Level 6 Challenge: A Sustainable Volunteering System
This challenge measures your ability to integrate advanced leadership concepts: strategy, partnerships, governance, and accountability — in scenarios reflecting real field complexity.
- Length
- 55 min
- modules
- 5
- questions
- 18
- Pass mark
- 70%
Sign in so your progress is saved and you receive a certificate.
Requirements
🔒 This course is locked
Finish the required course above and this one opens.
Course information
- Level
- 6
- Difficulty
- Advanced
- Length
- 55 min
- modules
- 5
- questions
- 18
- Pass mark
- 70%
- Language
- Arabic / English
- Certificate
- Certificate of completion on passing
Who this is for
- Anyone who has finished the Level 6 courses
- Community organisation leaders
- Anyone wanting to test building an integrated volunteering system
What you get
- A certificate with a public verification code
- The course recorded on your profile
- Credit towards your volunteer journey
What you will learn
Course contents
Strategy and organisational decision-making
Strategic leadership does not mean making all decisions — it means making the right decisions at the right time with the right information.
At Level 6 of the Takaful programme, you are in a leadership position combining the organisation's vision with its operational details. The skill required is not just knowing the principles — but the ability to apply them when pressures intertwine: an insistent funder, a withdrawing partner, a field crisis demanding a decision within hours, and a team needing clear leadership. This challenge presents composite scenarios from the three Level 6 elements: partnerships, governance and accountability, and strategic decision-making. Each question has a context requiring analysis — not just rule recall.
Question 1
Your organisation faces a strategic choice: geographic expansion to a new area or deepening work in your current area. Your main funder prefers expansion. The field team prefers deepening. The budget does not allow both. How do you decide?
Question 2
Two weeks ago a core programme ended and nine employees' contracts will expire within a month. You have no funding for renewal. The CFO proposes extending contracts from reserves. What is the correct procedure?
Question 3
Your longest-standing partner in your area is expanding their scope to include services previously exclusive to your organisation. Is this a threat or an opportunity?
Question 13
What does this situation reveal and what must you do?
You sent a senior trainer from your team to lead a training-of-trainers programme in four partner organisations. Six months later, only one of the four is actively applying what they learned. The trainer says: "We trained them — the responsibility is theirs now."
Question 14
When should you start transition planning?
Your main programme will end in eighteen months when the donor exits. Eighty percent of your staff work exclusively on this programme. There is no confirmed alternative funding yet.
Governance crises: decisions under pressure
Good governance is not tested in quiet days — but when a funder's request contradicts institutional policy, and when authorities conflict at the wrong time.
Governance crises rarely announce themselves clearly — they come in the form of requests that seem reasonable, decisions that seem urgent, and pressures that seem unavoidable. The key is recognising them as governance crises before they become PR or legal crises. Three common types: (1) A funder requesting to bypass an internal procedure "exceptionally" citing urgency — and every urgency will be exceptional once you accept. (2) A board member intervening in operational decisions that should remain with the executive director. (3) A senior employee executing an unauthorised agreement on the basis of "I'll inform the board later."
Question 4
A funder requests disbursing a large payment before signing the formal agreement "because the fiscal year-end is approaching." What do you do?
Question 5
The board chair gives direct instructions to a programme manager that bypass your authority as executive director. How do you handle this?
Question 6
You discover a programme manager signed a $20,000 service agreement without authorisation — "because the opportunity would have been missed." What do you do?
Question 15
What is your position?
A junior staff member submits a formal complaint about a board member's behaviour during a field visit. The board chair asks you to handle the matter "discreetly" without involving the full board.
Partnerships in critical situations
A partnership successful in ordinary days is no guarantee of its performance in crisis. The real test comes when partners' interests conflict at a critical moment.
At Level 6, you manage multiple partnerships simultaneously and handle conflicts between partnership requirements and governance requirements. A common example: a partner requesting beneficiary data under the guise of "joint support" — but beneficiary data is restricted by the data protection policy. Or a funder threatening to withdraw funding if you enter a partnership with an organisation they consider a competitor. These situations require a decision balancing the relationship, the policy, and the principle — and this is exactly what this module prepares you for.
Question 7
A partner requests a list of beneficiary names and numbers in your shared area "to coordinate intervention." What is your position?
Question 8
Your main funder conditions no partnership with a specific organisation. This organisation is the most suitable to meet a specific community need. What is your decision?
Question 16
What is your response?
You are running a training-of-trainers programme in partnership with three organisations. During the training, one partner organisation begins recruiting your trained trainers with offers of higher salaries. There are no clauses prohibiting this in the partnership agreement.
Leadership accountability: when you are the one responsible
Leadership means accountability not only for what you do — but for what your team and partners do in the name of your organisation.
One of the hardest aspects of leadership accountability is bearing responsibility for decisions you did not personally make — but that affected your organisation or beneficiaries. The executive director is accountable to the board for the team's performance. The board is accountable to the community for the organisation's performance. This cascading responsibility is not reduced by pointing to others. Deep leadership accountability means: when a problem occurs, the first question is not "who is to blame?" but "what created the condition that enabled this problem?" — and working on that.
Question 9
An employee on your team mistreated a beneficiary. You were not present. The beneficiary wants compensation and threatens a public complaint. What is your first position?
Question 10
After an internal investigation, you find that the employee's error partly arose from absence of adequate training you were responsible for providing. What are the steps?
Question 17
What does this situation reveal about your leadership approach and what must happen now?
After three years of building a community volunteer network, you are about to transition to a new role. The network has no documented processes, no succession plan, and everything runs on informal personal relationships. Your successor will find no handover materials.
Integrated scenarios
A good leadership decision is rarely clear-cut — it requires integrating multiple principles at once.
Previous modules presented each principle separately — strategy, governance, partnership, accountability. In reality, these principles intertwine and sometimes conflict. The seasoned executive director knows that the issue is not applying one principle — but finding the decision that maximises commitment to the total of principles given available resources and time. The following two questions present compound scenarios where considerations intertwine.
Question 11
Your funder offers conditional funding renewal: add a new component (vocational training) not in your strategic plan and your team has no expertise in it. Refusal means losing the current funding portion too. How do you think about this decision?
Question 12
In a board meeting, a member proposes a partnership with a private company with positive impact. You later learn this member has a financial interest in the company and did not declare it. What do you do?
Question 18
How do you approach this offer?
A donor proposes funding a five-year expansion of your programme, conditional on: (a) reducing your board from nine to five members, and (b) granting the donor observer status at all board meetings. Both conditions are new and have not been discussed with the board.
Finish the course
You answered 0 of 18 questions
Answer every question before finishing.
Standards this content is built on
- • IFRC — Leadership in Humanitarian Organisations: Standards and Practice
- • Accountable Now — Leading for Accountability: A Framework for Senior Leaders
- • CIVICUS — Advanced Governance in Civil Society: Case Studies