This week’s seed features Chi Yan Lam, a friend and colleague who is completing his PhD in Education at Queen’s University. We share an interest in developmental and collaborative approaches to evaluation, though as you can see from his about page, he comes at it more from the academic and theoretical side.
In support of writing his dissertation, Chi recently relaunched his personal site as a process journal to “chronicle and archive [his] emerging thinking and serendipitous discoveries around evaluation and design”. A recent post brings up the idea of the Stanford $5 challenge, where students in the Technology Ventures program are asked to use $5 and two hours of time to make a profit. Those most successful didn’t end up using the money: that resource all too often turned out to be a trap, too little to turn into anything with taking a huge risk like buying a lottery ticket or hitting the slot machines.
This example really resonates with my experiences in the nonprofit field. The first question that’s usually raised after generating a new idea for a program or service is where will the money and resources come from: in response, many organizations will “gamble” staff time and resources on preparing a grant application. If the gamble doesn’t pay off, the idea is dead in the water, morale drops, and staff are discouraged from coming up with innovative solutions in the future.
Instead of focusing immediately on what we need for success, oftentimes we need to take a step back as Chi suggests and first determine the need for a program (or to borrow from the business world, whether the “market” is there), and then whether our theory of change (the steps from here to there) matches our plan of action. These two steps can help identify faulty assumptions or leaps of logic in your plan, but more importantly, they force you to question if there is a better path to success. For example, is it possible for the program to take advantage of existing in-house resources such as a spare room and some dedicated volunteers, or draw on connections with community partners such as a university community service-learning project? A successful program will at some point need dedicated resources, just as a successful business venture will need capital to go to scale: however, if an idea can show some initial successes on $5 and two hours of time, it’s an easier argument to make that investing more time and money will be worthwhile.
(A quick shameless self-promotion here – my approach to supporting project development takes a similar approach, working with organizations to better understand the need and context, clarify how the program will work, and identify potential resources. If you’re at this stage of a program design and not sure how to proceed, drop me a line!)
Question: Think about a cause or issue you’re passionate about – what would you do to start creating change with $5 and two hours?