The provision of infrastructure, community-building, and resources for learning across the field and among grantees was a major feature of the monitoring, evaluation and learning (MEL) support that the Open Society Foundations’ Economic Justice Program offered its grantees.
The EJP team provided opportunities for peer learning, with grantees leading, co-creating or facilitating; the aim was to seed opportunities and connections for peer-led learning rather than dictate it. Importantly, this approach aimed to demonstrate the wealth of existing MEL expertise within grantees and build muscles for skills and knowledge transfers between them.
In addition to investing in peer learning resources for its grantees, EJP sought to strengthen MEL for the larger social and economic justice field, recognizing that many of the challenges OSF and its partners faced in measuring economic justice were also experienced by the larger community. EJP primarily did this through a specially designated ‘Enhancing Impact’ portfolio that provided a range of grants and funded research, evaluation, and the development of missing tools and resources most often cited by grantees.
This series features resources for peer learning and economic justice field learning as a whole.