**4.2 Step two: getting the organization ready for sustainability**

Once members of the organization have understanding and could envision the future of their organization, the next task towards sustainability is getting ready for sustainability. The assumption essentially here is that in order for organizations to start the transition towards sustainability, they need to be strong enough to manage change [4, 5]. As such, activities at this stage involve gauging the readiness of the organization for sustainability using sustainability assessment tools. These tools take the organization through a detailed examination of its current efficiency and performance across all its activities and management processes. Of paramount importance at this stage is to ensure that the assessment is conducted as an organization wide process, with everyone (e.g. staff, management and board) fully involved, rather than a Director/MD/CEO conducting the assessment in isolation ([4, 5, 18] etc.). In this way, the whole team builds consensus on strengths and areas for learning and strengthening. Also, it is helpful at this stage to focus on helping

the organization to recognize the difference between practices that "maintain" and those which "sustain" an organization. Often, good practices may already be in place. However, with a completely different understanding of sustainability owing to activities at this stage, the organizations can readily enhance its practices and performance [4, 18]. The sustainability assessment may, for example, reveal that the organization is ready to implement a sustainability strategy or there may be areas where strengthening or additional capacity may be required, and this gives the entire organization an opportunity to come together and jointly agree on the optimal ways to move forward. Again, it is vital that leadership and staff work together to build these organizational foundations and prepare as a team for the new journey.

#### **4.3 Step three: planning for sustainability**

The next exciting stage after the necessary preparatory activities is to start planning for sustainability. The activities at this stage include providing staff and stakeholders training to support strategic planning skills, knowledge of needs assessment and logic model construction, leadership skills and fundraising expertise [7, 15, 18, 22]. Owing to the activity-oriented nature of operations at this stage, peer relationships and support networks are encouraged, which the organization can continue and retain for shared learning in the long term. These help to create the opportunity for members of the organization to plan their sustainability strategies, generate a supportive atmosphere where participants can share, learn and plan jointly, and build supportive relationships that allow the organization to compare learning and winning strategies as they work alongside each other. The activities here also help to introduce members to new skill sets and ways of thinking and realizing sustainability.

Six key activities are undertaken as part of the planning process [3]. These include: integrating sustainability aspects into project activities [13, 19]; developing communication and outreach strategy; involving key stakeholders in programmes development [4, 20, 22]; diversifying funding sources [11, 12]; creating inventory of resources [5, 15]; and using donor databases [11, 12, 15]. Concerning integration of sustainability aspects into programme of activities, it is always advisable to integrate sustainability aspects in projects right from the beginning as this helps to develop partnerships and relations with relevant stakeholders at an early stage of project development. This also ensures that once the primary funding for project activities terminates the organization has a strong support to continue its activities into the future. In a similar vein, developing a strong communication strategy is essential at this stage to achieve three key purposes. First, to ensure that project results can be shared with a large audience. Second, to ensure that the organization puts in place a well-documented project results that helps in getting support from a range of stakeholders and donors. Third, this serves to avoid last minute rush of donor search.

Another major step towards sustainability planning at this stage, and as intimated earlier, is stakeholder involvement in programme development. This can be done in several ways, but as part of the project planning activities, a multi-stakeholder dialog workshop can be initiated to seek the involvement and participation of relevant people and agencies in the programme of activities of the organization. Stakeholder involvement and participation is key in maintaining, sustaining and institutionalizing the organization's missions, programme objectives and operations. The most important aspect of planning for sustainability at this stage is to diversify the organization's funding sources or donor-base, and to develop long term partnerships with donors to support the organization's activities. As the success of the organization at securing financial sustainability, for example, depends on partnerships developed with corporate organizations, local institutions

#### *Addressing Sustainability Planning in Higher Education Research DOI: http://dx.doi.org/10.5772/intechopen.93589*

and individuals, the advice always is not to focus on traditional donor agencies but explore new opportunities as well. Another useful way to plan for sustainability, particularly at this stage is to create and keep an inventory of all physical, material and human resources that the organization can make use of after its activities or project ends. This helps the organization to know in advance the resources it would need moving into the future. In this way, the organization gets to use some devices and equipment (such as training modules, camera, recorder, furniture for a school etc.) purchased during specific programme of activities even after the grant for such activities expire. Lastly, and on the part of using donor databases as an activity in sustainability planning, the advice always has been to enlist a few donors from the organization's donor database who are likely to fund its project or programme of activities and to keep in touch with such agencies so that they are aware about the organization's existence and its activities.

### **4.4 Step four: implementing the sustainability plan**

Once the organization is able to develop, finalize and assess its sustainability plans, the next step is for it to commence implementation of its sustainability plan. The essence of finalizing and assessing the plans before commencing implementation is to allow for decisions and/or arrangements for technical support for implementation that probably may be needed. But essentially, the activities at this stage in the sustainability planning process involves putting into use or implementing the plans developed to ensure that an organization's mission, programmes of activities and resources continue to exist after its funding regimes elapse. In practice, it is a generally acceptable practice for an organization's sustainability plan to outlive or transcend project proposal development and submission processes. This is particularly the case since the organization may well commence implementation of its sustainability plans even before a proposal is developed to source funding from donor agencies to get or keep its operations sustainable.

In sum, it needs to be foregrounded that while the illustration in this article treats sustainability planning in the form of steps, it is not to be considered that the approach is compartmentalized into discrete components or stages. The processes and steps involved in sustainability planning are fluid and therefore in practice flow easily into each other.
