The Agency Fund

In early 2014, a passionate team of four received funding to adapt and scale a promising trial aimed at reducing new HIV infections among young people in Botswana. Fast forward ten years and Youth Impact has reached more than a million people in 25 countries. They've grown to a team of 400, delivering three powerful programs across health and foundational education, scaled through impactful partnerships, including with the governments of Namibia, South Africa, The Philippines, India and Botswana. As a learning organization, Youth Impact have kept evidence at the heart of all their work, conducting 53 rapid and rigorous RCTs to improve impact and decrease costs. They currently conduct ten trials per year and support other organizations to use their testing methodologies. Happy birthday - here's to another decade🎉 🎥 Watch their full journey here: https://lnkd.in/da9EkH4h

In both policy and research, agency tends to be understood in terms of personal freedom: the absence of social constraints. The problem with this view is that it misses perhaps the most important aspect of human agency, which is that it is built socially. This presents us with a challenging paradox: Though agency manifests in the personal choices that people make, those choices are made possible by social inputs. Even in the face of oppressive social norms, violent institutions, and subjugating inequality, our best hope for building agency may still be the social institutions we can draw on: a peer who provides company, a mentor that provides protection, a coach who helps navigate a challenging path. In a new article in Brookings Future Development, James Walsh and Karla Hoff explore this paradox. 🔗 Read the full blog here: https://lnkd.in/g5bEez9h The Brookings Institution

For development organizations, digital capacity is an essential lever for scale. But evolving the sector’s tech stack requires investing both finance and expertise. As a funder-doer, The Agency Fund can deploy technical staff to support organizations to develop their operations. For example, software engineer Edmund Korley has worked directly with Shamiri Institute to build their Digital Hub, streamlining their back office functions to free up capacity for client-facing work. The next step? Building a multi-tenant SAAS application to make the tech available to other organizations that need it. Hear more from Edmund ⬇️

Riza Santoyo, an informal waste collector in Quezon City, Philippines, used to work seemingly endlessly to feed her children. Not able to afford her own work tools, she relied on a rented bike and cart to transport waste to the junk shop. Things began to shift when Riza joined a program that provided not only business skills support and funding, but also training focused on agency, self-worth, and overcoming limiting beliefs. Now, she works half the time and earns double, allowing her to save and spend quality time with her family. In our latest blog, we spotlight two expert practitioners of agency-based training. Anna Melita B. de Chavez leads the Women in Waste Economic Empowerment (WWEE) program, which supports women like Riza, while Philip Mathew K M directs the livelihood program at India’s Magic Bus India Foundation. In a wide-ranging discussion, Anna and Phillip highlight the essential components of effective agency-focused training: ➡Recruiting trainers who are hungry for change and willing to engage in self-reflection, so they can guide others in doing the same. ➡ Ensuring accessibility by offering stipends to replace lost income and providing amenities like childcare and nursing rooms. ➡ Tailoring training to the specific context of different communities. ➡ Fostering collective agency by creating a strong support network among participants that can endure beyond the training. 🔗 Read the full blog here: https://lnkd.in/gG_TRzPC Have you ever completed training that expanded your agency or self-knowledge? What components made the difference to you? Share your reflections in the comments. 👇 USAID SEE Change Initiative | JHU Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health

Attending the Society for Personality and Social Psychology (SPSP) conference next year? Join the Intervention Science Preconference. The event will dig into the theory and evidence behind groundbreaking interventions, highlight new data, and create opportunities to workshop some of the common challenges affecting intervention research. And in partnership with the organizers, we're delighted to announce a $10k research award for psychological scientists developing innovative research and interventions to expand human agency, particularly for the most marginalized. Applications for the award will open in November, with the winner announced at the pre-conference in Denver. 🔎 Find out more about pre-conferences: https://lnkd.in/d5VYZtHJ

To develop approaches that work in complex contexts, organizations need to continuously test, learn, and adapt. In our latest blog, Strategy Fellow Ishaan Bansal dives into the "test-and-learn" approach that powers user-centered innovation. By centering beneficiaries’ experiences and iterating based on real-time feedback, social sector organizations can make informed decisions that reflect the needs of the communities they support. Using tools like A/B testing, user personas, and journey mapping, plenty of organizations are already uncovering insights that drive real impact—whether it’s improving user engagement, enhancing program retention, or tailoring services to better meet community needs. And as data technology continues to develop, we have the opportunity to do even more. By embedding experimentation and continuous learning, organizations can refine and scale their programs, meeting complex challenges with agility. Testing isn’t just a step in the process; it’s how we achieve some immediate impact while preparing to be even more impactful in future. How are you using “test-and-learn” methods in your work? Read the blog and share your thoughts in the comments. 🔗 Full blog here: https://lnkd.in/g5DeYMp8 Harvard University The Tuck School of Business at Dartmouth

Where Can AI Add Value in Career Development Coaching? 🚀 A new white paper by Sarah Shaw and Abby Lupi evaluates Coach, an AI-powered career tool from CareerVillage.org. While not an RCT, the study offers valuable early signals on how AI can enhance career readiness. ✅ Most learners reported their CVs, cover letters, and interview skills were employment-ready after using Coach. 🧑🎓 In a pilot with Generation.org, 81% found the tool effective for employability coaching. 🤝 90% of participants preferred a mix of AI and human coaching, showing that AI works best alongside mentors—saving time on tasks like resumé writing and freeing mentors to focus on personalized support. Here are some of our takeaways: 1️⃣ AI for Workforce Efficiency: Coach demonstrates that automating tasks like resumé building allows mentors to focus on personalized guidance. This points to AI’s potential to optimize resources and make workforce interventions scalable. 2️⃣ Blended Support as the Future Standard: Learners’ preference for hybrid coaching reflects a trend where AI augments human support, rather than replacing it, positioning AI as a key enabler of deeper, more impactful mentoring. 3️⃣ Adaptive Coaching Through Data: The ability to track mindset changes over time highlights how AI can deliver real-time feedback, refining interventions continuously and tailoring support to individual learners' journeys. 4️⃣ Democratizing Access to Guidance: AI tools like Coach show promise in reducing barriers for underrepresented learners, making career development support more accessible at scale and fostering more equitable workforce outcomes. The insights from Coach offer exciting new directions for AI in career development. To learn more, explore the full paper and join the conversation on the future of career readiness! 🔗 Full paper here: https://lnkd.in/gRwN5CJM

There's a ton of psychological research that tells us people respond better to stories than to raw statistics. When information is presented to us through role models — people like us navigating contexts like ours — we're more likely to take it onboard when we make decisions. But how do we operationalize that knowledge? Supreet Kaur, Associate Professor, Berkeley Economics, University of California, Berkeley, is testing an approach that uses locally-sourced media content in the State of Punjab to boost the efficacy of public health interventions on drug use. Learn more ⬇

In the social sector, we often talk about putting people at the center of development. But how do we design processes that deliver on that promise? In our latest blog, Strategy Fellow Ishaan Bansal explores how user-centered design can fuel successful innovation, by ensuring beneficiaries' needs, experiences and feedback shape key decisions. This drives organizations to grow in ways that genuinely respond to the communities they support. At our recent sprint in Bangalore, we heard from partners who are applying these processes and achieving results, using tools like user personas, journey maps, and A/B testing to drive growth. For instance, when @Rocket Learning tweaked their naming conventions through A/B testing, they boosted user retention by 26%. By embedding user-centered innovation and continued learning, organizations can improve programming as they scale, adapting and iterating to reflect complex real-world needs. Experimentation isn't a box to check—it's how we achieve some impact today while learning to be even more impactful tomorrow. How are you integrating user-focused innovation into your work? Read the full blog here and share your thoughts in the comments: https://lnkd.in/gr89myWh

CLOSING SOON: The Agency Fund open call for grant funding There’s just one week left to respond to our latest open call for applications for grant funding. The closing date is Thursday, October 31st at 11.59PM Pacific Time. We anticipate having at least $1 million in awards available in this round to support exciting and innovative projects that align with our mission and values. We want to hear from you, if you have a project that: ➡ will engage more than 1,000 users ➡ will help people update their beliefs, perspectives, or mental models; and have a way to demonstrate this ➡ will measure outcomes for users, and a comparison group of non-users, to estimate impact ➡ will work to reach over 1 million people by 2030 🔗 Apply here by October 31st: https://lnkd.in/gcUNwVre Know any organizations that should apply? Tag them in the comments. #FundingOpportunity