Evaluation takes courage and the willingness to change. When everything seems to be going well, it is especially important to take the time to reflect, to ask the tough questions and to be willing to hear inconvenient answers. What if the work you are doing is popular but not achieving its intended outcomes? What if you learn that the good work you are doing is actually increasing vulnerability and stigma for the people it’s intended to help?
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As the challenges facing communities become more complex and the importance of effective collaboration across sectors and perspectives increases, the need to find simple and effective ways for people to think and learn together has never been greater.
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The part of the community change process that gets dropped most often is all that comes after the work is done. We host an event and then don’t do the debrief. We coordinate a year-long community of practice but don’t capture the way the meetings have impacted people. We convene neighbours for a community gathering and work day but don’t share how we did it and why people came.
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Over the last year, the First 2000 Days Network has been striving to address systems change efforts as part of our multi-tiered Theory of Change and our Systemic Change Framework. Our Network includes what we term ‘change mechanisms’ at multiple levels: individual, community, organization & agency and systems-level – all with the goal of improving outcomes for children and families.
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There are times when I am flipping through Twitter and I find a nugget of information that leads me to pause, reflect and then consider what is being shared and how this impacts my thinking about community change. With one tweet, Systems Innovation (@Sys_innovation) both asked and answered the question “what does it take to liberate the capacity of an organization?”
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When we hear the word community, we typically think of larger groups of people who gather around a common purpose (faith, sports, neighbourhoods, social clubs, and so on). We often think of community as participating or having membership in these groups, gatherings or events. However, we can also be involved with smaller communities of people, from a cluster of neighbours, a circle of friends or family, or the familiar faces we see at the store to the community recreation centre, or coffee shop. Further still, community inhabits relational spaces with friends, partners/spouses, siblings, parents, neighbours or co-workers. Community lives in all levels of connection, from larger community events to individual relationships. What happens then, when people do not have a strong sense to community in any of these ways? For many people, the experience of not belonging to any form of community is a daily reality. For adults with developmental disabilities, this reality is too common.
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