Bridging philanthropy & development: June Forum Agenda

Following last week’s Rio + 20 conference on sustainable development, the post-2015 agenda is very much at the centre of the international stage. So our meeting in Bellagio comes at a great time. Bringing together a small group of philanthropists and development actors from across Asia and Africa, we will be exploring how these two groups can work together to achieve sustainable change.

The agenda we’ve put together covers the broader issues affecting sustainable development and philanthropy as well as some more specific questions relating to collaboration, innovation and risk.

We’ll begin by introducing some of the key questions which will provide context to the discussions throughout the rest of the forum and inviting the participants to share their own experiences on the types of issues they focus on, how we might place more emphasis on investing in organisations rather than individual projects in the future and what philanthropy looks like in an interdependent world, where many development issues are borderless.

We’ll then move on to look at examples where collaboration between philanthropists and development entities has worked well and reflect on why these examples succeeded. We’ll also look at what we can learn from examples that didn’t work so well. By the end of these discussions we aim to develop a list of factors that influence the success of collaborations.

During the first afternoon, we also have a debate planned to address the question of who is driving the development agenda. We aim to provoke a lively discussion on who is setting the agenda, the relevance of such an agenda for philanthropists and whether we need a global case for support for development. Social innovation systems will also be examined, considering what they might look like and how such systems could be scaled.

The first day will end with a short presentation on the critical issues in risk and philanthropy. It will highlightsome of the key findings from the paper on risk and philanthropy we commissioned following the Bellagio Summit, which is published today.

The second day will take an in depth look at the critical issues in risk and philanthropy, picking up on some of the issues emerging from the report. We’ll be encouraging the group to come up with recommendations on reducing operational and impact risks. By the end of the forum, we hope to have a more concrete idea about what it would take to support people so that they can learn from the successes and failures of others and scale up the fundamental idea of our forum to give others the same experience.

We’ll keep you up to date as the discussions evolve and will really welcome your own perspectives and questions on these issues in the comments below and via Twitter and Facebook.