A very interesting meeting happened in Montreal in July. The J.W. McConnell Family Foundation, Ontario Trillium Foundation and the Lucie and Andre Chagnon Foundation invited foundation colleagues from Canada and the United States to a workshop focusing on Evaluation and Learning for Aligned Action.
The workshop included a number of evaluation experts and practitioners. Vibrant Communities was invited to share our lessons learned about our journey to getting to shared outcomes. I have attached with this post a Pecha Kucha I prepared to entice everyone to my workshop and the power point we prepared about how collectively our movement has gone on this journey of developing a common evaluation framework. Those in the room were very interested in the Vibrant Communities evolution over the past 12 years.
Tamarack and Vibrant Communities has taken the lead in developing a shared evaluation framework for the cities engaged in place-based poverty reduction efforts. From 2002-2012, this included 13 cities from coast to coast in Canada. Over the past two years, this network has expanded to include more than 50 cities across the country. While the common evaluation framework is coordinated nationally, each of the cities collects local data and contributes their results through an annual survey. Most recently, Vibrant Communities Canada has partnered with the Community Data Program to purchase population level data for each of the cities. This set of 12 population level indicators will enable us to track impact on an annual basis.
Vibrant Communities Canada and our cities partners annually review and reflect on the individual and collective results. This annual reflection is instrumental to understanding the progress we are making and some of the challenges local communities face when working collectively to achieve change.
This post has led me to consider the evaluation journey in more detail. Often power points don’t provide the details about the hard graft that went into each step. This timeline may give you a better sense that where we are today, is not just one point in time, but an evolution of experiences, conversations, learning, testing, reviewing and revising our collective efforts. Most of us only look back on the last three months or the last year. Twelve years is a long time to reflect – but each step was critical in the path.
Advice and Lessons Learned:
- Getting to shared outcomes is more than a process. Deepening our understanding and learning about shared outcomes is a journey.
- A clear and shared understanding of the issue, in our case poverty, emerged out of the work. At the beginning, we did not have this shared understanding. Once it was developed, it was easier to build a common evaluation framework across different sites.
- The Sustainable Livelihoods Asset Pentagon was vital in developing a common evaluation framework. Each city, despite undertaking different activities, was engaged in building assets. The Assets Pentagon allowed us to compare results across each city.
- When working across multiple sites, look for scalable results. The CCSD Community Data Program allows Vibrant Communities to purchase shared and comparable data across different cities.
- Have patience and focus on learning and improving in each evaluation round.
View a PDF of the below timeline of activities by Vibrant Communities.
| YEAR |
VIBRANT COMMUNITIES HISTORICAL TIMELINE |
GETTING TO SHARED OUTCOMES: TOOLS AND RESOURCES |
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