Collaborative, participatory, empowerment approaches to evaluation.
Logic Models.
Theory of Change.
Outcomes Harvesting.
Contribution Analysis.
Most Significant Change.
Baselines and Exit-lines.
Cultural safety and trauma-informed evaluations.
Organizational capacity development.
Intersectional and systems thinking lens.
Thank you, Anna Maria, for facilitating this conversation on ToC. I have worked with organizations that have been working for 20+ years and have periodically revised their vision, mission, and strategic goals; some have an unwritten understanding of the philosophical underpinnings with respect to their desired outcomes. Yet many of these mature organizations have never worked with an evaluator before, and many have not given enough consideration to their ToC. I believe there are many cases where the evaluation of a social impact organization needs to begin by working with the client to define, organize, and visualize their ToC by integrating all their implicit and explicit ways concepts and frames -- the process needs to be collaborative and participatory, and it is a bit like a Foucauldian archaeology/anthropology of knowledge.
Guatemala
Angela M. Contreras
Founder, Director, and Principal Consultant.
Verapax Solutions Inc.
Posted on 27/08/2025
Top of mind for me is the complex issue of leadership and organizational culture.
As Monica rightly concludes, leadership is critical. But in my experience as external consultant helping small civil society organizations. In many instances, junior staff members are the ones with the most refreshing perspectives on issues and solutions. I agree with the conclusion that ‘senior leaders must model learning, reward follow-through, and create no‑blame spaces for reflection so findings positive and negative, drive improvement’, but I also believe we need to design participatory, collaborative and empowerment approaches to monitoring and evaluation where time is periodically scheduled for team members (junior and senior) to engage in retrospective reflective reviews and discussion of case studies and lessons to repeat or avoid.
In my small evaluation practice, I have been finding increasing receptivity from small organizations to select past evaluation reports and study the documents through the lens of the organization’s statement of shared core values and principles. The exercise is part of our capacity development activities. At determined project team meetings or organization-level meetings, 15-30 minutes are allocated to discuss the assigned evaluation report and to co-generate a list of lessons to formally integrate to management and evaluation systems, or failures to learn from and keep working on; all this sense-making is done seeking alignment to the organization’s shared core values and principles.
If anyone else has been using a principles-based approach to developing an organizational culture that values learning and action-oriented exchange of feedback.