This week, we celebrate the theme of building intersectional feminism into the future of the TIG with our colleagues in the Feminist Issues in Evaluation (FIE) TIG. This post is being brought back from the archive as evergreen content so important, it’s worth a second read.
Hi, I am Rituu B Nanda and I work on M&E, community engagement, participatory action research and knowledge management. I work with multiple organisations like Institute of Social Studies Trust (ISST), Anti-Slavery International, and Constellation. I moderate an international online community of practice (CoP) – Gender and Evaluation – under ISST’s project “Engendering Policy through Evaluation.”
Sharing of ideas and experiences is key in meaningful evaluation process. The CoP is aimed to bring together all interested in evaluation- commissioners of evaluation, researchers, evaluators, implementers, government officials, and policy makers. In India, we have a strong feminist evaluation group and have realized we have much more to learn from peers. Therefore we set up an international online community. Currently we have 1733 members.
Hot Tips
Numbers are important, but far more important is a vibrant community. Features like blogs, videos and photos have given us an opportunity to share.
Encourage the use of the discussion forum to raise queries. For instance I recently attended a session on a photo voice tool at AES Conference and was keen to learn what was the experience of members. Members responded from different parts of the world to share their experience.
By offering members different tools we are trying to engage them to become content creators and participants in the discussion around the issues they work on.
Lessons Learned
- When I invite people to join the community, many of them say that they do not work in the field of gender and equity. Over the years I have realised that gender and equity is about using a specific lens at every stage in evaluation. We can use any methodology or approach.
- I would love that language should not be a barrier for us to share. We will find a way around it by using google translate.
Thus, our endeavor is to create new knowledge, gather existing knowledge, organize, share and adapt it. We believe that if we continue to nurture a space that our members value, members can become the biggest advocates of our network. Our dream is to use these platforms to influence policy on gender and equity sensitive lens in evaluation.
Rad Resource
Consider this a warm invite to join our community…sign up at http://gendereval.ning.com/
The American Evaluation Association is celebrating Feminist Issues in Evaluation (FIE) TIG Week with our colleagues in the FIE Topical Interest Group. The contributions all this week to aea365 come from our FIE TIG members. Do you have questions, concerns, kudos, or content to extend this aea365 contribution? Please add them in the comments section for this post on the aea365 webpage so that we may enrich our community of practice. Would you like to submit an aea365 Tip? Please send a note of interest to aea365@eval.org. aea365 is sponsored by the American Evaluation Association and provides a Tip-a-Day by and for evaluators.