Course Description

Multi-stakeholder partnerships (MSPs) are an essential approach to delivering the Sustainable Development Goals, maximizing humanitarian assistance, and building resilience within communities. While the work of MSPs is complex, their success or failure can often be attributed to a single root cause: how well they engage the people and communities whose lives they aim to improve.

To help MSPs achieve real, sustainable impact, we’ve assembled this playbook of powerful, inclusive strategies to turn ‘beneficiaries’ into partners. Through these approaches you should be able to design better, more context-appropriate, and more innovative programs, develop stronger local buy-in and leverage a range of local resources towards delivering more, and more sustainable, impact.

This course goes beyond presenting general good practice. In each lesson, you will find case studies of programs that are successfully (and sometimes unsuccessfully!) working with communities, assessment questions that analyze your MSP’s strengths and weaknesses on your own metrics dashboard, tools you can bring to your next meeting, and an interactive action planning tool where you can plan for the future.

Course supported by:

Course Topics:

• Expand your network by uncovering new community-based stakeholders
• Maximize the impact of your MSP’s investments
• Cultivate balanced, equitable relationships among stakeholders
• Create new mechanisms that enhance your accountability to affected communities
• Develop a continuous improvement plan for your MSP

Who Should Take This Course?

The course is for all those wanting to increase the impact of their MSPs through stronger engagement with people and communities. It will suit individuals with some experience of partnering, who are currently in or interested in joining an MSP that aims for on-the-ground impact, either as part of a secretariat, or representing one of the partners. Participants should be sufficiently senior and positioned to be able to influence the course of the partnership or their own organization, either directly, or through supporting a senior colleague, or champion to do so.

Certification

The University is a non-degree, diploma or credit granting initiative. Philanthropy U, Inc. is the concept developer and sponsor of the initiative. Learners are not entitled to earn college or other academic credit.

Learners are eligible to receive a Certificate of Achievement for this course. To earn a Certificate of Achievement for this course, you need to earn more than 50% of possible points on quizzes and assignments to obtain a passing grade. Quizzes are worth 15% of your total score, while assignments are worth 85%.

All use, reproduction and distribution of content in this course is subject to a CC-BY-3.0 license.