What is Collaborative Inquiry?

Collaborative inquiry creates learning partnerships among grantmakers, grantees, and consultant researchers or evaluators to build useful knowledge from practice. The approach draws from diverse disciplines, including participatory action research, organizational development, and adult learning theory.

Key characteristics include: a candid, collegial relationship among participants, where no one is the exlusive "expert", an early commitment to working together on formulating the questions to be answered, an open process of implementation and evaluation, and a shared belief that diverse experience and ideas advance learning.

The process includes: agreeing on key questions, meeting in learning groups, receiving training and expert assistance, making site visits to see one another's work, conducting research and data analysis, study the capacity of ones own organization, and publishing findings in a report/sharing.

Takeaways are critical, bite-sized resources either excerpted from our guides or written by Candid Learning for Funders using the guide's research data or themes post-publication. Attribution is given if the takeaway is a quotation.

This takeaway was derived from Learning Together.