How Our Partnerships Work
All our partnerships are based on the values of openness and transparency, respect and trust, integrity, accountability, and a commitment to joint reflection and learning.
We choose our partners carefully, based on three key principles that guide our strategy:
- Our partners must be focussed on issues that are relatively underaddressed.
- Their work must create long-term benefits for children at the project and seek to create further benefit for other children in the future.
- Finally, they must be willing to work with others and share their learning.
Through giving feedback, encouraging reflection and analysis, and providing formal training opportunities, COTA helps our partners develop skills in areas such as project planning, fundraising, financial management and monitoring and evaluation.
Helping a partner become stronger does not happen overnight. For this reason, COTA generally signs partnership agreements for a minimum of three years. This helps to provide the financial stability a partner needs to develop their work and plan for the future sustainability of their organisation. It also provides the time necessary for us to learn from each others' work.
We conduct regular reviews of all our partnerships to make sure that they are meeting the needs of our partners and the children they work with, and fulfilling COTA's objectives.
As part of our commitment to building the strength of our partner organisations, we expect to reach a point where partners can flourish without continued financial support from COTA. So one aim of our partnership reviews is to ensure that no organisation becomes entirely dependent on our funding and is managing to diversify its sources of support.
We constantly seek to learn as much as we can about organisations working with vulnerable children in Colombia and, when our resources allow, to form new partnerships.
Promoting Mutual Learning
Through our partnerships with many Colombian NGOs, we aim to facilitate the exchange of ideas and experience, so that partner organisations - including COTA itself - can learn from each other and become more effective in supporting vulnerable children.
What are our partners talking about? Find out here.
