What do Volunteers, Evaluation Networks and creating Equilibrium have to do with each other?
Like almost everyone else starting in Monitoring and Evaluation (M&E), my job was to monitor and/or evaluate the various projects for the organization. I sat at a desk, collected data, analyzed it, worked with various teams, reported on results, and occasionally, attended trainings on topics relevant to M&E. My network was comprised of those whom I worked with at the office and a few occasional international connections. Like any employee, I aspired to grow, learn, and be promoted as the years went by. I had a goal to climb up the ladder and reach its top step.
But then, I attended the EvalMENA conference in Tunis where I was introduced to volunteering in evaluation networks, and my life changed.
Evaluation Networks
Evaluation networks like Voluntary Organizations for Professional Evaluation (VOPEs), Eval4Action, EvalYouth, and others were founded because they had a purpose and a function within the evaluation ecosystem. For example,
VOPEs exist to meet goals like advancing national evaluation efforts.
Eval4Action advocates to meet the SDGs for 2030.
EvalYouth supports and promotes Young and Emerging Evaluators (YEEs) to participate in the evaluation ecosystem.
At first, I wanted to attend the EvalMENA conference to learn a few new methods to apply in my work. I was also keen on collecting new business cards to impress my management with for potential partnerships. Focused, I introduced myself and met with so many practitioners from the Middle East and North African (MENA) Region. Although I did network, I found that, many of them were volunteers in VOPEs. Some were active while others were not. I also met Khalil Bitar who introduced me to the concept of volunteering in the various evaluation networks and told me about EvalYouth. I then realized that perhaps there is more to the evaluation field than developing indicators and being promoted.
Who is a Volunteer?
At that time, I did not understand what it meant to volunteer in these networks. The term volunteer usually sparks an image of “helping” others. Although it might be partially true, I understood later, as a YEE volunteer, that it is not all that we do. Volunteering actively within evaluation networks is a selfless process and a learning journey (if you allow it to be) that takes a lot of time and effort. Being an active volunteer, involves:
Working within and outside your area of expertise. I remember sitting behind the screen of one of the design applications to design a flyer. I had the app open on one tab and a tutorial in another tab. I spent hours minimizing text to fit into boxes and arranging colors to complement each other. I am not a designer, I am an evaluator, I would think. Sharing it with the team and collecting feedback, I completed it. The flyer was sent to hundreds of inboxes and was part of multiple presentations to showcase our work as a volunteer network.
As volunteers, we learn quickly that we have to manage projects, teams, and budgets. We communicate with each other and handle different team member agendas and expectations to ensure that the journey runs smooth. If you have not guessed it yet, we also design our own flyers, advertise them on social media, and come up with creative and innovative ideas and initiatives. Basically, replacing the instinctive response of “I don’t know how to do this” or “This is not my job” with “I will look it up or ask someone from the group who does” helped many of us gain a plethora of skills that carry us throughout our careers.
Managing your time and giving time. Time is hard to find for anyone, but many of us, volunteers, recognized from the beginning that we are a team and that, as individuals, we are not supposed to do all the work by ourselves. During the Eval4Action MENA Regional Consultation, we had less than a month to launch. Nonetheless, we worked as a global team, albeit living in many different countries. We planned over emails, met online, prepared for the launch, assigned roles, prepared again, followed up with each other, launched, and then quickly debriefed. It was an international event, and it was a great success.
If you look around you, you will find that a volunteer who completes the whole project on their own, most of the time, neither learns nor is able to teach. Their team will know that whether they show up or not, that person will complete the work. Not because of their insistence on meeting deadlines, but because of their lack of faith in the collective and its foundational ability to grow. We must accept that not everything will be perfect and that this journey is a learning one. Instead, we should build faith in each other’s work, acknowledge the lessons, celebrate the wins, and take stock of it all as a collective.
Belonging to a collective(s). Imagine you throw a pebble in a pond. The pebble will create forces of ripples that will only end when the force wavers down. This is what the collective looks like. A collective can be the team you work with and/or the evaluation networks that partner together to meet common goals. Collectives are not just there to support each other but to also hold each other accountable. Volunteers, volunteer networks, and other stakeholders involved in the evaluation field, are responsible and accountable for making their experiences better. For example, as a volunteer, I am not an individual working on my own. I am part of many collectives, like the EvalYouth MENA collective, Eval4Action and EvalYouth collectives, and many more. Being part of those collectives is not solely about the individual within them. It is natural to join a group to also benefit. However, it is more about how these collectives’ function within each other and together to shape the evaluation ecosystem for them and for others. The idea that a collective creates a ripple effect could be interpreted as old members supporting new members, networks partnering with each other to create an even bigger effect, and different volunteers uniting to create new initiatives that help create global equilibrium.
Being part of an Evaluation Based Collective
Why is having an Equilibrium Important?
Through this journey and within this process, many of us volunteers, seek equilibrium. An equilibrium is a status quo, where youth, women, and men, especially from the global south, volunteering in evaluation networks or not, are part of the evaluation ecosystem, not as beneficiaries, but as decision-makers with rooted seats at the table. We seek to advance the evaluation field to build a robust and inclusive evaluation ecosystem.
Why is having an Equlibrium Important?
Marco Segone told us, back when I was a fresh YEE getting into volunteering, that no one will open doors for us, we must open them ourselves. So, many of us did and, although we are no longer YEEs, we still do. We are mostly volunteers in the evaluation networks and most of us volunteer with these networks to make a change and create equilibrium within the evaluation ecosystem. Some might reject the proposed ideas and fight against them, but many will listen and become part of the force of change. These will be your people, your collective, and together you will be the activists learning and working together to create a more inclusive global discourse on evaluation.
Getting into volunteering, I learned that if I wanted to advocate for an idea or an initiative, then I can. This is a privilege that I continuously value because if it weren’t for other volunteers, who previously built collectives and created ripple effects, then I would not have been invited to be part of the equilibrium and thus would not have become part of the bigger collective. That is why, volunteerism looks like activism, and volunteers are considered activists. Sometimes, in the midst of it all, when we are minimizing texts into boxes, asking ourselves why we are doing this and thinking that perhaps it is all irrelevant. We meet people, or they send us messages, telling us that they remember us and our work and how all of this made an impact on their career journey. This is when we understand that our work has meaning and that we have tilted that scale a bit more to reach equilibrium.
These days, like almost everyone else working in evaluation, my job is to evaluate projects and programs, but also to volunteer and lead as a volunteer in evaluation networks. I still sit at a desk, collect data, analyze it, work with various teams, report on results, and occasionally, attend and give trainings on topics relevant to evaluation, whether as a consultant or as a volunteer. My network is rich and includes local, regional, and global practitioners in evaluation and other disciplines. I still aspire to grow, learn, and be able to share the knowledge I have with others. My ambitions are not limited by the linearity of a ladder, but are boundless with possibilities.
As you can see from the blog post above, I am really interested in volunteering. Much has been written about volunteers in general, but not about volunteers in evaluation networks, which is a totally different story. This post is the beginning of a series of posts about this topic. If you are interested, let us start a conversation around volunteering within the evaluation ecosystem and let me know your thoughts.