I was already part of the North-South Working Group for Evaluation of Social Change, in which Latin American social movements activists and Northern donors are gathering virtually since last year about evaluation of social change in the context of North-South relationships. This group is producing a joint document that systematizes its reflections on this topic and presented it recently during the Grantmakers Without Borders (GWOB) Conference in Washington DC, along with a quite successful workshop facilitated by Virginia Lacayo from Fondo Centroamericano de Mujeres (FCAM), called “Complexity-based Evaluations: When Traditional Evaluation Approaches are not Enough”. As FCAM, we also organized a longer workshop (3 days) on the same topic, this time in Spanish, which will take place next week in Nicaragua with the participation of some other Women’s Funds from Latin America and some International NGOs working in Nicaragua.
During the European Foundation Center Conference in Rome, I could give some follow-up to the conversations with the King Baudouin Foundation about organizing a similar event in Belgium at the end of the year or beginning of the next one, with the participation of the Cairo participants who would be interested and may be some other foundations we would invite as well.
I also talked with Gerard Salole about the possibility of organizing a workshop similar to the GWoB one during the European Foundation Center Conference next year and I think that we should do something similar in the Council of Foundations Conference.
Later: The workshop in Nicaragua “Complexity-based Evaluations: When Traditional Evaluation Approaches are not Enough” took place last week and was very interesting and productive. In the Central American Women’s Fund we really want to keep exploring how we can use more the complexity science and systems thinking approach to evaluate our work and then share our story.