Some of the most important things a network builds are also the hardest to measure.
At WINGSForum in Montreal, Alianza received the inaugural WINGS Ecosystem Builder Award (WEBA) in the Connections category.
It was, of course, a joyful moment. An award gives you something tangible to hold, a photograph to take, and a reason to celebrate with people you have worked alongside for years.
But what made this recognition especially meaningful was what it chose to recognize: connections.
The WINGS Ecosystem Builder Awards were created to recognize organizations that strengthen philanthropy through relationships, knowledge, infrastructure, collaboration, and the systems that allow the sector to work more effectively. Alianza was recognized specifically for connecting socio-environmental funds across the Global South through collaboration, shared learning, and collective action.
That framing resonated with us because so much of what holds a network together is difficult to capture in a report. We can count meetings, projects, participants, and activities. We can document what happened and where. But numbers and lists rarely capture what people actually take away from those moments: the insights, ideas, questions, and connections that emerge along the way. They certainly do not capture the effort of joining a conversation from different time zones, sometimes as far apart as UTC-7 and UTC+9.
Networks begin with conviction
Strong philanthropy ecosystems rarely begin with a blank page. They already contain relationships, institutions, knowledge, and leadership that have been built over decades, often far from the places where philanthropy traditionally looks for expertise.
The story of Alianza itself reflects this. The funds that came together to create the network already had years, and in some cases decades, of experience accompanying communities, moving resources through locally rooted mechanisms, building trust in their territories, and learning from practice.
What brings organizations like these into a network is a strong conviction that what they have learned matters, that others are working toward similar visions in different places, and that coming together can expand the knowledge, relationships, and possibilities available to everyone involved.
The work of a network is to connect and strengthen those threads around shared values without flattening the distinct histories, contexts, and ways of working that give each one its strength. When organizations recognize that others are working toward a similar vision, they can share what they know, test new approaches, and build on one another’s experience.
That is part of what a network can do.
The infrastructure we do not always see
Philanthropy talks frequently about where resources should go. It speaks less often about the infrastructure that allows those resources, ideas, relationships, and knowledge to move well.
The inaugural WEBAs put that kind of work at the center. WINGS describes ecosystem builders as part of the infrastructure that can make philanthropy more local, resilient, and collaborative over time.
So receiving this award also means recognizing that, as infrastructure, Alianza is built by many.
It includes the Executive Coordination, which keeps the network moving day by day: nurturing relationships, making space for exchange, supporting collective processes, and connecting people and ideas. Much of this is the less visible work that allows everything else to happen.
It includes the member funds, which move resources to communities and whose experience, knowledge, political vision, and locally rooted work give the network its substance.
It also includes the communities and movements they accompany, peer networks, Indigenous Peoples, youth and feminist organizations, traditional communities, funding partners, and many allies who have helped expand what locally rooted philanthropy can look like across the Global South.
That is why receiving the Connections Award felt so fitting. It recognized something that is central to Alianza precisely because it happens all the time: monthly member meetings, working groups and communities of practice, WhatsApp groups, conversations that continue long after a formal agenda ends, lessons carried from one territory to another, introductions that open new doors, and the trust to ask for help, try something together, or simply stay present when another member needs support.
These are not ordinary things. They are part of how a network becomes capable of doing more than any of its members could do alone.
We are deeply grateful to WINGS for this recognition, and for being such an important catalyst and partner throughout this journey. We are equally grateful to every member fund, partner, supporter, ally, and friend who has invested time, trust, ideas, resources, and care in Alianza.
Five years in, we are proud of how much has been built together and aware of how much more there is to do. There is a lot behind us now. And much more still ahead.
