Creativity • Integrity • Connection
The Manchester United manager may not be your idea of a model for NGO managers, but in the field of M&E his example can teach us a lot. Monitoring and Evaluation workshops clog up very fast with jargon that people struggle to relate to the real world. Where do ‘activities’ end and ‘outputs’ […]
Robert Chambers’ guiding principle for workshops, being ‘optimally unprepared’, comes straight from his commitment to participatory learning. The paradox makes me sit up and think: where can there be room for ‘unpreparedness’ in a workshop, and how do you measure out an optimal amount of it?! I was preparing for a two-day workshop on M&E […]
In a previous post I shared some first impressions about using audio. Now Keith Ricketts and I have had more time to digest and think about what we’ve learnt, and it’s opened up more new ideas. Here’s a few: Think of internal as well as external audiences: we often think of audio as useful for […]
Just returned from the launch of my report on the Kings Hedges Family Support Project in Cambridge, with a speech by our MP Julian Huppert (pictured with the report). There was lots of birthday cake, and about 80 toddlers and parents, as well as many partners from the fire service to the NHS. It was […]
This was something different! Going from the family support project (see previous post), to a room full of initially rather intimidating police men and women: black uniforms, high viz vests, belts bulging with what? Handcuffs? Radios? I wasn’t sure I wanted to find out. I wasn’t being arrested. I was there to convince the officers […]
I’ve been exploring how to use audio interviews as part of my work. If making a lot of mistakes is any guide to how much learning is going on, then I’ve learnt a lot! Luckily for me, I’ve been working on this with Keith Ricketts, an experienced sound media consultant who I met through the […]
It looks and sounds like a pre-school play group. But in fact, it is a well-disguised project to battle poverty and disadvantage in families in north Cambridge. When it started 18 years ago the Kings Hedges Family Support Project was way ahead of it’s time: focusing on helping parents to be actively and positively involved […]
Both speakers at a recent event run by MDN (consultants working with voluntary sector organisations in the UK) emphasized the huge shift in the environment for non-profits in the UK. While they both started from the fact that the funding landscape is changing radically, they then followed different trains of thought – one looking at […]
After each training or workshop, I try to write up some key learning points for myself – how I’d run the course differently, what sessions worked well and which were less successful – and why. The difficulty is that each course varies so much depending on the participants, the questions they are bringing with them, […]
It’s been really interesting to spend a week with Article 19 in Kenya, facilitating a project management workshop for their Nairobi and Dakar staff along with their partner organisation IDPAC (Internal Displacement Policy and Advocacy Committee). We used the Internally Displaced People’s project as a case study during the week, which kept the course practical. […]
I’m delighted to share that insights from the two virtual convenings I facilitated with SARELL are now being hosted as a case study on the Aspen Institute’s Aspen Digital hub. The convenings explored the nature of mistrust in social platforms, and proposed actionable strategies for rebuilding user wellbeing and trust
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