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
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
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
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
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
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
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
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
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
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
I’m sure many of you are seeing your newsfeeds full of discussion about what is happening in Ukraine, and how best to help. That desire to help is a basic human instinct, and the reason why many of our current
