Call for Applications
‍Implementation Partner: Impact Model & Assesement Development

Over the past year, the Collaborative’s Learning Team has developed a plan for how to create the impact model and the approach to understanding the Collaborative’s impact. This plan reflects deep engagement with the literature and practice of complexity-aware evaluation, dialogue with members and partners, and collective reflection on what would be most useful and meaningful for the Collaborative at this stage of its development. We now need an experienced, thoughtful implementation partner to help us bring this to life. The implementation partner will be joining a process that already has substantial grounding and momentum.

The core challenge is one that few have solved well: how do you develop a meaningful, credible impact model and measurement system for a collaborative of 27 diverse organisations — each with their own theory of change, working on different aspects of complex systems, across multiple geographies, levels, and timescales — when systemic change is emergent, non-linear, and fundamentally unpredictable – and as we work through a portfolio approach?

This is not a request to design a framework from scratch. There is already substantial grounding: significant contextual knowledge within the Learning Team, member-level theories of change, and a clear orientation towards learning-led, adaptive approaches to impact. What we need is a skilled partner to work through this with us — helping us navigate the genuinely difficult questions, facilitating the process of building shared understanding across a diverse group of stakeholders, and supporting the development of an approach that is both rigorous and alive.
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Scope of Work

The implementation partner will work closely with the Learning Team to develop the impact model and approach to understanding the Collaborative’s impact. This is a collaborative, co-creative engagement — the implementation partner is not being hired to deliver a finished product in isolation, but to work alongside the Learning Team as a skilled thought partner and process facilitator.

While the specific shape of the work will be co-designed with the Learning Team, we anticipate that it will involve most or all of the following:

Understanding the existing content:
- Deep engagement with existing work: the Learning Team’s plan and strategy, individual member theories of change and impact models, existing data and evidence frameworks, and relevant external literature and practice.
- Conversations with Learning Team members and selected Collaborative members to understand perspectives, priorities, and concerns about the impact model.

Supporting the development of the impact model:
- Facilitating a process through which the diverse perspectives and theories of change of 27-plus Implementing Partners — each with their own approach, context, and definition of success — can be understood, integrated, and synthesised into a coherent collective impact model for the Collaborative as a whole.
- Helping the Learning Team and wider Collaborative navigate genuinely difficult questions about contribution, aggregation, and what it means to claim collective impact in a context of complex, emergent systems change.
- Supporting the development of a portfolio-level impact framework that can hold the diversity of the Collaborative’s work while providing enough coherence and shared language to enable collective sensemaking, adaptive management, and credible external communication.

Designing the measurement and learning approach:
- Working with the Learning Team to develop a practical, adaptive approach to impact measurement and learning that is suited to the Collaborative’s context — one that supports ongoing learning and course correction, not just retrospective accountability.
- Helping to identify what data, evidence, and sensemaking processes are needed, at what levels of the portfolio, and how these can be sustained over time.
- Advising on methods and tools that are appropriate for the complexity of the Collaborative’s work, including participatory, qualitative, and arts-based approaches alongside more quantitative methods.

Building shared ownership:
- Supporting a process through which the impact model and measurement approach are genuinely owned by the Partners so that they can function as a living, adaptive tool for the Collaborative rather than an external compliance requirement.

What are we looking for?