Field Building
Building on our legacy of transforming nuclear weapons policy, Ploughshares embarked on a field building effort in 2022 to help strengthen the nuclear field.
Ploughshares works with and across different parts of the nuclear field that seek to combat nuclear weapons threats by limiting, reducing the number of, or eliminating nuclear weapons including through arms control, nonproliferation, disarmament, and abolition. This field is inclusive of civil society broadly and includes advocates, impacted communities, thought leaders, activists, academics, funders, and others. It has close connections to other fields, such as conflict resolution, social justice, the environment, and peacebuilding. It is international in scope, though currently much of Ploughshares’ grantmaking and partnership is US- focused.
What is Field Building
A field is a set of individuals and organizations working to address a common social issue or problem.
Field building is the activities or investments that drive a field’s progress toward impact at scale. This can include strengthening things such as connectivity, adaptive capacity, the range of capacities the field can deploy, the diversity and composition of the field, the resources supporting the field, and reach into other issue areas/networks. It often also includes alignment around a larger, longer term common agenda; as well as making visible, thoughtfully addressing, and working within power dynamics of the field. For this field, it also means strengthening institutions — from pipeline issues to building healthy work cultures to supporting organizational sustainability.
Field building is not the work of any one organization. Rather, it is advanced through a whole-of-field approach, with coordinated action from a range of individuals and institutions. For Ploughshares, this is an organization-wide effort, which builds on and is centered in our Equity Rises work, and connects closely to our grantmaking strategy.
Ploughshares’ field building efforts are centered on:
- Providing supportive services to the field
- Providing capacity building and innovative strategies
- Actively convening and engaging our partners including through new processes and strategic approaches
- Providing flexible funding that allows organizations to invest in their health and pivot as the policy environment changes
Through this work, we hope to support the field to be:
- Welcoming and inclusive
- Collaborative, instead of competitive
- Resourced at a level that facilitates progress and policy wins
- Responsive and adaptive, able to shift together to achieve greater impact
