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The Co-Working Life

December marks the five-month anniversary of Strong Roots Consulting (five months and one week, if you use the July 11th date of my first post), and six months since I moved back to the prairies after living in Ontario for twelve years. There are many factors to credit for my surviving and thriving through these […]

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When Does It End?

One local initiative that I’ve recently joined is The Kolo Project, a community focusing on growing Saskatchewan’s entrepreneurial roots. At a recent steering committee meeting, we worked to refine our vision and mission and created a blueprint for our activities in the coming new year. Towards the end of the meeting, we were asked to […]

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Value

One resource that I have started to draw on are the websites and particularly blogs of others doing similar work in the fields of evaluation and community practice. Among the useful sites I have found are Chris Lysy’s EvalCentral which brings together several dozen blogs (including this one) that have a common interest in evaluation, […]

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Quick Thought – Capacity to Fail

Chris Lysy over at Fresh Spectrum posed an interesting question: Do you have the capacity to fail? Venturing outside of “the way things are done” could lead to amazing success and a new approach to a previously unsolvable problem, but the more innovative and unproven the idea, the greater the risk that it falls flat. […]

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Site Update – Evaluation, Grants, and More Resources!

Strong Roots is continually evolving, so it makes sense that the website would reflect that change too! The section formerly known as Community-Based Research under Activities has been renamed to Research & Evaluation. The rationale for this move is explored in a previous post, but what it comes down to is that I see all […]

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Powerful Stranger

It’s been a while since I blogged about one of the chapters from Getting to Maybe. I think now is the right time to return to that book after getting a refresher on developmental evaluation (which has been described as the “practice” to Getting to Maybe’s “theory”) and because the chapter on the Powerful Stranger […]

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In a Word

As pragmatic as I usually am, I sometimes get hung up on words – see here and here for two examples where I debate over the meaning and connotations of words that I use to describe myself and my work. More recently, before my trip to the American Evaluation Association conference I was grappling with […]

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Site Updates – Approach and Resources

Although I have dialled back the pace of posting to the blog since returning from last week’s conference, don’t think that the website has stayed static in that time! Building on a post from September, I’ve distilled the essence of the Strong Roots approach to four elements: Connect, Empower, Change, and Share. The last one, […]

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AEA Conference – Day 4

I’ll admit, today my energy and enthusiasm level at the conference was a bit lower compared to the other days. There’s likely a couple of reasons for that, ranging from a somewhat earlier start time today and yesterday compared to the first two days, to the accumulated effects of being away from home. However, I […]

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AEA Conference – Day 3

Today’s workshop at the American Evaluation Association was on participatory methods, which covers a range of methods and approaches for use with populations that could be categorized as “vulnerable”: those living in poverty, not speaking or understanding the dominant language, identifying as LGBTQ, Aboriginal / First Nations, or a racialized minority, living in an area […]