“PEAK Grantmaking has always been dedicated to creating communities for grants professionals to embrace our Learn, Share, Evolve Principle. As PEAK looks to its next chapter, we want to leverage our existing peer network structures in new ways to better foster a learning community that embraces and advances adaptive learning processes, and we also want to inspire our members to utilize this approach inside their own organizations. PEAK sees the concepts and practices of emergent learning as a natural fit to advance our work around our Principles for Peak Grantmaking in powerful new ways. Now is the time to define the concepts, qualities, and practices of emergent learning, and how we envision operationalizing it throughout our community and in the sector at large.”
“Perhaps most importantly, emergent learning helps us move away from the idea, advanced by dominant culture, that learning is time-limited, formal, written down, and driven by a select few who have preset our learning destination. Instead, emergent learning prescribes an ongoing journey where learning is dynamic and driven by the evolving needs of the individual, the community, the organization, and the sector. It is also driven by the mindset that learning is iterative and that lived experience matters, opening the door for knowledge to be sourced from different sectors, functions, and issue areas. It moves us away from a paradigm that limits us—where knowledge is power, held tightly, and shared deliberately, usually as a result of a financial transaction—to a liberated and democratized approach where knowledge is shared intentionally and freely. We move from learning that focuses on the individual to learning that embraces multiple voices and sets us all on a journey to authentically and effectively change the world!”
The key qualities and practices they list are:
1. Curiosity
2. Transparency
3. Diversity
4. Vulnerability
5. Collaboration