Our Strategic Pathways
Is organised into four Strategic Pathways, each of which aims to produce a range of critical outcomes, and contribute to significant and lasting impact.
These pathways are not only interconnected but also complement and strengthen one another in our mission.
It’s important to recognise that the progression from Pathway 1 to Pathway 2, and finally to Pathway 3, is not always a straightforward journey. While some contexts may allow for this linear progression, our approach is far more dynamic. We aim to advance along these pathways in a manner that is most responsive to the needs of the communities we serve, seeking out opportunities for meaningful progress and establishing a solid foundation for sustainable impact.
Decisions on where to focus our efforts are informed by the invaluable insights and analyses of local rights holders, ensuring that our actions are deeply rooted in the realities of the contexts we engage with.
Pathway 4 is dedicated to innovation for impact, ensuring that Positive Vibes continually evolves as a creative, agile, and enduring agent of change, enhancing our effectiveness through Pathways 1 to 3.
Strategic Pathway 1
Vibrant Movements
Rightsholders’ movements foster community and cultivate change
Strategic Pathway 2
Accountable Systems & Services
Local, national, regional, and global systems and services are more accountable, inclusive, responsive, rights-based and effective
Strategic Pathway 3
Just Policies & Laws
Policy and law reform address othering at national level, and beyond
Strategic Pathway 4
Innovation for Impact
Sustaining, developing & strengthening Positive Vibes
Strategic Pathway 1
Rightsholders’ movements foster community and cultivate change
STRATEGIC PATHWAY 1 – cultivates and works to strengthen inclusive, well-coordinated movements whose members can improve their constituencies’ lives and contribute to lasting change in their local and national contexts.
We do this by:
- Building long-term relationships with partners (local leaders and organisations) who work to realise othered people’s rights
- Creating spaces for rightsholders to convene
- Facilitating processes that enable rightsholders to find common ground, think together, and collaborate
- Sharing methods and approaches, such as the LILO suite of methods, which help to strengthen rightsholders as individuals, social actors and supports their mental health and wellbeing.
- Accompanying organisations’ and movements’ work over time, including developing and implementing joint strategies and approaches together
- Learning together, including documenting and publishing evidence which fuels our joint advocacy agendas
- Building active, self-sustaining communities of practice and action (online and in-person)
- Helping to resource partners’ work though ethical grant-making
Strategic Pathway 2
Local, national, regional, and global systems and services are more accountable, inclusive, responsive, rights-based and effective
STRATEGIC PATHWAY 2 – enables rightsholders to hold duty bearers to account and to be part of the process of making policies and services work better for them and their constituencies.
We do this by:
- Directly supporting community-led monitoring processes (transferring methods and tools; cofacilitating where necessary; coordinating; financing)
- Accompanying partners as they advocate for local change
- Transferring methods and approaches for cultivating accountability to partners and movements
- Documenting outcomes from local processes and synthesising evidence for wider influence at national, regional or global level
- Tracking progress towards milestones, so we can steer the work effectively
- Sharing knowledge from these processes widely
- Engaging with key influencers to advocate for change, in particular engaging with global donors and powerful development actors to encourage them to institute reforms in policy implementation and service delivery over which they have significant influence
- Keeping community accountability on the agenda in all our engagements with stakeholders
- Finally, strategic litigation could form part of this pathway – if legal rights to services are denied or key policies are implemented (or fail to be implemented) in deleterious ways, and all other avenues to change have been exhausted
Strategic Pathway 3
Policy and law reform address othering at national level, and beyond
STRATEGIC PATHWAY 3 – is about making space for justice – for fair treatment within legal and policy frameworks that enable our constituencies to survive and thrive.
We do this by:
- Stimulating and supporting greater interest in human rights, ethics and the law amongst marginalised rightsholders
- Strengthening rightsholder movement’s legal, policy and rights literacy to enable more robust engagement with these issues
- Collaborating with partners to craft goals and strategies at national level, and accompanying partners as they advocate for local policy change, or law reform, or hold their governments to account for implementing global treaties and agreements
- Packaging evidence and advocacy agendas from Pathways 1 and 2 for use with policymakers and key influencers – and sharing these with strategic partners
- Exploring a variety of approaches to advocacy, including strategic litigation, expanding provisions and protections in current laws, expanding definitions of standing, and supporting the introduction of new bills
- Influencing investments and funding flows by showcasing promising and effective practices, innovations, and solutions
- Foregrounding our evidence and joint advocacy positions at national, regional and global forums (conferences, donor meetings, etc.)
Strategic Pathway 4
Sustaining, developing & strengthening Positive Vibes
STRATEGIC PATHWAY 4 – aims to ensure that the vehicle for all our work – our organisation – remains fit for purpose and capable of cutting-edge work and innovation.
We do this by:
- Always designing programmes for sustainability: rightsholder leaders, organisations and networks build new knowledge, connections, skills and capacity within themselves and their wider movements, and together make lasting impacts on policy and practice – these shifts are sustained beyond the life of specific programmes
- Continuing to explore and develop our approach to ethical grant making for movement building and impact
- Caring for and developing our own human capacity (board of trustees, staff and associates) and expanding our strong, creative team at a carefully managed pace
- Continuing to refine our conceptual and practical competencies (for example, deepening our shared understanding of feminist and intersectional approaches; cultivating a shared approach to working in consortia)
- Developing and innovating new methodologies
- Adopting efficient and sustainable ways of working to reduce our carbon footprint and the environmental impact of our work
- Integrating the use of technology more deeply into all of our work, especially in relation to communication, knowledge creation and dissemination, and influencing
- Strengthening our approach and practice around external communication to position PV for greater visibility and influence
- Consciously positioning ourselves as a global contributor that offers co-created solutions to global developmental problems
- Refining our business and sustainability model
- Attracting appropriate financing and partnerships that allow us to amplify impact