within our network, test and iterate those and distil learning to share with the wider education community. Similarly, we have grown our membership mindfully and sensitively to ensure that member growth does not eclipse or come at the expense of community cohesion.

Looking ahead, and with an incredible team and board by my side, I hope the next few years bring new experiences and new lessons. We are excited to explore new directions including the launch of Learning Labs, where we will support and fund our member organisations to test, evaluate and scale educational innovations. We are thinking about how we can support our members to work more effectively and systematically with governments. We will test the viability of establishing regional partnerships in a few geographies where we have a strong cluster of members. And finally, we will begin to design an Accelerator programme to seed and support a new generation of education entrepreneurs. These initiatives are part of our larger vision to scale our work and deepen our impact. While we will continue to grow and support our membership of mission-driven non-state education organisations, we want to also push ourselves to exponentially increase the impact of our work beyond our members to wider education systems.