People at a conference

Transitional arrangements to support governing, coordinating and funding for collective impact

Overview

We are working within a collective-impact approach, which is hard and often requires difficult conversations as we move towards a ‘new equilibrium.’ The hallmarks of this approach are: 1) a common agenda, including the sectoral hubs, regional hubs, open data system, and living inventory of AI-enabled digital evidence synthesis tools; 2) a shared measurement system in the form of our planned monitoring evaluation and learning infrastructure; 3) mutually reinforcing activities within and across our community of communities; and 4) continuous communications via this website, newsletters and events; and 5) backbone support, initially via the Wellcome Trust and later via the future global secretariat to be based in the Global South.

On 21 September 2025, the Funder executive announced three transitional arrangements to support this collective-impact approach (from late 2025 through 2026):

  1. Steering group
  2. Communities council
  3. Funder interest group (FIG) executive, or Funder executive for short.

Terms of reference have been created for each group. These transitional arrangements will be periodically re-evaluated, with the first re-evaluation taking place in the July to September 2026 period.

The Communities council is comprised of leaders of groups with ‘skin in the game’ – key interest-holder representatives and newly named ESIC infrastructure leaders – who will help us ‘strategically coordinate for collective impact.’ Two of the ‘peak bodies’ representing broad groups of interest-holder representatives have been funded by the Wellcome Trust:

  1. Global SDG Synthesis Coalition, which has an ongoing grant to support the many contributions of the coalition to ESIC
  2. Building a Global Evidence Synthesis Community, which held (via Cochrane) a now-completed grant to support the ESIC planning process, which took place from January through June 2025 (and the outputs from which can be found on the Documents webpage).

Key parts of the ESIC infrastructure have been funded by a grant from the Economic and Social Research Council to a consortium called METIUS.