Swiss CoopStarter
Tropos
von Emily Elsner
Organisational learning for adaptation, resilience and impact
Welches Problem / gesellschaftliche Herausforderung möchtest du / möchtet ihr lösen?
Organisations are often set up to address issues in society or in society's relationship with the environment. Many of these are non-profits or social enterprises, some are for-profit. However, they all share a need: to collect knowledge about the effects of their actions, and to use that knowledge to do more, or do things better - to deliver 'impact', or change in a situation. Yet many organisations, especially those which are early-stage or non-profit, lack the resources (financial and staff) and skills to effectively collect and use knowledge that they generate for growing their impact - even when this would materially benefit them in terms of resource use. This leads to a gap between claims about their impact made by organisations, and what they actually do - either because their impact is less than desired, or because they cannot provide evidence for e.g. funders and partners, that would allow them to grow and expand their work.
Wie möchtest du / möchtet ihr vorgehen, um das Problem zu lösen?
Tropos is a new organisation that seeks to address this gap through delivering services both for a fee and pro-bono, focused around building organisational capacity to collect data on impact, and to use that data internally (to help with strategy, decision-making, expansion amongst other things) and externally (for communications, partnership building, etc.). In addition, Tropos seeks to collect learnings and lessons that are often lost when organisations close down projects, or close down entirely - by collecting these, and encouraging young, innovative organisations to document and share their experiences, Tropos intends to contribute to the social innovation field by preventing and avoiding repetition of errors, and encouraging a learning mindset in all organisations.
Wie soll sich das Unternehmen finanzieren?
We are currently looking to generate income from: - workshops for organisations interested in generally improving their knowledge on these topics - consultation with individual organisations or projects on diverse themes - grant funding for specific research projects on organisational development and impact
Wo hat das Team seine Kernkompetenzen?*
We combine our expertise in biology, ecology, history, philosophy and art to support social innovation projects as they grow - their evolution from insight to impact. Emily Elsner has a background in research (she holds a PhD in Human Geography) and a career in NGO management. Impact measurement - its design and application - has become a passion, driven by the needs of social innovation projects and the demands of society and the environment. Katalin Hausel has gained 3 Masters degrees (in history, in philosophy, and in fine art) over the years. As a dedicated discipline-roamer and paradigm-shifter, she has been exploring how to craft situations, tools and spaces for transformation and learning, on individual, organisational and societal levels.
Wie weit bist du / seid ihr in der Entwicklung des Projektes?
Early-stage - we've been working together on the concept over the last 6 months. However, the discussion about legal form always caused an issue - we love the non-profit concept, but concede that it does not fit that well with offering consulting services. Yet, a for-profit model is against our general principles, and has a bad reputation with many of the sorts of projects that we'd like to work with. A cooperative organisation would fit well with our expectation that Tropos will be a growing community of experts (we are already talking to 2-3 independent consultants who are keen to join forces, and bring different skills). We love the model of Guerilla Media Collective and see this fitting well with our diverse domestic and professional situations: https://wiki.guerrillamediacollective.org/ We have written a position paper, and will start looking for ways to share our ideas and seek for income in January 2021.
Warum möchtest du / möchtet ihr beim «Swiss CoopStarter» mitmachen?
We want to learn about what it takes to create and run a cooperative, and ensure that our project gets a strong start. Running organisations is a challenge, we've both set up and managed non-profits over the years, and know that support at the start is crucial to create a good working environment and a team that can deliver despite the uncertainty of early stage work. We're also keen to see what the Programme can offer us by way of publicity and visibility
Warum willst du / wollt ihr die Genossenschaftsform für das Projekt wählen?
Our latest thinking is a cooperative that is restricted in its membership to a few experts - at least whilst we create a community around our work. We'd like to become a centre for expertise in all aspects of evaluation, impact measurement and organisational development.
Was möchtest du über Genossenschaften wissen?
- How to set it up properly - How to manage a small but dynamic team within a cooperative context - we've done team management in many contexts, but not cooperatives, and imagine there must be some best-practices and common mistakes - How to leverage the cooperative legal form as part of sales and pitches
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