Welcome

Dear colleagues and friends,

I am delighted to share Keystone’s first public report for the period since Keystone’s creation to July 2009. Its main purposes are to describe what we do and to report what we think we have achieved over our first five years.

The report has three main parts. The first is this main report, Keystone Accountability 2004-2009 - Constituency voice: linking the means and the ends of social change. It reviews the state of constituency voice in the sector and offers an overview of Keystone’s journey till today.

The second part presents the results from an online survey of our constituents. What you told us: the 2009 Keystone Constituency Survey Report is a summary of our constituents’ views on how we are doing. We also included the principal survey findings in the main report.

The third part is the Keystone Results Ledger, which is our chronological record of results that we collect from our day-to-day work. This is an important internal tracking and learning document for Keystone. We plan to publish it once a year to enable others to see how we experience our work results.

We did not want this report to be only, or even mainly, about Keystone. We want it to shine a light on what we are most passionate about: constituency voice. The first sections of the report are about the state of constituency voice in social change organizations today. They show, regrettably, that constituency voice is currently more an aspiration than an ethic or a practice.

Keystone, working with many of you, is developing and testing the practical ways and tools to turn this aspiration into practice. We have learned that to realize constituency voice one needs to be systematic, embedding right practices at each and every stage of the typical operational cycle of planning, implementing, monitoring, assessing, and public reporting. One needs to put the views of the people most affected by your work at the heart of the way you work. One needs to learn with one’s constituents. Among other things, best practice involves measuring the quality of those and other important relationships, and publishing those measures.

We have tried to exemplify these principles in this public report.  Please let us know how we can do this better ourselves. For this purpose, we have a comment function embedded on each page of the report on our website.

Please also let us know in what other ways we might work with you to promote constituency voice, and to meet our greatest threats – extreme poverty and environmental disaster.

With best wishes for our common future,

David Bonbright

Co-Founder and Chief Executive

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