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After eight years, I am leaving Porticus. From January 2025, I'll be starting a new chapter - working in a freelance capacity to support systems change efforts through strong learning, evaluation and strategy. Having worked with the amazing Porticus UK team for the first four years, I moved to Amsterdam in 2020 to work in the central strategy and learning team, supporting colleagues around the globe to embed strategy, evaluation and learning in their work. I loved this work. I learned a huge amount about social justice, and about how philanthropy can most effectively support the many fights for change needed today. I will miss the passion and commitment of so many people I feel privileged to work with - too many to name here. One of the pieces of work I am most proud of is the design and introduction of a new practice of learning between Porticus and its partner grantees, ending the burden of written reporting. I will always appreciate my colleagues’ appetite for innovation and to living out their values with this work. Getting rid of reporting may sound radical, but static reporting about what happened and what was done doesn’t fit with a systems change approach. If we trust our grantee partners, let’s focus on working and learning with them, about what matters. Reporting about outputs, activities, actual spend vs anticipated spend, will not help us shift systems. Learning together about what’s changing, why, how, and how can we adjust or adapt as a result of this insight and learning, in real time, will. As I leave Porticus, I will be taking this approach to learning with me. And as I do so, I would like to urge the philanthropy sector to challenge itself and explore how the systems we use for evaluation, learning and reporting can be made more fit for purpose for system change, less burdensome and more equitable. Here is a reflection piece I’ve written about why this learning practice. I offer this as a personal reflection and share it in the hope that more foundations and funders will think about doing their reporting differently - and ideally, not doing reporting at all…