In-between: a moment with GPPAC and Propel
When you hear a team member say “wow, that’s amazing” while exploring their Propel space, you know you’re onto something.
We wrapped up our tour with a visit to GPPAC in The Hague. GPPAC is a member-led peacebuilding network, connecting more than 250 civil society organisations worldwide.
Why learning matters for them
Peacebuilding depends on people learning from each other. New knowledge is generated every day across countries, communities and teams. For a network like GPPAC, this means finding ways to make sure lessons don’t get lost but are shared and used to strengthen peacebuilding efforts everywhere.
We often hear that teams work in silos and that the value of integrating learning as a natural element of the work is often not clear to everyone, especially when they are presented with an excel sheet of lines and lines of lessons learned without context. The reality is that a lot of knowledge lives in different places. For GPPAC that also means that currently it can be hard to build on what’s already known, spot patterns or adapt when things change. Insights risk staying hidden instead of inspiring new ideas and actions.
GPPAC’s team is tackling this head-on, looking at where learning happens, how it flows and who needs to use it. So, in this session, we were in a room with policy advocacy, communications, fundraising and PMEAL and it showed where Propel comes in. Walking through the shared space together, created a real Aha-moment how organisational learning can come together and should function as a learning ecosystem, connecting all parts of the system.
Hence, for GPPAC, we are together setting up a shared space where lessons from local peacebuilders feed into global strategies and back again. Learning becomes a living resource: easy to find, easy to share, useful for daily work and big decisions alike. Or as someone said during the session:
“Imagine you can consolidate everything happening on youth-led peace processes across the network and see it here - mic drop.”
What we’re working on
As GPPAC strengthens its learning approach, Propel is there from the start. It’s not an extra tool bolted on afterwards but part of the way learning is captured and used. One person summed it up well:
“If you were doing this manually, you’d need several people to do this.”
How we’re doing it
Propel connects to real use cases: communication, fundraising, policy advocacy, monitoring and learning. It helps capture experiences and stories in a structured, systematic and continuous way, so that the right people can find the right insights when they need them.
We started by setting up the space with existing data and documented experiences from reports. Reflection sessions are now feeding in fresh insights. As learning questions roll out and teams move into implementation, Propel will grow with them and reach more teams and partners.
In the end, GPPAC’s Propel space will serve the network as the go-to place to connect knowledge, experience and lessons where the network can find what has been done before, see what worked, learn from others and avoid repeating mistakes. So that no one needs to start from scratch, but instead, can see what is already being done in related topics or other contexts and build on it.
Looking ahead
We’re also working on what comes next. Our partners’ shape what comes next. One clear request is to show trends and patterns over time: what has been learned, how practices have changed, what worked and what didn’t, where behaviour shifted.
GPPAC’s ideas shape how Propel will do that based on what they need, such as helping them connect local action to wider impact and provide evidence when talking to partners, donors or the UN. It also feeds into stronger communication and advocacy. At the same time, the team reminded us to be mindful of AI’s environmental footprint. We take this seriously and always build Propel with care and responsibility.
We will now build on this momentum to show how learning can bring the work of all together and it just clicks. It’s time to stop thinking of MEAL as a parallel system, and rather, the space where it all comes together.
So, that gives us the homework on what to work on next for Propel. Stay tuned if you want to see how you can explore what your organisation is learning and how you can use collective intelligence for greater impact. The time is now.
