"Imago Global Grassroots was created to fill what its founders call the “missing middle” in international development. This is the space between large, international organizations that have access to significant resources but whose programs are often not nuanced or specific enough to truly benefit the poor and small grassroots organizations that lack access to sufficient resources, but whose programming is often much more nuanced and effective. Imago looks to be the bridge between these two. It works with smaller grassroot organizations to help them organize themselves internally and eventually to scale. It also works with larger organizations and social enterprises (UN Women, Solar Sister, etc.) on concepts such as adaptive leadership, values-based strategic decision making, and other topics that help them to improve their organizational effectiveness.

While at Imago, I worked on several different projects, both with external clients and internally at Imago: 1) RUDI is a social enterprise created by the Self-Employed Women’s Association (SEWA) in India. It is an agribusiness, processing agricultural goods in Gujarat, and employs a fleet of salespeople that market the goods door-to-door. RUDI ensures equitable pay for actors all along its supply chain and employs solely women. SEWA is currently in the process of scaling the RUDI model to two additional states in India, and Imago is aiding them with the state selection process. I assisted in this, performing some of the data analysis necessary to choose the states, as well as drafting a portion of the report that Imago would send to the donor funding its assistance on the project. 2) Trial and Error Blog: Imago is beginning a new blog series focused on lessons learned in the implementation of international development projects. Along with Hannah Clifford, I helped to pitch the series internally, conducted interviews with four of Imago's client organizations in both English and Spanish, and drafted the initial writeups that will appear on Imago's website. 3) Latin America strategy: IMAGO understands the potential that it has to expand in Latin America, given its innovative model and its ability to deliver its services in Spanish. Therefore, it is looking to concertedly grow its presence in both South and Central America. I assisted with this process by helping the team with an initial landscape analysis of potential clients and partners in Central America (my region of expertise) and helped facilitate the connection of several of my contacts to the Imago team. 4) Business development: Imago is still relatively young, at seven years old, and its team nearly doubled in size in the past year. For this reason, there is now an internal push to update its business development strategy, particularly as it relates to private foundations. Because I have a background working with a private foundation, I volunteered to help Imago to strategize its private foundation engagement strategy and wrote several memos outlining my thoughts and recommendations for the team.

One of the key projects that I worked on this summer, as noted, was the Trial and Error blog series, where we asked Imago's clients to reflect on interventions that they tried, ways that those interventions failed or encountered challenges, and how they adapted. Across the board, the lesson that organizations distilled from their failures was that they need to spend more time understanding and involving the community they are trying to serve. Organizations encountered problems in their participant recruiting strategies, in program implementation, and even in how they measured success, because they did not do this enough. Interviewees realized that for programs to be implemented effectively, community members and participants would need to be intimately involved in all stages of planning — from developing the theory of change through the minutia of implementation. Communities would also need to 1) understand the value of the intervention; 2) justify the time and resources it would take to participate; 3) see that all aspects of program implementation take into account the reality of their context and experiences; and 4) agree with the implementing organization’s definition of “success.” This is something that we talk about a lot in the field of development but still is often not practiced enough due to time and resource pressures on implementing organizations. It was good to have so much time this summer to truly meditate on this necessity, and to sit with so many examples of interventions going off track from shortchanging it.

Another key takeaway I have from the summer centers on the importance of good communication and anticipating possible objections in advance. This came to the fore as my manager, Hannah, and I, were pitching the Trial and Error series. We assumed that leadership would be interested in undertaking such a project, and so, while we put together a deck and presentation to present the idea, we did not spend much time thinking about leadership’s potential objections. This backfired, as there were several. They questioned why organizations would be willing to share their failures with us, when that could bring negative publicity. They asked how this series was distinct from other similar initiatives. And they asked how much time the initiative would take and why Imago should expend resources on it. After the meeting, we went back to the drawing board, carefully thinking through each of their objections and answering them in a second, succinct PowerPoint presentation. The next time that we presented, we had a clearer pitch and one that responded to their objections. After this second presentation, leadership became excited about the project and enthusiastically endorsed it. The learning here was that our team should have spent more time anticipating possible pushback, which could have saved us time and allowed us to begin the project sooner."