Morning Session with Paul Born - Breakthrough Community Change

In this deeply needed workshop, based on his just-released book Breakthrough Community Change, Paul will share practical strategies that can catalyze local communities and guide them to make significant progress on seemingly intractable community problems. Learn to tackle the root cause of many of your community challenges and how to achieve population-level change outcomes.

Learning Outcomes

• Understand how breakthroughs lead to a deeper understanding of a common agenda and how it changes everything.
• Increase knowledge of the latest community engagement strategies to unite your community.
• Apply key mindsets to strengthen impact of your community change efforts.
• Identity personal and community skill sets needed to strengthen collective action.
• Learn community conversation techniques you can utilize right away.

Paul will lead participants through a learning journey on how to mobilize their community to develop a common agenda that changes everything. He will help participants learn how to engage community members to move beyond individualism and isolation, and join together in a plan for community change.

With Paul, participants will explore how their community can accelerate impact and collectively tackle challenges to improve the quality of life for everyone. Participants will discover powerful strategies and a methodology for bringing communities together to uncover hidden assets and transform deep-rooted challenges, including identifying their community’s readiness for change, forming Leadership, Action, and Strategy Teams, creating a common agenda, and establishing plans for community engagement. Approaches and skill sets needed to do the work described and demonstrated.

Afternoon Session with Mark Cabaj  - Understanding and Capturing Impact

In this hot off-the-shelf workshop, Mark will share a range of new frameworks, tools, and practices that community-based change-makers can use to better understand and track the results and learnings of their collaborative efforts, including alternatives to traditional evaluation practices (aka zombie practices) that get in the way of community innovation, collective action, and change. These frameworks are alternatives to traditional evaluation practices and will explore ideas such as : contribution vs attribution, 360-degree community intelligence, accountability, and strategic learning. All Frameworks that help us better understand impact and the power of collaborative community change.

Learning Outcomes

• Understand a multi-level results framework that includes five types of systems changes and three types of impacts.
• Increase knowledge of ten principles for evaluating community change, such as “Feed the accountability beast quickly so you can get on to strategic learning,” “No narratives without numbers, no numbers without narratives,” “Tap into 360-degree community intelligence,” and “Aim to understand contribution, not attribution.”
• Demonstrate how five practical techniques can immediately better focus strategic learning and impact tracking efforts.

Veteran strategist and evaluator Mark Cabaj brings his expertise in outcome tracking and impact evaluation to this workshop. Participants will learn about a more compelling way of understanding and tracking the learning and impacts that emerge from community efforts to transform deep-rooted challenges. Mark will describe various evaluation methods that are best suited for community change work. He will also provide key understanding for how we might understand system level impact and to track population level change outcomes. Participants will learn how evaluation can support collaborative community change efforts and provide some key frameworks and methods of evaluation that support collaborative outcomes.