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Short-term contract

UAF A&P’s ORGANISATIONAL REVIEW AND STRATEGIC PLANNING FOR 2024-2029

In its fifth year of operations, UAF A&P is keen to undertake an organisational review of its journey and growth as the only feminist rapid response fund working across Asia and the Pacific. The review’s insights, learnings, and recommendations will inform the five-year strategic planning process that the fund wishes to undertake to guide its organisational journey from 2024-2029. We hope to invest and engage in a process that offers clarity, collective enthusiasm, ownership and co- responsibility among staff, Board and other key stakeholders in the UAF A&P ecosystem about these priorities.

Towards this, we seek proposals from a team of contractors who can hold space, curate conversations and lead UAF A&P through the review and strategic planning process through 2023.

About the fund:

UAF A&P supports the resilience and resistance of movements led by women and non-binary activists in Asia and the Pacific by co-creating a safe environment for them to sustain their work and thrive. Guided by feminist values, individuals, organisations, and their communities are provided urgent grants and strategic support to strengthen their safety and well-being. Our mission is to resource the resilience of women and non-binary human rights defenders by strengthening and sustaining their networks of support and webs of safety and care. As a fund, we began grant- making in 2018, and to date have re-distributed over 4mn dollars to human rights activists, communities, and collectives across more than 25 countries of Asia and Pacific. Our strategies are multi-faceted and linked to a transformative agenda of achieving social justice, building a solidarity economy and re-imagining cultures, including the culture of giving in Asia and the Pacific.

What we seek from the review:

• Devise an evaluation of how we have progressed against our organisational learning question “What will it take to support the resilience and thriving of women and non- binary activists in Asia and the Pacific, and create a safe and caring environment that sustains their work?”
• Generate a collective assessment from UAF A&P’s core ecosystem comprising of its advisors, board members; donors; grantees; other allied women’s funds, including UAF sister funds; and team members.
• Draft a document that will serve as the reference and background for the strategic planning process that will follow the review

Our vision for the 5-year strategic planning:

UAF A&P wishes the planning process to be a collaborative, participatory process that includes a methodology that makes the best use of our biggest knowledge base – our team members; our grantees, current and past; advisors; board members; and our partners and sister funds. The process must result in:

• A progressive and flexible feminist map for 2024-2029 that sets out a context analysis of our work; and lessons we learnt from our review that we will take forward to response to intersectional crises and opportunities human rights defenders and their communities confront.
• An articulation of our core feminist values that will continue to be our guiding light as we face conflicts, crises, and other intersectional difficulties; and opportunities to forge resilience by focusing on thriving and creating new futures.
• An elaboration on our core strategies that will help the team to expand or contract as needed during moments of opportunities or crisis as needed.

What kind of an approach do we seek?

UAF A&P commits to be intentional in its approach to strategic planning: this process should help us to define the conditions we need to cultivate to ensure we are able to flexibly respond and reimagine the needs of our staff, the individuals, and communities we support. Our monitoring, evaluation, accountability and learning approach is anchored in the Emergent Learning approach that is true to our feminist values and ways of working. We would like the chosen contractors to use methodologies that align with and complement our MEAL approach.

We are keen to continue to mount our new strategic plan for 2024-2029 on an approach akin to a bamboo scaffolding that gives us room to bend and bow with changing winds of the times ahead. We seek to be responsive and adaptive to changing civil, economic, cultural, and political conditions and funding opportunities by harnessing the collective wisdom of our ecosystem. We seek to strengthen our collaborations and draw strength from collective action.

Some core principles to the approach we would like the contractors to adapt are:

• We pay attention to learning from the past, current realities and future visions for the sake of moving towards collective vision

• Flexibility - to accommodate individuals’ schedules, contextual changes, and time zone differences

• “Just enough” strategy will include most vital elements to clarify the direction of travel and conditions needed for UAF A&P, but will encourage flexibility rather than rigidity

• Change is constant, and so any strategy must be designed to support reflexivity and adaptation

• Conversations between stakeholders are needed to learn lessons, share understanding and develop new ideas collectively

• Learning is at the center, so there are no failures, but rather learning processes and insights are valued and integrated into strategy

This is a carefully paced process, rooted in deepening trust between different people/teams in the UAF ecosystem.

Timeline: UAF A&P Board and team are convening in February 2023, and we would like the review processes to kick off at the meeting there.

We hope to align the timelines of the review and strategic planning sub-processes to the various convenings and meetings that members of our ecosystem will be at, along with finding virtual spaces to convene online for brainstorming, and consensus building. The contractors will be guided and advised by an advisory group comprising of UAF A&P staff members and board members along with the Co-Leads. While the timelines can be mutually agreed by the selected team of contractors and UAF A&P, we desire the reflective review to be concluded by May 2023, and for the strategy setting and writing processes to commence by June 2023. Discussions for this phase should ideally coincide with our annual staff reflection huddles that are scheduled usually in July-August every year.

How to apply?

We seek a team of contractors with:

• Supporting skills and experience to develop methodologies, facilitate conversations and steer convenings through 2023 to conclude a review of our journey so far.
• Research and analytical skills to conduct a multi-stakeholder study in person and virtually will be essential
• Past experience of facilitating and authoring organisational strategic planning and ability to divine the current needs and capabilities of UAF A&P and forecast our growth and expansion, and build a broad and flexible plan that supports our experimentation and creative approach.

We are looking for a team of two or more contractors with a range of diverse skills to support us through 2023 through the two key organisational processes of the review and strategic planning. If interested, please write to us with a proposal of how your team will carry out these distinct but interconnected projects, brief bios of your lead contractor and supporting contractors, a brief note on your skills and compatible work undertaken previously. As stated earlier, we are keen to seek proposals from contractors who have previously worked with feminist funds on programmatic reviews and strategy planning.

Please also include the professional fees with a break-up of the number of days required for the design, facilitation and drafting of the review and strategic plan.

Please send in your expressions of interest on or before 15 January 2023 to info@uafanp.org with the subject line “Proposal for Organisational Review and Strategic Planning Facilitation”.