Greetings! We are the Ananse team, a collaborative of solo and small evaluation firms. We come together from Arbor West Consulting (Jamaica), Auricle Services (Nigeria), BLE Solutions (USA), and the Institute for Peace and Development (Ghana).
As strategy evaluation partner for the Conrad N. Hilton Foundation’s Catholic Sisters Initiative (CSI), we wanted to identify an appropriate and meaningful way to learn about how Catholic sisters use networks to address issues such as human trafficking, migration, youth employment, and elderly sisters’ care. We wanted to understand why and how they create these networks, the benefits and challenges they face in working through networks, how the Hilton Foundation and others support them, and the differences they are making.
We discovered storytelling is a perfect fit.
- Storytelling is universal and a natural way for sisters to share information.
- With storytelling, narrators can own their stories—important for those who are often unseen or unheard. Storytelling allows us to make visible sisters’ work from their own perspectives.
- Storytelling’s flexibility allows for the complexity of CSI’s and their partners’ work, given their diversity across geographies, cultures, political influences, focuses, and approaches, and the dynamism of human and network relationships. Because stories have depth, they allow complexities to surface and be understood.
- Storytelling provides an opportunity to highlight sisters’ lived experiences, humanizing the data and bringing to the fore the depth and breadth of challenges and accomplishments. Stories are vivid, going beyond the recount of facts and figures. They surface memories and unearth feelings, motivations, joys, and pains from lived experiences—all critical for understanding paths toward progress.
- Storytelling is a powerful communication tool, fostering common understanding where there are diverse perspectives.
Our storytelling approach:
Preparation: We read relevant documents and dialogued with CSI, which is led by and includes sisters, to agree on our scope.
Guidance: We convened an evaluation advisory group, comprised of Catholic sisters, to guide our design and inform our analysis. This allowed us to consider sisters’ lived experiences at each step—from the design of questions to learning how best to engage with sisters to understanding the information sisters provided. The group’s expertise invariably helped set the tone for the storytelling exercise.
Implementation: We used a semi-structured interview guide—flexible enough to guide us through the bobs, weaves, and rhythms of the stories and to capture the full scope of the stories, irrespective of networks’ maturity levels.
Sensemaking: The CSI team, our evaluation advisory group, and the sisters who told us their stories helped us make sense of the stories we heard.
Lessons Learned
- Engaging with our client and an advisory committee facilitated finding a culturally relevant methodological fit.
- Maintaining ongoing client engagement helped to better understand the unique and complex nature of a client’s mandate.
- Using storytelling underscored key evaluation principles: listen to understand and always consider context.
- We recognized that stories are personal and should be handled carefully. We worked to build trust with storytellers and remained sensitive to how we entered the process, respecting organizations’ cultures and procedures.
- Among the many benefits of using a storytelling approach was hearing about the intangibles, such as the emotional effect of CSI’s support and what motivated people to do what they did. This got us to the depth of what drives change.
- While some sisters willingly talked about the ups and downs of their experiences, we had to encourage others to do the same.
- We had to be flexible with interview time, given interviewees’ enthusiasm about telling their stories.
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