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Seeds for Thought

Seeds for Thought: Five and Change

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 […]

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Seeds for Thought

Seeds for Thought: Negative Results

Whether you are evaluator of a program or someone associated with the initiative being evaluted (the evaluatee?), it’s probably safe to say that everyone hopes for good results: proof that all the planning, effort, and resources that went into the program made a difference. Sadly, that doesn’t always happen, leaving the evaluator to figure out […]

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Resources Seeds for Thought

Seeds for Thought: Scale

Today’s Seed for Thought comes from the Stanford Social Innovation Review’s blog, a site that covers (as the name suggests) social innovation and related conepts like philanthropy, social entrepreneurship, and nonprofit organizational development. In the latter category, an article today provided a five-question checklist for nonprofits to assess their readiness to scale and increase their […]

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AEA Conference – Day 2

Another great day, including meeting a group of awesome people around the topic of community development and cities (I’m an urban nerd at heart!). Lots of talk today about how to introduce and implement developmental evaluation practices, which can be difficult as the whole point of the field is to eschew the “one size fits […]

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AEA Conference – Day 1

It’s the end of day 1 at the American Evaluation Conference, and so far it’s been a great experience! In addition to the content of the workshop itself (more on that below), I had the opportunity to chat with people from academia, research institutions, government, and non-profits doing work in an array of fields. The […]

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Thoughts

Getting to Maybe – Stand Still

The second chapter of Getting to Maybe, somewhat confusingly sharing the title of the book itself, focuses on how social innovators get started. For many, there is a sense of calling or having reached a personal tipping point. There’s a realization that some aspect of the current reality is not merely a problem, but that […]