Day 3 ⏐ Session 1
Learning what matters:
tracking place-based system change
This session kicked off a series of discussions exploring in-depth collaborations between innovators, evaluators and funders to support systems shifting initiatives.
We visited our Antipodean friends in Australia; Zazie Tolmer (DK), Carolyn Curtis and Aunty Vickey Charles, The Australian Centre for Social Innovation (AU); Niall Fay, The Fay Fuller Foundation (AU), Angie Tangaere, The Southern Initiative (NZ) and Jess Dart, Clear Horizon (AU).
Casting aside grand logic models, big evaluation frameworks and preconceived notions of success, we turned instead to the deep value of joint learning, of attuning ourselves to the planet and to each other in more meaningful ways, through centuries old Indigenous traditions and knowledge systems.
“I think it’s about having to let go of your humility as a person and say, ‘Hey, I do have knowledge about this, but I need to also listen and hear’. We listen to our elders, we listen to our ancestors, we listen to the sun, we listen to the clouds, we listen to the water, the land because that is our total immersion and connection… people just need to step back from their humility and say, give it a go, let’s do something different and sit in the awkwardness of that.”
Resources
Aunty Vickey Charles and Carolyn Curtis
Nial Fay
Jess Dart
Angie Tangaere
Quotes from the session
“We had one group of people looking at the data… and then we had another group of people really actually going out sitting down street corners, couches, cafes, and actually speaking, yarning with a purpose [asking] what's keeping you awake at night?” (Carolyn Curtis)
“The thing that drives right down the center of this initiative is a clear set of principles. These principles thread through all elements of the initiative.” (Carolyn Curtis)
“We hear this a lot about commitment, around being brave or bold… and you know, when you unpack it, we kind of throw it back and say, well, tell me what we're doing is not common sense, right?” (Niall Fay)
“Sometimes funders go ‘we want to evaluate a cloud so we're going to take a helicopter and fly right into the middle of it’ and all of a sudden the composition of that cloud is fundamentally changed by this rash act… someone rich has said ‘we want to get involved’… The way that we go about partnering for place change… has to be true partnership where you're slowly invited into place.” (Niall Fay)
“Your evaluation framework also has to reflect not just the change that you're hoping to see in partnership but also how you show up as a partner, how you show up as a funder, how you show up as evaluators, how you show up as social innovators and how you show up as humans in this because you can't make complex social change by treating community like test subjects” (Niall Fay)
“Evaluation can actually stifle innovation. Evaluation can stop all systems transformation happening if it comes in too hard in the wrong way.” (Jess Dart)
“Evaluators love their evaluation plans. We are taught to build a plan and implement it. The bigger the thing the bigger the plan… I was determined not to do that. The first time I tried to do a long term developmental evaluation, I built a big plan. I used nearly all the budget redoing the plan because the initiative kept changing. So I was like, Okay, I'm done with big plans….” (Jess Dart)
“We (as evaluators) have a different vantage point. Sometimes we can see patterns that others can't and I think that's one of the things that people have said that they enjoy about having an evaluator at the table.” (Jess Dart)
“I like to say we are accountable for learning… We're not gonna have targets, but we are accountable to learn our way through change…” (Jess Dart)
“Our job is to help learn our way into to deep systems change… and that is acknowledging the intergenerational trauma of colonisation here and the ongoing iniquity that it continues to cause…” (Angie Tangaere)
“...first is to create the space for our people in place to describe what wellbeing is for them and what an ecology of wellbeing looks like for them in place” (Angie Tangaere)
“We think the best thing we can do is to support the spaces, to share the power and control that we have in a way that empowers people or enables people in place to design what the future looks like… using a localised strength base Indigenous lead, building on what works for people.” (Angie Tangaere)
“Our people know a lot about clouds. They also know a lot about tides and they know a lot about moon phases, and they know a whole lot about the sun as many other First Nations people do. And what Indigenous knowledge systems give us is powerful innovation and learning tools in their own right… the ability to start and to continue in a fundamentally different way, often in a values driven way…” (Angie Tangaere)
“...what indigenous knowledge systems helped me to do as a Social Innovation practitioner is to move away from planning and programming service delivery towards a true attuning to the planet, attuning to each other, attuning to rhythm, attuning to what space looks like, attuning to different relationships and fundamentally different way of being. What that helps us to do is to reverse engineer the systems that are now holding inequity in place” (Angie Tangaere)
“Indigenous knowledge helps us embrace complexity, not to simplify it, not to compartmentalise it, to embrace all of what's the cloud is and observe the cloud first without trying to figure out what we're going to do with the cloud.” (Angie Tangaere using clouds as an example of a complex system)
“Particularly as a white evaluator, I can't listen the same way as Auntie Vicky. So what do we need to unlearn? Where do we need to step back?... We actually are part of the solution as well and we have to be committed to equity.” (Zazie Tolmer)
