In social innovation we are at risk of confusing our stories of success for real, genuine impact. Without theories, implementation science or evaluation we risk aspiring to travel to the moon, yet leaving our rockets stuck on the launchpad.
Read More
The Tamarack Institute is once again hosting the dynamic, three-day Evaluating Community Impact workshop in Halifax, Nova Scotia from June 2-4 and again in Winnipeg, MB this November 18-20.
A number of years ago I was the director of the Hamilton Roundtable for Poverty Reduction (HRPR), a comprehensive, communityinitiative focused on reducing poverty for the citizens of Hamilton, Ontario. The HRPR had the aspiration of making Hamilton the best place to raise a child. The change framework encouraged investments across five critical points in the lives of children, youth and their families: investing in the early years (0-6), helping kids to be successful in school, ensuring that kids complete high school successfully, providing bridges to post-secondary education and employment and working to build assets like savings accounts and home ownership.
Read More
The Robert R. McCormick Foundation has recently published this very useful Program Evaluation Guide.
Read More
We all know that our city, region and community is different from those neighbouring us and different again from those in other provinces. The mix and interactions of the people, organizations, companies, local government, history and context make each city, region, place unique. This uniqueness presents both challenges and opportunities to collaborating around complex issues in a place-based context.
Read More
The authors of this paper argue that big changes only occur through advocacy efforts and yet, advocacy is an elusive activity to evaluate.
Advocacy requires an approach and a way of thinking about success, failure, progress, and best practices that is very different than the way we approach traditional philanthropic projects such as delivering services or modeling social innovations. It is more subtle and uncertain, less linear, and because it is fundamentally about politics, depends on the outcomes of fights in which good ideas and sound evidence don't always prevail. This difference poses a particular challenge in evaluating advocacy efforts, exacerbating the resistance to advocacy from foundations that naturally resist in investing in projects that they can't judge as successes or failures.
Read More