Building Cross-Border Water Collaboration Through a Funder-Enabled Network
The Challenge
Water challenges, from infrastructure resilience to effective governance, require action across borders, sectors, and issue areas. Yet organizations working on water stewardship and governance often operate in silos, missing opportunities to learn from one another, scale solutions, and amplify their collective impact. The BHP Foundation recognized that addressing North America’s most pressing water challenges would require more than funding individual projects. It made a different bet: bring four grantees with distinct missions, geographies, and approaches into a shared network where they could learn together, adapt strategies in the open, and influence the broader water sector as a group.
Our Role
Ross Strategic serves as the convening partner for the BHP Foundation‘s North American Water Network, a four-year, cross-border initiative bringing together four grantee partners, the Centre for Indigenous Environmental Resources, International Institute for Sustainable Development, Duke University’s Internet of Water Coalition, and the Pacific Institute, as a community of practice working on water governance, natural infrastructure, water data, and water stewardship across the United States and Canada. Since 2023, we have designed and facilitated the Network’s in-person gatherings in Winnipeg, Montréal, and Vancouver, along with quarterly virtual calls and informal partner coffee chats. We are planning its final gathering in June 2027.
We create structured opportunities for partners to engage in collaborative problem-solving, exchange challenges and strategies, and identify pathways for scaling solutions. Our approach emphasizes peer-led learning, open discussion of setbacks and power dynamics, and building trust across organizations with different missions and regional focuses. We have led partner capacity-building sessions on facilitation and difficult conversations, curated outside expertise in response to partner priorities on topics from Canadian federal water policy to data center water and energy demand, and worked with partners over three years to develop a shared approach to impact measurement. Our convening reports from the Network’s gatherings in Winnipeg (2024) and Montréal (2025) capture key insights, shared learning, and next steps for the collaboration.
The Impact
The Water Network has become a model for funder-enabled collaboration, demonstrating how strategic convening can amplify individual efforts into field-level impact. Partners report that the Network provides rare space for deep peer learning, helping them refine strategies in real time and avoid duplicating efforts. Topics first raised in virtual sessions, including scaling, impact measurement, and communications, have become threads partners return to and build on across years, bringing back what they tested in their own organizations.
When the Foundation introduced collaboration grants in the Network’s third year, Ross Strategic coordinated the resulting joint projects, including a cross-border learning effort connecting U.S. water data policy experience to the Canada Water Agency’s review of the Canada Water Act. Partners have also reshaped how they think about scale, moving from replication toward transfer, adaptation, and deepening, grounded in how their work actually spreads. In 2026, partners presented the Network as a case study in trust-based philanthropy at the Philanthropic Foundations Canada conference. As the Network approaches its close, partners are carrying stronger facilitation and convening capabilities into their own work. By fostering trust, facilitating knowledge exchange, and creating pathways for partners to influence the broader water sector, the Network illustrates how thoughtful convening can transform isolated initiatives into coordinated, systems-level change.