Dear colleagues,
We are pleased to share with you Newsletter 29 of the Scaling Community of Practice (SCoP). This Newsletter provides you with summaries of our very successful 2024 Annual Forum on 11-26 March. The 12 virtual sessions covered a wide array of issues and experiences with presentations by 54 panelists from 51 organizations. A total of 1008 participants from 386 organizations in 77 countries joined in lively exchanges. The summaries can also be found on the SCoP website as the Proceedings from the 2024 Annual Forum. Videos and slides for the 12 sessions can be found here. Highlights of the three plenary sessions of the 2024 Annual Forum include: The presentation of preliminary findings from the SCoP’s ongoing Initiative on Mainstreaming Scaling in Funder Organizations, for which we have now posted 12 case studies of funder partners’ mainstreaming experience. An interim synthesis report is under preparation and will be posted on the SCoP website later in May. The launch of an outstanding new book on scaling by Isabel Guerrero and her colleagues. Isabel has been a member and supporter of the SCoP from its inception and is co-chair of the SCoP’s Working Group on Social Enterprises. The presentation and discussion of the SCoP’s new Strategy 2024-2033, which presents a long-term vision and pathway for the SCoP’s networking, knowledge and advocacy agenda. Beyond the plenaries, as you will see from the attached Forum summaries, there was much, much more substance covered in the sectoral and thematic working group sessions and we recommend that you take a look. We want to take this opportunity to thank all the organizers of the working group sessions and the excellent panelists who devoted their precious time to share their experience and insights. We also thank the MSI team that valiantly managed the technical aspects of the twelve virtual sessions. One of the new features of this Annual Forum was the media partnership which we were able to forge between Devex, the international development news organization, and the SCoP. As a result, we gained much wider recognition of the event and of the SCoP and its important agenda. We also can report that the SCoP’s 32-member Executive Committee in a recent meeting endorsed our proposal that we look for a host organization to take the SCoP under its wings as of next year. We are currently in conversation with various potential hosts and will report in our next newsletter about progress in this regard. We believe this step will be important for sustaining the SCoP well into the future. As always, we welcome your suggestions related to the Newsletter and, more generally, on the SCoP and the working groups. And, of course, we are grateful for your support in making the SCoP a success for all of us. In our next newsletter we will return to our practice of reporting on activities of SCoP members and look forward to your input in due course.
With many thanks for your participation in the CoP,
Larry Cooley, MSI, and Johannes Linn, Brookings
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