"Moving the needles" on community-wide issues requires cross-sector coordination and an engaged community.

There are countless community change initiatives working on a diversity of issues in our country, such as early childhood development, health care, education, poverty and homelessness, immigration and workforce development. Evaluating Community Impact: Capturing and Making Sense of Community Outcomes is a three-day workshop intended to provide those who are funding, planning and implementing community change initiatives with an opportunity to learn the latest and most practical evaluation ideas and practices.

This workshop is best suited to those who have an interest and some basic knowledge and experience with evaluation and are eager to tackle the challenging but critical task of getting feedback on local efforts to change communities. It is not designed for professional evaluators. Please browse this webpage to learn more about the workshop and how you can become a member of our learning community from February 9-11 in Vancouver, British Columbia.

Register for Evaluating Community Impact: Capturing and Making Sense of Community Outcomes

Who Should Attend?

This workshop is for you if:

• You manage programs that need to be evaluated
• You are part of a collaborative that is trying to understand how to evaluate
• You are a community development professional who wants to make the connection between learning and community change
• You are in a collective impact network and wanting to understand shared measurement
• Evaluation is part of your job description

Learning Agenda

• Models and dynamics of community change i.e.Theory of Change and Logic Models
• Evaluative thinking, utilization focused evaluation, and developmental evaluation
• Program evaluation and the evaluation of community change evaluation
• ‘Measuring’ systems change, dealing with unanticipated outcomes, attributing outcomes to change activities and participatory sense-making
• Evaluation Planning Tools and Outcome Evaluation Tools

Curriculum Team

This workshop will be led by Mark Cabaj and Liz Weaver. Mark is Canada's foremost expert on developmental evaluation and has worked in community change his entire life. Liz has run Canada's largest Collective Impact initiative and consults across North America on issues related to community change. Together, they have designed this workshop to incorporate their practical experiences in developing and measuring community impact initiatives, as well as the challenges they have faced in doing so.

9am Pacific Time | Noon Eastern Time

Join the Real Economy Lab, the Next System Project and the New Economy Coalition for an interactive webinar discussion on mapping the next system.

The inability of traditional politics and policies to address fundamental challenges has fueled an extraordinary amount of experimentation, generating increasing numbers of sophisticated and thoughtful initiatives that build from the bottom and begin to suggest new possibilities for addressing deep social, economic and ecological problems. Thus we encounter the caring economy, the sharing economy, the provisioning economy, the restorative economy, the regenerative economy, the sustaining economy, the collaborative economy, the solidarity economy, the steady-state economy, the gift economy, the resilient economy, the participatory economy, the new economy, and the many, many organizations engaged in related activities.

There are calls for a Great and Just Transition, or for reclamation of the Commons. Many of these approaches already have significant constituencies and work underway. Creative thinking by researchers and engaged scholars is also contributing to the ferment. Although they vary widely in emphases and approaches, there is a good deal of commonality. These movements seek an economy that gives true priority to people, place, and planet.

Taking the next step in collective development will require better information on the array of organizations and initiatives active in this space as well as efforts to identify potential areas of cooperation and collaboration. Beyond that loom questions of scale and replicability. The Real Economy Lab (REL) has been surveying the landscape and identifying the linkages and is seeking to provide an interactive platform where the cumulative knowledge, aims, and resources of these movements can be drawn together in order to seek common ground and drive coordinated action.

In this webinar REL will present their work to date and invite you to join them and a panel of leading thinkers and practitioners in discussing these issues. We will hear about the work of REL as a connector of change makers in the next economy space, working to raise awareness and understanding of new economy theory and practice and help connect the thinkers and doers in this world for collaboration and movement building. REL will explain its theory of change and unique role in this evolving new economy ecosystem and walk us through one of their core tools, the mindmapping of the next economy ecosystem.

Register for the Mapping the New Economy webinar

Participants will also discuss questions that explore the value of mapping the next system:

1. Problem statement – What are the leading / recurring challenges in organizing more coherent effort and coalition building within and across this movement? What are the obstacles / challenges that crop up?
2. Underlying causes - What do we have in common? What principles, values and alternative economic paradigms motivate our actions, and where are we ultimately aligned? How do we talk about this more openly?
3. Solution framing – How can people and organizations build on one another’s efforts and collaboratively work towards a more capable, credible, and coherent movement for systemic change? What are leading theories of change?
4. Solution space – Where are we seeing inspiring or illustrative success stories and convergences underway in the movement? How can we measure progress and promote positive outcomes?
5. Improving the odds – How might the work of REL better support practitioners and thinkers in the next economy world? What tools, data, or support are missing from the system we all work in?

Featuring Moderator:

Gus Speth, Co-chair of the Next System Project

Panelists

• Michel Bauwens, P2P Foundation
• Ferananda Ibarra, VillageLab / Metacurrency Project
• Michelle Mascarenhas Swan, Movement Generation
• Jules Peck, Real Economy Lab
• Ed Whitfield, Fund for Democratic Communities

8am - 9:30am Pacific Time

Join Transition Towns founder Rob Hopkins along with transition organizers from all around the country for an informative telephone conference about the role of Transition in the climate justice movement and the Paris talks. Hopkins will share lessons from his timely new book, '21 Stories for Transition.'

Register for '21 Stories of Transition' with Rob Hopkins

November 1st sees the publication of a landmark new publication from Transition Network.  '21 Stories of Transition: how a movement of communities is coming together to reimagine and rebuild our world' is published in advance of the COP21 climate negotiations in Paris in December, and is a joyous and inspiring celebration of what the Transition movement has become.  Here Rob Hopkins, who harvested the stories contained in the book, introduces it: 

It tells 21 stories of 39 Transition projects in 15 countries, drawing out some staggering insights into their impacts (for example, between them, our 21 stories alone have saved car travel equivalent to driving to the Moon and back 3 times, installed renewable energy equivalent to that needed by 4,000 homes, put over £1 million of local currencies into circulation, and generated over 18,500 hours of volunteer input).  But those are just the measurable impacts.  So much of what these groups do is much harder to measure, but just as important.  

More Information on the book here