evaluation
Evaluating Network Formation: Webinar Follow-Up
Submitted by Claire Reinelt on Mon, 02/27/2012 - 09:44I was honored to host a webinar with my wonderful colleagues Kim Ammann Howard and Melanie Moore on The Promise and Perils of Supporting and Evaluating Network Formation and Development. We got some great questions during the webinar. Here are some follow-up reflections on three topics.
Trust in Networks
Trust is one of the foundations of collaboration. Leaders need to trust one another to take risks together to try something new. Leaders must be able to surmount differences, cross sectors to work together, and avoid serious conflicts. Here is some of what we think trust looks like in the Barr Fellows Network: (thanks to Gibran Rivera and Kim Haskins for their input.)
- Claire Reinelt's blog
- Login or register to post comments
2012 Webinar: The Promise and Perils of Supporting and Evaluating Network Formation and Development
Submitted by bcelnik on Tue, 01/10/2012 - 14:58Presenters: Kim Ammann Howard (BTW information change), Melanie Moore (See Change), Claire Reinelt (Leadership Learning Community)
Date: Wednesday, February 15 11:00-12:00 Noon PDT (2:00-3:00PM EDT)
In recent years, leadership funders have begun experimenting widely with how to move beyond investments in programs and organizations to funding the formation and development of networks in order to catalyze greater collective impact. Drawing on the experiences and examples of three leadership and network evaluators, this session explored the following questions.
- What are the promises and perils of investing in network formation? What evaluation questions are important to ask?
- What are critical practices for supporting and nurturing the emergence and development of networks? How can evaluation inform the development and support of networks over time?
- What are promising practices for evaluating network behavior and network effects in the early stages of network formation?
This session provided useful advice on how to fund, support, and evaluate network potential and sustainability in the earliest phases of network formation.
- bcelnik's blog
- Login or register to post comments
Alumni Support and Evaluation: Kristine Maltrud, M.P.H., Healthy Native Communities Partnership, Inc.
Submitted by Natalia Castaneda on Wed, 08/24/2011 - 10:57Tags:
In 2004, Kristine Maltrud was Coordinator for the Healthy Native Communities Partnership (HNCP) Learning Team, based in New Mexico. HNCP is a non-profit organization based on the Navajo community of Shiprock, New Mexico, that supports capacity building, leadership development partnership, and networking so that Native communities are better prepared to realize their own vision of wellness. During a series of internal meetings, the Learning Team recognized they would benefit from reaching out to learn from other leadership development organizations. Kristine did some research and found Leadership Learning Community (LLC) on the web, which was listed as an organization that specialized in leadership evaluation.
Upon finding LLC, Kristine contacted Deborah Meehan, LLC’s Executive Director, and made plans to travel to Oakland to meet with LLC. HNCP was interested in learning more about how to expand support for alumni of their program. They recognized that the one-year fellowship program, while highly valued, does not enable fellows to reach their full support. Learning from others about how to provide continued support and access to resources post-Fellowship was a top priority when Kristine traveled to Oakland.
- Natalia Castaneda's blog
- Login or register to post comments
[download]
[more info]
The Leadership Development Investment Framework is a tool developed to assist funders, program staff, and evaluators clarify the purposes of leadership development and capacity-building supports. In 2008, we partnered with United Way Toronto to adapt the original Leadership Development Investment Framework that was produced by Grantmakers for Effective Organizations in 2005. The tool was useful in assisting the United Way and other leadership funders in Canada to become more intentional about where they are currently investing resources, where there are gaps in investment, and how they might work together to maximize the impact of their resources. Grady McGonagill adapted the framework further by adding the dimension of teams and team building capacity as part of a study for the Bertelsmann Foundation. Claire Reinelt and LLC Board Member and Leadership Consultant Grady McGonagill have continued to refine the framework and explore ways that funders can use this tool to better align their leadership investments internally and externally with others. At a recent Funders' Circle meeting designed for funders to learn more about each other's work and find synergies across strategies, issues and geographic areas, the attached summary of the framework was shared. This summary describes changes that occur at five levels: individual, team, organizational, community, and field. Since most foundations seek to develop a range of leadership capacities across multiple levels, choosing the right approaches and combining the right strategies is a process of experimentation and learning. To make the framework more useful, we have added examples of different programs and how they invest in leadership development. This framework provides a comprehensive view of 25 potential leadership development opportunities organized in a 5 x 5 matrix. The matrix enables stakeholders to identify patterns in their current investment strategies; engage in deeper dialogue about the purposes for investing in leadership; and become more intentional about the directions in which they want to invest moving forward. Through sharing strategies and lessons learned among funders, successful approaches can be adapted and tried in different contexts. Please refer to the document for additional information on the framework.
Authors: Claire Reinelt, Grady McGonagill
Subjects: leadership, evaluation
11/23/2009 - 01:00 - 0 comments - 1 attachment - Posted by Natalia Castaneda
Leadership Tip: Learning from (and having fun with) Design Thinking
Submitted by Natalia Castaneda on Tue, 11/30/2010 - 15:37|
Image source: Embraceglobal.org |
Lately I have been interested in learning more about design thinking – a problem solving methodology that is helping generate innovations across multiple sectors, even social change innovations. One of the key things about design thinking is that it is user-centric and participatory, so solutions are designed not only with the audience in mind but also with their active participation and engagement in the process. For instance, Embrace, an organization dedicated to creating low-cost incubators for the developing world, uses a design thinking approach to help improve the product – “they visit their stakeholders to find out if their big idea actually works in the context of people’s day-to-day lives” (Roberts 2010). This allows them to modify the product to meet the needs of their audience; for instance, they interviewed women in a village in India and found out that they were not using the incubator’s digital temperature screen because it was too complex. In response, the team added a digital happy face to let the mothers know that the temperature was OK and a sad face to indicate that it needed reheating. I recently took a brief workshop on this methodology at the University of Berkeley Extension and ever since I have been seeing references of design thinking across multiple levels of my work here at the Leadership Learning Community (LLC). Just a couple of days ago as I was scanning the Twitter hashtag for the American Evaluation Association I saw an article on design thinking and evaluation. I started thinking about how this methodology can be used by leadership programs to help train their participants and strengthen their ability to work collectively towards innovation. I am not an expert in this methodology but I want to share what I’ve learned about it with the LLC community and some insights I’ve had that may be helpful for others who are interested in this topic. read more » |
- Natalia Castaneda's blog
- Login or register to post comments
What leadership approaches are making a big difference in people’s lives?
Submitted by Deborah Meehan on Wed, 09/29/2010 - 22:33Tags:
What would it take to answer this question with any certainty? At the Leadership Learning Community, we recently invited our members to participate in a survey that guided them through a process of creating a working hypothesis. A hypothesis will make more explicit the assumptions that a leadership programs holds about how they are planning to accomplish the goals of their leadership program: who is reached, with what supports, and for what purpose, e.g. if we do X (leadership strategies), then Y (program result) will occur. You could say that through this exploration we are testing our own hypothesis: If leadership programs develop, test, refine and share their hypothesis about how they achieve different results then leadership development practitioners will be able to make better decisions about which approaches will help them get the results they are hoping for. We were encouraged by the number of people who quickly responded to this request. What did we learn? read more »
- Deborah Meehan's blog
- Login or register to post comments
