How do feminist perspectives transform the concepts, practices, and relationships in evaluation and learning? In this unique collaboration, eight movement partners and four national women’s funds explore a feminist approach to evaluation and learning to deepen insights into how gender equality change happens.
Drawing on mid-project reflections, this blog post shares emerging thoughts on what a feminist approach to evaluation and learning looks like. We set out the steps that were taken to shift thinking and practice toward new approaches for qualitative data collection. We share their plans to use collective sensemaking to better understand how feminist change happens across diverse contexts. And we learn more about individual and organizational mindset shifts associated with feminist evaluation and learning.
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A Complex Collaboration
This project is unique among the Fenomenal Funds Collaboration Grants in that it is composed of grantee partners and women’s funds. Together, they wanted to explore what it would take to strengthen feminist learning and evaluation. A feminist approach to evaluation and learning puts the knowledge and wisdom of feminist activists, organizations, and movements at the center, prioritizing their learning and accountability over the interests of the donors.
Multiple Factors Influence the Work
From early on, the four national women’s funds knew that they must ensure that the project engaged both grantee partner organizations and women’s funds. At a practical level, this has meant navigating:
- multiple languages and time zones,
- increasingly restrictive political contexts,
- diverse cultural contexts,
- geopolitical dynamics affecting the movement of partners,
- differences in access to technology, and
- the knowledge that some project partners are volunteers in their organizations.
Steps to Build the Basis for the Experiment in Feminist Evaluation and Learning
Following the Discover, Define, and Refine Phases for designing this collaboration, the four national women’s funds met in person to finalize the work plan. It was also an important opportunity to learn more about the different evaluation and learning approaches taken by each organization, the extent to which they were already using feminist approaches, and the way to identify the changes they hoped to achieve during the project.
The second face-to-face meeting brought together the eight grantee partners and four women’s funds with a focus on learning more about feminist approaches to evaluation and learning and exploring how they wanted to experiment with these approaches in the year ahead. In the intervening periods, virtual meetings were held. The women’s funds advanced project administration. Country meetings with grantee partners and women’s funds shared introductory information on feminist evaluation and learning approaches.
Feminist Approaches to Evaluation and Learning: Emerging Thoughts
The collaboration has drawn on a tool developed by the Urgent Action Funds with consultants Caroline Lambert (who is also a consultant on this project) and Karen Chen. The “Feminist Evaluation and Learning Honeycomb” sets out the different types of thinking and actions associated with a feminist approach to evaluation and learning.
Fundamentally, the tool does two things: it centers changemakers as the primary knowledge holders (decentering the evaluation and learning expert), and it shifts the focus of learning and accountability to serve movements over donors. The tool sets out thinking and action to achieve these changes.
At the first in-person meeting, the partners used the tool to review their existing organizational practices, share existing alignments, and identify opportunities for change. The tool was also used in the online country sessions and at the first face-to-face meeting of the grantee partners and women’s funds as a way to understand the types of mindset shifts—individually, organizationally, and across the collaboration—that would be required to strengthen feminist evaluation and learning approaches.
Trust, Stories, and Different Ways of Knowing
The collaboration used the “Feminist Evaluation and Learning Honeycomb” to guide the design of their first all-partner, face-to-face meeting. In this session, together, they focused on building trust and valuing different ways of knowing, using personal storytelling tools (valuing qualitative data). In this session, the participants were asked to create individual collages with images representing turning points in their lives. These collages were fundamental to the outcomes of the meeting. The session turbocharged relationship building, offered deep insights into the commonalities and differences in context and the ways in which change for gender equality happens, and provided first-hand experience of the power of storytelling and collective sensemaking.
An Experiment in Storytelling and Collective Sensemaking
The collaborative project had identified, early on, their interest in both deepening their understanding of feminist evaluation and learning tools, as well as possibly co-creating a new tool together. Three key questions/observations during the meeting opened up the discussions for the co-creation work. First, there was a reflection from one of the participants—which was affirmed by all the other participants—that a phone call/meeting elicited much richer data on the work of partners and the changes they were observing compared to a written report. Second, there was a reflection that evolving an understanding of how change happens was easier when done conversationally and collectively. And third, during an exercise on what sorts of questions supported good reporting, one of the participants said that she wished sometimes that the donors would just say, “Tell us what you want to tell us.” From these three insights, the participants elaborated an approach focused on two steps: one, storytelling and two, collective sensemaking.
Seven Process Steps Identified
As they started to think about these two phases, they realized that it would be useful to think about some additional steps—to prepare for the storytelling and collective sensemaking and to ensure that the insights led to the transformation of strategy and tools.
They identified seven steps in the process, which included work to unpack individual mindset shifts alongside the commitment to drive insights and learning into the transformation of strategy and practice. They also finessed two questions, one to guide each phase:
- Phase one, storytelling: When you think about [insert the social change you are interested in] what do you want to tell us?
- Phase two, collective sensemaking: When you think about [insert the social change you are interested in] what can we learn together?
Resisting the Urge to Create Detailed Guidance
The participants discussed the pros and cons of creating detailed guidance to advance the experiment. In the end, they evolved a phased approach that sets out critical components for each step, which is outlined on the slide about the process.
Guidance on Gathering a Story
In the discussions to co-create the “approach,” they explored what it took to gather a story, drawing on the “Feminist Evaluation and Learning Honeycomb” to identify core components. For example, in setting the scene of the story, the approach sets out that in addition to identifying the characters, it is important to frame the context and surface the power dynamics. In exploring what happened, the value of curiosity is highlighted, alongside the idea of “articulating the compelling changes” and “embracing the contradictions”—which challenges the idea that gender justice can be distilled to one most significant change or that change occurs in a linear fashion.
The approach also encourages the storytellers to “value the intangible”: to tell a story that goes beyond concrete outputs to one that considers other less output-oriented components—for example, to value different types of knowledge, such as intuition. As one of the participants noted: “You’ll see our lineage of progress markers, of most significant change, of outcome harvest. But we’re trying to just pull it together in a way that really values learning for the purpose of disruption.”
As participants have taken the approach home, considerable time and effort has been spent to contextualize the concepts and language of the “approach.” Some of the terms were untranslatable, and others lacked resonance—for example, “dwell in the possible” and “seek out the emergence.” It remains to be seen whether the tool has been helpful. In some instances, funds and partners have found it necessary to supplement or replace the “tell us what you want to tell us” question and the story-gathering approach with more traditional tools, such as interview question schedules, surveys, and other more structured qualitative tools, most particularly the “Most Significant Change” methodology.
Guidance on Collective Sensemaking
The focus on collective sensemaking has a profoundly transformative potential—and is the trickiest part of the process. It brings to life the idea that the participants “own their stories” and extend their voice and knowledge into the analysis and sensemaking process, which, in traditional evaluation and learning work, is left to the “objective” observer.
The premise of the experiment is that by creating a safe enough container—one that actively manages power dynamics and embraces boldness and vulnerability, as well as highly valuing active participation and listening—collective sensemaking with knowledge owners will offer insights of greater quality than those produced by an “objective” observer. In the words of one of the participants: “Evaluation and learning experts have said, ‘Well, because you’re part of the story, you can’t make sense of the story.’ We say if we are transparent and actively engag[ing] with power dynamics and vested interests, we will do a better job of interpreting the change that is, or isn’t, happening than an ‘expert’ who comes in to interpret our data.”
Mindset Shifts as a Critical Part of Feminist Evaluation and Learnin
One final point: At the midpoint reflection, one of the participants flagged how the project provided the opportunity to “understand our own mindsets around feminist evaluation and learning and support each other to shift those mindsets into new ways of learning and unlearning.” These shifts were seen as critical, and more guidance is required to support individuals and organizations in this process.