If all my data were laid out on the floor around me in some fashion, I could never escape its breadth, not even peripherally while honing in on some specific code or case. But when it is tightly nested away from me in folders, I am more likely to pay attention to what is on top, so I have to make sure I'm digging into the backs of those drawers regularly if I'm going to keep my data at the front of my brain.
Read MoreIn every community I've worked in for capacity building, some kind of important community organizing (formal or informal) could be identified prior to my entrance. This work is foundational not only to the when we come to develop programs, but in terms of the information we need to conduct an authentic evaluation of what we think of as "our intervention." What's more, this work is likely to keep happening at some pace and to some scale, whether we are investing from the outside or not.
Read MoreAnd this brings us to here, to me, 54 years later, in the time of COVID and a dying planet, in the time of a bellowing monster of white supremacy who has taken a few arrows but isn't going down easy. In the time of festering patriarchy and unchecked capitalism, and surrounded on all sides by two dozen California wildfires, and to this attempt to lay it bare.
Read MoreBy designing programs that required tens and perhaps even hundreds of people to fly, I was racking up metric tons without even flying the miles myself. I was designing learning communities, for instance, that were dispersing 185 metric tons or more of carbon dioxide into the atmosphere of our vulnerable planet! I want to take my work to scale, but not like this.
Read MoreLike all good pilots, we'd learned and corrected course as we went along, and while those course-corrections were documented, recommendations for what to do with specific objections were absent. WWMQPD? He'd roll up his sleeves and analyze each objective in turn, deriving useful recommendations as he went along. That made sense. I figured I'd just throw the nine objectives in to a table and write a few sentences about each one. No big deal, right?
Read MoreCommunities of Practice tend to go awry when conveners and/or facilitators are not adept at the core conceptual components required for success, and the more often this happens in the philanthropic sector, the less likely participants are to enter the Community of Practice space in an open and optimistic way.
Read MoreBlogging from the American Evaluation Association's Evaluation 2017 conference in Washington, DC.
Read MoreBlogging from the American Evaluation Association's Evaluation 2017 conference in Washington, DC.
Read MoreEarlier in the week, I asked my students, "When was the last time you intentionally read something that you knew in advance you would strongly disagree with?" I got thirty-five blank stares. And I wasn't surprised. Under what circumstances in our contemporary American society would they come across a reason to do that? When they see something they don't like, they swipe left and it's gone.
Read MoreI had to admit that I felt the same relief. For several years, I'd been working on my own pretty successfully, but the least successful thing I'd managed was explaining to folks what I was doing all day that resulted in an actual deposits to my checking account.
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