Planning for Organizational Influence on Epilepsy Stigma

Abstract

ROW Foundation is a funding focused 501(c)(3) private foundation that relies on successful domestic and international partnerships to reach people with epilepsy in LMICs. As those partners have identified stigma as a barrier to their projects, ROW recognizes an opportunity to help equip their partners to address stigma or to better identify potential partners with existing stigma strategies. This project explored three sources of data (document analysis, survey data, and semi-structured interviews) collected from ROW Foundation, ROW's current partners, and experts in the field to answer the project questions. Overall, three major themes emerged from the inductive and deductive coding process that may help ROW improve their ability to influence interventions aimed at stigma mitigation: 1) listening to partners and influencing interventions, 2) collecting and organizing data, 3) leveraging reputation among funders. Recommendations were developed and implementation strategies were suggested based off the findings.