The Institute for Health Leadership is the learning and development arm of the Zuellig Family Foundation.  Known as ZFF Institute (ZFFI), it has always served as the resource center for developing Bridging Leadership (BL) products, conducting training activities, and ensuring the quality of training programs rolled out by the Foundation, its academic partners, and external resource persons. Over the years, the work of ZFF expanded in terms of scope and key result areas, all the while retaining its expertise and core value on local health systems strengthening and leadership development. In more than 10 years, ZFF developed, implemented, and even expanded programs that focused on developing BL competencies toward the attainment of better health outcomes.

To achieve its goal of contributing to health systems development, ZFFI, headed by a director and an associate director, organized itself into subunits dedicated to delivering key outputs necessary to generate desired results. The subunits are:

• Bridging Leadership Formation | The BL Formation Unit takes the lead in ensuring quality product development as well as training implementation following the ZFF brand. It is subdivided into two: (1) Internal Support and (2) Public Offerings, which cater to internal and external partners, respectively.

• • Internal Support – The Internal Support team takes the lead in providing technical assistance and support to the learning and development needs of the ZFF program and project units. It is made up of the internal support manager, along with L&D (learning and development) associates who are assigned to specific thematic areas corresponding to the priority strategies of ZFF.

• • Public Offerings – The Public Offerings team packages learning and development products into public course offerings. It is composed of a product development expert, and content development and training management associates.

• Quality Assurance, Certification, and Accreditation | This subunit is in charge of monitoring the compliance of all ZFF units in the implementation of protocols to assure brand and quality adherence. This includes protocols for product development, training management, as well as monitoring and evaluation. The unit also ensures organizational alignment to known standards in the field of learning and development, such as ISO 29993 and the Professional Regulation Commission. The subunit is composed of a program manager and an associate.

• Knowledge Management, Monitoring, and Evaluation | This subunit is responsible for establishing the system supporting the monitoring, evaluation, and knowledge-building activities of ZFFI. It includes organizing, managing, and utilizing the capacity-building data to provide useful and timely information to all relevant program stakeholders. It is also responsible for facilitating knowledge building and sharing within ZFFI and its partners, providing technical inputs on policy studies, and training program enhancements.

ZFFI’s teaching and training methods include traditional face-to-face activities and the use of digital platforms. The use of the digital the platform is further segregated into synchronous online and asynchronous modalities:

• Synchronous online training and learning activities refer to those in which learners and instructors are in the same online platform at the same time, with the same learning content.
• Asynchronous training and learning activities refer to those in which learning happens at the pace of the learner, with the learner and the instructors accessing the materials at different times. This may be done through self-paced courses in the Learning Management System, as well as other flexible learning solutions (e.g. non-internet requiring materials such as hard copies of modules and workbooks, digital copies in portable drives/devices, etc.).