“So What?” – Your Weekly Guide to Advocacy With Impact
Lovingly selected and lightly snarked by Team APEP: David Devlin-Foltz, Susanna Dilliplane, and Christine Ferris
The American Evaluation Association (AEA)’s annual conference in Chicago featured record crowds and Exemplary Evaluations in a Multicultural World: Learning from Evaluation’s Successes Across the Globe – if you could find them in the maze that is the Chicago Hyatt. We’ll share presentations from sessions we had a hand in. We will categorically deny any connection to this AEA anthem, however. So wrong.
Good discourse on discourse
It was a panel on discourse that inspired discourse – thanks to fun slides and an engaged audience who offered thoughtful comments and questions. In case you missed it, CARE’s Milkah Kihunah and APEP’s Susanna Dilliplane co-presented our pilot approach to measuring the quality of discourse on child marriage among key USG officials – both from CARE’s perspective as an advocate, and from APEP’s methodological perspective. And we shared in-depth qualitative research from Tostan International’s Ben Cislaghi on how discourse on child marriage changed over time in rural West African communities.
Advocacy as a Team Game—Evaluating Multi-Stakeholder Advocacy An overflow crowd sat literally at the feet of advocacy evaluation cool guys Jared Raynor (TCC), Sue Hoechstetter (Alliance for Justice), Carlyn Orians (ORS Impact), and Jewlya Lynn (Spark Policy Institute) as they respectively provided an overview of the multi-stakeholder evaluation challenge, assessed the way organizations rely on each other, analyzed who contributed what to policy change, and analyzed the nature and boundaries of an advocacy field. APEP’s DDF offered immoderate moderation and got leg cramps.
Next Week: No Way. Last Week: Today.
“So What?” will be “dark” again next week for Thanksgiving. Be thankful for our return December 4th. One APEP-per marked his first Veterans’ Day as the father of a vet and is thankful to see evidence of strong charitable support for those who chose to serve. John Oliver said what can’t be said on network TV about the Paris attacks. We’ll give John and Last Week Tonight the last word – and it ain’t polite.
The Aspen Planning and Evaluation Program helps leading foundations and nonprofit organizations plan, assess and learn from their efforts to promote changes in knowledge, attitudes, behaviors and policies in the US and internationally. To learn more about our tools and services, visit http://www.aspeninstitute.org/apep
