We are already on the third day of this evaluation meeting! The morning started with the group being "locked out" of our training venue for a little while and waking up to the fresh December breeze while waiting. Once inside, the programme kicked off directly with a session dedicated to self assessment.
Step 1: Put some soft background music and find a comfortable spot and possition.
Step 2: Close your eyes and let Nik's voice guide you through different reflection questions.
Step 3: Remember, review and assess moments lived and emotions felt...
In short, the objective of this first session was to explore the personal development and growth as a result of being a part of this project, to provide the space for participants to explore their own unique journey in the Activist Factory.
Following the reflection, participants had time to record their journey by writing in their notebook their key thoughts regarding difficulties, failures, successes, emotions and learning. Then, the group was divided into small teams with an interviewer who had to ask questions about the experience and support the interviewee to identify learning and a recorder who wrote down key notes and points of interest from the interviewees responses. The session finished with a plenary and exchange of comments on the different exercises.
The first session after lunch was dedicated to one of the most interesting areas of assessment: the impact! For this, national teams had time to gather and present a series of numbers regarding the impact of their campaign in their communities: channels used for communication, number of posts, number of events, number of participants and team members, and statistics regarding the followers, likes and reach of their publications.
Besides, participants were introduced to a series of questions regarding impact measurement:
- What were the online waves of your campaign?
- What were the offline waves you made?
- What changed in the participants about the topic?
- What impact you saw in your organization?
- What connections did you make to continue contributing to social change?
- What could you still do now to increase/sustain this impact?
Finally, after the second coffee break, the last session of the day followed up on yesterday's work on enriching the manual, this time by inviting participants to work on their personal testimonials, which they had to prepare and type in and which will be included in the final project resource.
It was a very intense, productive day in which we finally "felt" the numbers and outcomes of each of our campaigns, which gave us a very positive and proud feeling at the end and made us believe more than ever that, together, we can make the change.
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