Six Insights on Organizational Learning

Examining how we learn as individuals and organizations is a key to evolving grantmaking practices to be more effective and equitable. Here, we’ve compiled highlights from our content library to help you advance your organizational learning and leadership. Backed by the experience and expertise of members of the PEAK community and staff, these articles provide practical and actionable strategies to transform your organization’s culture, build resiliency for challenging times, showcase the stories behind your data, and more.

If you’d like to take a deeper dive into organizational learning, click here to access our complete collection of stories.

How to Become a Change Leader

This article by PEAK Senior Knowledge and Learning Director Lita Ugarte Pardi explores how anyone—regardless of title or role—can become a change leader in their organization. “A change leader’s role is not to suggest the ‘best’ ideas or unilaterally implement shifts in practice,” writes Pardi. “Their role is to weave together an inclusive, proactive, and flexible approach that unites their organization in a common vision for a better future.” READ MORE

Four Foundational Building Blocks for Culture

What does it take to build an organization that not only values justice, inclusion, and equity but actively incorporates these principles at every level of its operation? Jackie Hanselmann Sergi of Radical Spark Consulting shares the four building blocks you can use to create an organizational culture with safe spaces where curiosity, compassion, and a sense of purpose can thrive.

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Five Data Storytelling Strategies to Foster Learning

At PEAK2024, Pivot Data Design’s Jennifer Marsack led a workshop where she shared strategies for turning data into engaging dialogues, equipping your organization and its partners with the skills to communicate impact effectively. This post highlights top strategies to transform mundane data into compelling narratives for a variety of audiences from your team and grant partners to senior leaders and board members. READ MORE

How Centering Equity Deepened Cross-Team Collaboration

In this article from The Superpowers of Grants Professionals issue of the Journal, Sarah Small and Anna Ostroushko of Margaret A. Cargill Philanthropies share how cross-functional collaboration enabled them to strengthen grantmaking change efforts, foster internal trust and transparency, and build a culture of equity, compassion and inclusion. READ MORE

Creating New Beginnings Together 

Here, Daniel Weinzveg, founder of The Meeting Guru, shares how strengthening our TQ, or transition intelligence quotient, may be the missing key to weathering ongoing, overlapping, high-tension change. He explores five phases of building your TQ. “When we skip or race through any of these phases, however, we miss crucial learning opportunities,” he writes. “And if we don’t learn them this time, rest assured they’ll come around again. And again. But there are ways to resiliently meet these moments in our professional and personal lives.” READ MORE

Evolving Requires Avoiding the Traps of Ignoring, Hoarding, and Stagnating

In this article from the Learn, Share, Evolve issue of the Journal, Janet Camarena of Candid explores how you can operationalize PEAK’s Learn, Share, Evolve Principle by examining their opposites: ignoring, hoarding and stagnating. With actionable tips and visual guides, this piece can help you identify where your organization might be falling short—and the strategies you can take to create change. READ MORE