DEEPER DIVE Into PRACTICE OF PANDO FUNDING

Hello! This is a Pando Funding deep dive; one of several concepts where we dig deeper into a critical aspect of Pando Funding. To explore why we believe it matters and to share what we’ve learned while leading the New Capitalism Project, a US-based system change network to transform the economic system so that it works for all people and the planet. These deeper dives are offered as tools to help you adapt Pando Funding to your context – to animate Pando Funding as a shared, living practice rather than a fixed model.    

Building Root Enabling Conditions

Pando Funding exists to support organizations working together within a network to transform a complex system. But collaboration at this scale doesn’t happen automatically. It requires investment in and deliberate nurturing of the root enabling conditions—the trust, structures, shared understanding and visioning that make collective strategy, learning, and action possible.

The root enabling conditions for system health are the invisible infrastructure that transforms a collection of individual organizations into a living, breathing system change network. These conditions are what make network-level work possible, that are aligned with and additional to members’ individual work.

And because Pando Funding exists to fuel networks purpose-built for systems-level outcomes, these enabling conditions are not a “nice to have”—they’re a must-build and central to the work of shifting systems.

They are also reciprocal. Pando Funding makes these conditions visible and investable—especially to capital holders. And when funded well, these conditions in turn strengthen all aspects of the network: projects, outcomes, learning, governance, coordination, and ultimately, impact.

A healthy system change network consistently invests in root enabling conditions:

  • Trusting relationships among diverse system actors

  • A shared understanding of the system and its dynamics

  • Alignment around key drivers of system health

  • Fast and intentional information flows and learning

  • Capacity for adaptation, innovation, and cross-pollination

  • Smarter capital allocation and resource coordination

  • Strong backbone support to sustain the network over time

These conditions don’t arise spontaneously. They require skilled stewardship, strategic investment, and long-term care. Fortunately, there is a rich tradition of tools and practices for doing just that. But even with all this know-how, three things are often missing—and Pando Funding is designed to provide them:

  1. Investment in network stewards: Enabling conditions require time, energy, and leadership. They are relational and happen in the space between organizations. Pando Funding ensures sufficient capital for the people and teams holding the network’s structures and programs over time--provisioning the development of root enabling conditions that leaders are not incentivized nor resourced to drive on their own.

  2. Support for deep engagement by members: If network leaders are expected to show up "off the sides of their desks," these enabling conditions won’t take root. Pando provides the necessary support—financial, relational, symbolic—to make meaningful participation possible. It makes visible the often invisible (and unpaid) work of operating as a node in an action-oriented system change network — and provides the capacity required for a leader to operate beyond the single organization.

  3. Funding cluster projects and ongoing learning:  The enabling conditions are strengthened when they are used for shifting a system. Funding work on the system, by members working in clusters, strengthens the enabling conditions in invaluable ways; and the learning and adaptation that comes from cluster work regenerates the network and its value to members.

Root enabling conditions don’t show up in traditional logic models. You can’t easily draw a line from “more trust” to “systems change. But we know the reverse is true: without trust, shared purpose, and learning infrastructure, intentionally shifting a system for the better remains out of reach. Pando Funding helps make this invisible work visible—especially to capital holders—and treats it as an essential intervention.

Guideposts in Practice

Seeing the ROOT Enabling Conditions for System Health as Field Infrastructure

Since its inception, the New Capitalism Project (NCP) has focused on what’s possible when you invest in infrastructure for field-level mobilization. Rather than lock-in a rigid plan or model, we invested in deep relationship-building, development of an evolving shared vision, and collaborative strategy-making among economic change leaders. These are often overlooked but critical forms of what we consider as infrastructure investment. We followed the energy of the collective—while staying grounded in our aim: to support more coherent, connected, and transformative action.

What emerged is what we now call the NCP Stack—a set of interconnected, co-created assets that reflects the root enabling conditions for system health. Here are some top-line lessons from building those conditions:

  • Root enabling conditions evolve together. Trust made shared visioning possible; and the process of strategy-making deepened that trust. NCP focused on the full set of root enabling conditions and how the relationships among them made more possible. It’s not enough to just focus on one condition and think you’re good to go--like a one-time convening to build trust, or one gathering to pen a shared vision.  Like roots of any living system, those of a network must be nurtured and reinforce each other over time.

  • Root enabling conditions are shaped by context. Catalytic moments--like the COVID-19 pandemic and racial justice uprisings--created urgency and possibility for NCP shifting how leaders showed up and what they were ready to do together. Recognizing the impact of changing contexts is critical. This is adaptation in action.

  • Root enabling conditions require long-term investment and commitment. The NCP Stack is the result of several years of intentional network building, field leadership, and multi-phase funder support. It didn’t follow a strict blueprint—but channeled a shared willingness to explore, adapt, and build together over time. Capital must be along for this journey.

Pando Funding recognizes shared narrative as a form of capital: a collectively held, evolving sense of purpose that coordinates diverse actors without central command. As NCP has shown, narrative coherence is not a byproduct of collective action—it is a critical infrastructure that enables field-scale sense-making, coherence and trust.

GUIDING QUESTION

What’s happening outside the network that is making it easier for those in the network to collectively invest in the root enabling conditions? How can you “ride this wave?”

Each deeper dive offers a guiding question, as a jumping off point for exploring a particular aspect of Pando Funding in your own work and context.