Learning Communities & Conferences
Many foundations and nonprofits have embraced learning communities as a key approach for helping their grantees and clients to increase effectiveness and improve outcomes. BWB provides a structured, research-informed approach to learning communities that accelerates practitioner learning and social impact through peer exchange. It’s based on the reality that skilled practitioners improve their craft most effectively through well-designed peer exchange focused on real, pressing challenges. Our approach also emphasizes building a trusting relationship among practitioners, so that they feel comfortable sharing both what’s working well and what’s not, and experimenting with new approaches with their peers.
BWB Solutions has decades of experience in managing learning communities. Specific skills and experiences we bring to our clients include:
Learning Community design and facilitation. We help you determine the key outcomes you want for participants and how best to achieve those within a limited budget.
Structuring learning environments. We work to structure a range of learning environments to meet the needs of different types of learners, including in-person large and small groups, case studies and training sessions, webinars, and shared online resources.
Conference and site tour planning and logistics. We work closely with you to choose the conference venues and site visit locations which will create the right environment for the learning to occur.
Hotel and vendor management. We provide a one-stop shopping experience for our clients, managing all hotel and vendor contracts and payments, and ensuring that the learning community events are high quality, on time and on budget.
Examples of past work:
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BWB Solutions is currently the logistics partner for the Citi Foundation for their Community Progress Makers Initiative. The Initiative provides 50 grantees with $1 million in unrestricted funding over three years. In addition, the Foundation also engages its grantees in a three-year learning community. We manage all the learning community logistics, including 8 in-person conferences, 20 webinars, a newsletter and an online repository of information.
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BWB Solutions has designed and facilitated the annual Peer Group Meeting for CDVCA for more than 20 years. This meeting brings together senior managers of Community Development Venture Capital funds for a day and half of intensive in-person discussion. The Peer Group Meeting follows an “open space” model, in which the content is determined entirely by the participants, and there are no presentations by outside experts. Instead, the event provides the space for participants to engage each other in deep dialogue about challenges they are finding most pressing now, and sharing experiences that can help each other improve their practice.