The Rockefeller Foundation Global Fellowship Programme in Social Innovation was Bertha’s social systems portfolio’s first project. From 2015 - 2017 the Bertha Centre took on the role of lead and fiduciary partner on the fellowship programme which had launched a year before. Over its life-span the Rockefeller Foundation Global Fellowship Programme in Social Innovation supported 3 cohorts of innovators across various sectors, including leaders from NGOs, development agencies, social enterprises, philanthropies, and the private sector. Fellows were nominated from leading development organisations as well as impactful grass-roots social enterprises. The aim of the programme was to strengthen the systems thinking capacities (mindsets, practice and frameworks) of a network of change-agents around the world.

Originally designed by Dr. Frances Westley, then-chair in Social Innovation at the University of Waterloo, the programme was delivered by a dream-team of 4 social innovation centres in Canada, Stockholm and Cape Town: University of Victoria’s Centre for Global Studies, Waterloo University’s Waterloo Institute for Social R and Stockholm University’s Stockholm Resilience Centre.

Over the course of one year, fellows convened for intensive collaborative immersions in Colombia, South Africa, Rwanda, Indonesia, Thailand, New York and Stockholm. Modular and inter-modular content was designed to build fellows’ systems entrepreneurship, where systems entrepreneurship is understood to refer to the combined ability and power for a group or networks of people to influence their system at tipping points so that an innovation can have transformative impact. It was a deep dive (combination of theory and practice) into the seminal systems frameworks of navigating resilience, complexity and socio-ecological systems to bring about sustainable change.

The programme’s theory of change was underpinned by the understanding that success would mean 1. Participants’ individual resilience would be built up; 2. Participants would start diffusing what they learn in their own organisations; and 3. Participants would work with each other and other actors across sectors and scale. In this way the networks and systems of participants would also start to think and act at systems tipping points.

Programmatic conclusions were that systems work takes time, courage, collaboration, diversity, a safe space, experimentation, a common language, individual transformation, coaching and support.

Every learning journey is a co-learning journey and the faculty of the fellowship programme emerged with a deeper understanding of not only what it is to teach systems work, but also a publication on creating transformative space to develop systems sensibilities of working across scale and navigating emergence.

Moreover the international delivery team forged an abiding working relationship on which it would build continued partnership into the future.