Communities of Practice for Effective Partnerships (COPE) Activity

About the Project

The United States Agency for International Development (USAID)-funded Communities of Practice for Effective Partnerships (COPE) Activity is designed to foster south-south cooperation and create a more structured avenue for organizations from Asia and Latin America to come together and use systems thinking to innovate, share, and learn while addressing local development challenges.

COPE is a three-year, $2 million activity implemented by the Consortium led by the Philippines-based Gerry Roxas Foundation. LINC serves as a core resource partner to the activity, providing training, technical assistance, and capacity-strengthening on systems thinking, collective action, communities of practice, and monitoring and evaluation.

The COPE Technical Approach

COPE’s key research question is “can the communities of practice of local organizations be an effective and efficient platform for USAID to engage directly with local actors and communities in their journey to self-reliance?” Over the next three years, LINC and our partners will:

1. Build a community of practice: formalizing a gathering of organizations from Asia and Latin America for a more organized way of growing and learning from and with each other on systems thinking in different socio-cultural contexts.
2. Build digital infrastructures for collaboration: leveraging technology to facilitate collaboration; allowing on-demand access to knowledge to partners.
3. Build a robust monitoring and evaluation system: promoting collaboration, learning, and adapting.
4. Promote capacity development: supporting individual and collective capacity development to address complex, transboundary, and cross-cutting issues.
5. Launch demonstration projects: showing the organizational capacity to utilize systems thinking, the benefits of systems thinking as a technical approach and the value of a community of practice in locally-led development.

LSP Participants

Stemmed from the LINC-led Local Systems Practice Activity

The decision of the organizations to come together and build COPE stemmed from the USAID/Local Works funded research activity Local Systems Practice (LSP), which LINC led from 2017-2020.

LSP assisted USAID Missions and local actors to use systems-based approaches to address complex development challenges. Under LSP, LINC provided training on systems thinking and tools to 25 organizations from nine countries across Asia and Latin America and developed the practical Local Systems User’s Guide.