The Latest

This Is How I picture Community Development!

I recently attended the Evaluating Community Impact workshop that Tamarack hosted. During one of the presentations I thought to myself this is exactly how I picture community development playing out. A slide came across that read, “community change strategies and interventions tend to evolve through an adaptive cycle with different phases.” Hmmm. An example of an Infinity Loop was shown. Around the loop there were 5 different areas. Exploration, Development, Growth, Maturity and Release.

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Applying the Lessons: Evaluating Community Impact

In Tamarack’s Evaluating Community Impact Community of Practice, Mark Cabaj and Liz Weaver remind us that traditional evaluation tends to focus on evaluating the effects of discrete, programmatic interventions. This approach is not well suited to assist social innovators in addressing complex issues embedded in diverse and often fast moving contexts. The question becomes how do we complement the traditional focus of program evaluation with a broader focus on evaluating changes at the system level? And how do we, as evaluators, improve the probabilities that evaluation feedback is timely, relevant, and used?

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Evaluating Poverty Reduction: Hearing the Music Not the Noise

From a poverty reduction perspective, we are inundated by the sound of many voices: our clients, our funders and donors, our colleagues, governments at all levels, business leaders and their labour counterparts, and on it goes. That’s what this article is about: lessening the noise that envelopes us and increasing our capacity to make music together when it comes to identifying, acting on, and evaluating poverty reduction efforts.

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Matching Evaluation Strategies to Community Rhythms

Communities change when people work together, but working together means pulling people out of their comfort zones.  That is never easy.  Good community animators know that their approach has to be carefully calibrated to their context.  Strategies that are helpful in one circumstance may not work in another. That is one of the main insights I took away from the Harwood Institute Public Innovators Lab I attended last year.  

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What We Learned From Talking Evaluation to Funders

In recent months, we’ve been talking with funders (including private foundations, public foundations and funders, government, and corporate funders) about evaluation. We’ve learned that, by and large, they are very interested in evaluation and see it as an important tool for learning and action. They understand the challenges that nonprofits face around evaluation and they acknowledge that some of these challenges arise out of their own requirements and expectations. Like nonprofits, funders we spoke with in Ontario see the need for a better approach to nonprofit evaluation with more focus on collaboration, learning, and action. Many are already taking steps to achieve this, but most also acknowledge that they still have much to learn. During our conversations, we gained insight into the obstacles that funders must overcome in order to change their practices. Understanding these challenges may be one of the keys to building an evaluation strategy that is truly sector driven and action focused. That is the focus of this blog.

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The Art of Disruption | A Reflection

Last week, Tamarack’s Liz Weaver and Paul Born hosted a webinar on Community Change: The Art of Disruption as part of a Community Change Webinar Series. In this conversation Liz and Paul discussed some emerging ideas and strategies that are disrupting how some communities today are responding to the complex issues that they face.

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