Analysis, Adaptation and Innovation Workgroups

One of the self-sustainability strategies that development initiatives have come up with is appointing teams specifically tasked with analyzing their projects’ self-sustainability and suggesting adaptations and innovations to increase it.

In general, when development initiatives put their development plans, designs and models into practice they encounter unexpected circumstances, both positive and negative. After all, it is impossible to prevent everything. This is why many projects come up with spaces or mechanisms to adapt their plans at different stages of the process, and some of them appoint work groups especially focused on monitoring, taking care of and favoring the conditions needed to remain as self-sustainable as possible. Some of the functions of these teams may include:

1. Helping evaluate the initiative’s progress and giving feedback by organizing meetings to discuss new ideas and proposals with their colleagues to better approach self-sustainability strategies.
2. Either defining the possible roles (creator of demonstration models, incubator, fundraising and crowdfunding hub, etc.) and profiles (non-profit organization, social enterprise, hybrid organization, etc.) that the initiative should adopt to be as self-sustainable as possible, or evaluating whether the role and profile that the initiative currently holds are the most convenient to achieve its objectives. 
3. Innovating on the initiative’s model in order to better adapt and improve with the support of others’ suggestions and experiences, or testing out solutions with pilot projects or surveys.
4. Suggesting ideas to better integrate the initiative’s different programs or areas so that they can support one another and share their human, infrastructure or financial resources.
5. Identifying participants, relationships, resources, infrastructure and funding sources available to the project.
6. Detecting challenges that could make the initiative less self-sustainable in the present or in the future and coming up with appropriate measures to tackle them. 
7. Monitoring dependence on merely one or a few sources of funding and suggesting strategies to expand and diversify sources of support.
8. Assessing that resources are managed in ways that foster self-sustainability.
9. Monitoring how comprehensive, equitable and relevant to all the initiative’s work is and what can be done to increase these elements of self-sustainability (by conducting evaluations or designing mechanisms to receive feedback from the different stakeholders, for instance).

To make use of teams of this nature, some initiatives hire external auditors on a temporary basis. Others request studies or evaluations from experts. Still others appoint and train part of their staff to take on these tasks either exclusively or from time to time.