Grantee Summit 2024: Agency & Flourishing

May 31, 2024

The Rising Tide Foundation (RTF) hosted its second grantee summit in May. Over four days, we welcomed over 45 grantees from 15 countries to Schloss Marbach on the picturesque shores of Lake Constance. Beyond sparking collaborations, inviting grantees to share best practices, and creating a marketplace to promote the ideas of freedom, the theme underlying the summit was “Agency and Flourishing.”

The summit kicked off with the official launch of the RTF’s Agency and Flourishing Initiative, which seeks to open discussions and promote projects that enhance the mindsets, skills, and freedoms by which individuals can live life on their own terms. We also launched a call for proposals for projects focused on agency and flourishing, and announced our latest collaborative grant program that allows existing grantees to come together and launch new innovative projects.

After these announcements, the event was primarily grantee-driven. Over a dozen grantees gave ‘input speeches’ to discuss how their organization utilizes innovative approaches in the areas of human agency, technology and data, or evaluating success. The grantees spent ample time participating in co-creation around diverse topics, such as effective communication, evaluation and measurement, building a movement around agency, and how to measure agency and flourishing. Thanks to RTF grantee Sky Films Inc., participants also attended an exclusive screening of the new documentary film She Rises Up. The summit wrapped up with the grantees taking a boat down the mighty Rhine, visiting the RTF offices, and dining at the historic Burg Hohenkligen.

The summit strengthened existing connections and created new ones, gave attendees a deeper insight into the work we all do as a community, and aligned grantees with our new Agency and Flourishing Initiative. The summit has already sparked several new collaborative projects between our grantees and gave us at RTF numerous actionable items to help better support the community. Watch this space!