Spotlight on Monitoring, Evaluation and Learning at the Disability Rights Fund
I spoke to a wide range of organisations about how they evaluate participatory grant making. There was a range of different approaches; quite a number said that they don’t evaluate their participatory grant making at all, while others said they use standardised and traditional grant monitoring and reporting, and a small handful took a really exciting and innovative approach.
I have already written about some of the key questions, the power dynamics involved in evaluation and what you could be evaluating here, but I think one of the key takeaways to all participatory work is to continuously ask yourself and the communities you work with: ‘Why are we doing it like this? How should/could we do it instead?’
I was impressed by the work of the Disability Rights Fund in Boston, particularly their Evaluation & Learning Manager, Melanie Kawano-Chiu. Melanie spoke about the importance of using the values of participatory grant making and ensuring they are applied to evaluation.
“It’s not just about taking data to prove a point; it’s about how you engage grant holders and communities in the development of the framework, the assumptions and your approach.”
Melanie also highlighted the importance of implementation — there’s no point doing evaluation if nothing comes of it. If you don’t use and respond to the learning, then it’s not worth the time. For the Disability Rights Fund, the approach is formative — a continuous conversation with their grant holders and staff throughout the life cycle of the grants.
They utilise action research techniques such as learning journals. Their staff complete these journals, the content of which is analysed to help the Fund recognise trends, focuses and challenges in the activities and projects they support. This allows them to see whether what they are noticing out in the field is aligning with the strategies of both their grant holders and the Disability Rights Fund itself. It also allows them to reflect on the achievements of their grant holders while reducing their workload, as they are not required to conduct arduous reporting. They also engage in continuous check-in conversations with staff and grant holders to understand what they are achieving, what change is happening and what challenges they are facing.
This approach has allowed the Disability Rights Fund to recognise that technical assistance is vital to achieving change. For their grant holders, the things that have really helped achieve success have been support with press releases, up-skilling and capacity building. The approach also helped them have a broader understanding of what had been achieved by the grant holders and Fund.
This values-driven approach to evaluation is really exciting. It takes away the academic enigma and language that can often surround evaluation and uses engaging and simple techniques to capture the things that matter and help improve disability rights across the globe. Melanie reflected that getting staff and grant holders to understand that monitoring, evaluation and learning is helpful and not dull has been much of the work, and great efforts have been made to ensure that the tools used are accessible and developed collectively, and that training and support has been provided.
The Disability Rights Fund have a clear overarching aim of ‘empowering persons with disabilities to advocate for equal rights and full participation in society’ that all their grants are working towards. As well as this, grant managers support smaller grant numbers than other funders, but these methods and approaches are replicable across the field. They support principles of trust-based philanthropy by enabling stronger relationships, allowing networks to develop as those facing similar challenges can be more easily be identified and connected, using a life-cycle of learning where their approach to grant making and funding can be more flexible based on the context in which grant holders are working.
You can find out more about the Disability Rights Fund here: http://disabilityrightsfund.org/
