Category: Uncategorized

Overview:

• Welcome, introductions, intentions and programme, social contract

Intentions:

• Familiarise participants with the intentions, ways of working and the envisioned process for the 3 days, get to know one another, agree to ways of working/social contract and commit to quality attention and joint care for process
• Anchoring the process
• Finding and holding the energy

• Official welcome by Mampe on behalf of NMCF 

Since SeViSSA started, this is first Learning and Reflection event.  Key areas that need to be addressed are the reporting elements and demonstrating evidence of impact of the amazing work being done.

• Facilitators introduce themselves.  Overview of methods and facilitation as container:
  • Seamless co-creation/co-facilitation
  • Various streams of conversations
  • Free writing/journaling
  • Peer reflection/peer coaching
  • Experiential exercises and joint reflections
  • Right brain/creative exercises
  • Check in and check out daily
    
    
• Introductions (each person introduce themselves and their organization, province) and check-in

Participants checked in in with the overall feeling that is in their body, mind or spirit at that moment.

• Intention and process

Participants were asked to write themselves a welcome note to the workshop, comprising 3 sentences. They were also asked to set their own intentions for the workshop, thus at the end of the 3 days, if this workshop has been a success and worth my time x, y and z should have happened for me.

Overview of the intentions shared by participants…

• To learn new ideas, skills, and tools from others and share stories and experiences;
  • To participate fully, be energetic, cooperative, have fun and a positive attitude;
  • Learn what others are doing and be inspired;
  • To engage, ask questions, give feedback, listen and reflect;
  • To assess if on right track, identify ways to improve or grow the work and fill gaps;
  • To see how to take back and implement new knowledge;
  • To process, unpack and learn lessons from the work;
  • To improve on report-writing (tell the stories of impact);
  • To be able to single out a SeViSSA child from the rest;
  • To explore different issues and context of different coalitions and also best practices;
  • To explore good communication with each other and share different strategies;
  • To feel confident in the work that is being done;
  • To learn about self-care strategies (emotional wellbeing) from others;
  • Identify a way forward beyond SeViSSA;
  • To celebrate all the work and acknowledge the knowledge and experiences;
  • To treat each other with respect;
  • Improve ways of working and enable achieving of results;
  • To move from activity to impact in reporting (change made is missing);

• The following Social contract (agreement on ways of working) was agreed with the participants;
  • Trust allowance, emergent process
  • One meeting, one forum (speak through the facilitator)
  • Take responsibility for co-creation
  • Principle of 50:50 – give and take
  • Take responsibility or personal care and comfort
  • Embrace diversity – different ways of looking and see
  • Time management – use time efficiently
  • Being respectful
  • Ease up and have fun and colour in process
  • Phone on silent/vibration (answer responsibly and respectfully)

Each day participants volunteered for roles as process facilitators, time keepers and energizers. Sharing of these roles between the lead facilitators and participants helped (i) to maintain a tight energy container for the workshop, and (ii) to underscore the joint responsibility for a successful event.

This is an interactive report format. Participants are urged to add their thoughts, reflections and comments and share their understanding of what came out of the event. Please send your comments to Neftaly Malatjie so that we can incorporate your thoughts and highlights for future debate and development.

The report is meant to capture the creative nature, energy and mood of the event with the hope of inspiring the participants further by recording some of the key strands of the conversations and energies that were generated during this period.

The report also aims to highlight the key questions raised, the core insights gained, and further thoughts of the participants on the way forward. It is hoped that participants can share the conversations and emerging insights with their respective organisations and carry some of the thinking and inspiration on reflective learning and development into other spaces. This way, the inspiration, energy and creativity that was generated at the event is meant to live on and inform an enduring learning practice in the partnership of SeViSSA.

The workshop used an appreciative inquiry and it was framed as a joint learning process to identify, share and validate the experiences and evidence from the partners’ projects. The workshop methodology comprised a range of facilitator-led discussions in plenary and in small groups; writing/journaling; peer reflection/peer coaching; experiential exercises and reflection; right-brain/creative exercises; checking in and out of the day; debriefings; and presentations from participants in plenary. The experiences and perspectives of the participants were incorporated in the discussions.

Overview:

To allow participants to share concrete images and ideas of what success could look like at the end of the SeViSSA programme after 2019

Intentions:

• To get each of the SeViSSA partners to imagine a rich picture of the change they would like to see as a result of their interventions
• To highlight what the different pieces would look like together, and the role of each SeViSSA partner

Participants shared the following images and rich pictures of the success they envisaged and imagined at the end of the SeViSSA programme in 2019. Below are examples of some of the images drawn by the participants which struck a strong code with the entire group.

Overview:

• Explore the partners’ existing conceptions and ways of understanding social change as a foundation for thinking about the strategic entry point and types of change impacts they aim to achieve through SeViSSA

Intentions:

• To introduce some of the conceptions of social change
• To develop an understanding of how social change works
• To grapple with some of the complexities of social change interventions
• Learning the seeing and reading of impact from multiple angles and perspectives

The session started with a short input on conceptions of social change and a brainstorming on participants’ conceptions and assumptions about social change.

• Various streams of conversations were generated by participants from the first day of the workshop identified a number of pillars or dimensions around which the outcomes, impact and changes being effected by the SeViSSA programme are observed.

• The pillars were represented by a conceptual framework built around four main systemic issues – dimensions or quadrants of change, namely: cultural, relationship, individual and structural/system shown in the quadrants of change figure below.

• To deepen participants’ understanding of the systemic issues and dimensions around which the SeViSSA programme is impacting and transforming women and children, the facilitator took the participants through a change quadrant exercise outlined below.

• The different quadrants of social change were represented on the floor, and participants had to locate themselves where they felt their work is targeted at.

• Following an explanation of each quadrant/pillar or dimension of systemic change and the key issues it focuses on, each participant was then invited to step into the quadrant box that best represented the dimension of change they believed their organization has focused its energy, resources and capacity on in implementing SeViSSA and justify why.

• Selected participants within each of the quadrant/s were asked to share with others the reasons that placed them in a particular quadrant/s. They also shared on, (i) why they believe that that quadrant to be the key and most effective one for implementing the SeViSSA programme and bring about the change their beneficiaries should seek to achieve, and then (ii) identify the relationships between all the different quadrants and how they will address them in the remaining period of SeViSSA.

• Volunteers argued and justified their chosen change quadrant as the most strategic entry point for SeViSSA, with a view to convince fellow participants to change their quadrants. Most participants felt strongly about each of the quadrants and argued out their cases resulting in some of the participants shifting from their original quadrants after being convinced by their colleagues.

The following insights emerged from the quadrants of systemic change exercise;

• It is not easy to rally everyone, determine and agree on the resources, capacity and the key entry quadrant of change for SeViSSA.

• It is often difficult to address only one systemic dimension of change because all four quadrants are equally important. Many participants agreed that they need to be the change they wish to see in their own communities and country hence starting with oneself as an individual is paramount and a top priority entry point.

• The four dimensions/quadrants of change are blurred and interconnected e.g. systems/structures and culture are related and sometimes get in the way of the other.

• The four dimensions/quadrants of change are all related and depending on various factors and key social triggers and context, different quadrants of systemic change are pronounced differently in any given system/community.

• The way people/communities perceive and understand SeViSSA and the associated social change processes determines their thinking and views of the quadrant in which they see change as most prominent.

• At the end of the day, the work that partners are undertaking to bring about social change through SeViSSA ultimately affects or shows up at the level of the individual, even though that may not be their chosen strategic focus or entry point.

Intentions:

• To explore participants’ associations with learning, monitoring and evaluation and reporting and link it to their work on the SeViSSA programme
• To get participants in touch with their own associations and experiences of reporting, evidence and impact and create a tapestry of images/expressions on learning, monitoring, evaluation in the group

For 5 minutes, and using journals, participants were asked to freely write/draw and think on what comes to their minds when they hear about: impact, evidence and reporting. They were encouraged to journal, meditate and draw without limiting or censoring whatever came to their minds. Thereafter, the participants paired up to share with the next person and consciously notice what drew their attention from their peer’s sharing, and what caught the attention of their peers from their own sharing.

Following the individual reflections and free write/draw/meditation, volunteers were invited their reflections in plenary as well as highlight what had struck them from what their peers had shared with them. The plenary debriefing focused on: what has struck you? What collective picture emerges from our experiences, views and reflections? What is impact/evidence and reporting all about for us? Finding and grappling with our own definitions What do we all learn from the exercise, from the reflections and sharing and what does this mean for us in the context of SeViSSA and our everyday work, our conceptions of social change and impact, reporting and evidence?

• Following the journaling, reflection and sharing exercise, participants felt connected to their own impressions and experiences of monitoring, evaluation, reporting, evidence, impact and learning.

• They began to develop a sense of shared facets and patterns in how learning, reporting and evidence are experienced in the programme.

• Reporting is the process of communicating what has taken place, and the opportunity to share successes, challenges, and what the lessons are for future plans. Reporting can be written, audio, visual as it accounts for programme implementation.

• Evidence are verifiable results, tangible proof that show that the change has taken place. These include stories, data and pictures.

• Impact refers to the quality of change, how to measure it. It can sometimes be intended or unintended impact.  Assessing impact allows organisations to assess whether they are on right track or whether they need to change their focus or continue.

• In the conversation what emerged particularly was reflecting who reporting is for?  Is reporting for donors or is it for the beneficiaries? 

• Very often when thinking about impact or report, organisations forget that they are accountable to the context or the groups they work with as they are so focused on fulfilling donor needs for evidence.

• Conclusion –  partners are learning, monitoring, evaluation and reporting all the time anyways, though not always conscious of it. Monitoring and evaluation is about learning and improving but we often think/sense it is about proving (that I am good at this, that I am not stealing money, that what I do has impact, that I am worthy).

• Therefore, in the context of SeViSSA participants were encouraged to not try too hard or imagine something too sophisticated when it comes to learning, or seek and provide evidence for the impact of their work.

Overview:

• To provide an overview of the provincial SeVISSA strategy

Intentions:

• To build a pictoral overview of the strategies for SeVISSA at the provincial level
• To reflect on the articulation of strategy by partners vs what is written (consistency)

Each organisation was asked to complete their social change dashboard.  See annexure for completed social change dashboard.  Following this exercise, they were asked to present the overview of the provincial coalition’s intervention.  Below is a synthesis of the different presentations. From the presentations and assessment at a provincial, the following emerged:

Area	Western Cape	Gauteng	Eastern Cape	Limpopo
Focus of work	Farming communities	Working with youth in Diepsloot and other townships?	Working in Pedi	Working in two villages (and schools in those villages)
Approaches	Helping groups to make informed choices and build self-esteem, promoting self-reliance, capacity building, empowerment and awareness of gender-based violence	Empowering youth with skills and knowledge to make informed decisions, promoting financial independence and mental wellbeing as contributors to reducing gender based violence	Interventions to assist girls to report incidents of sexual violence and supporting empowerment and activism of different members of community around sexual and gender based violence	Supporting education system (educators, school management and curriculum support) and community engagement and empowerment
Interventions	Educational support (aftercare, career planning)Life skills and psychosocial supportSupporting women and girls leading local initiativesAwareness and prevention activities (including campaigns, community dialogues)	Entrepreneurial educationEducational supportLeadership camps and skillsAnti-violence buddiesAwareness and prevention activitiesTeacher training and curriculum supportCompetitionsYES Clubs	Leadership campsCommunity school – peace clubsCommunity dialoguesAwareness campaignsStakeholder forumsIntergenerational dialoguesAssistance to victims of violenceAdvocacy interventions	Curriculum supportTraining of educators and SGBsWork to create positive environment for learnersLeadership campsSelf help groupsCommunity dialogues (including intergenerational)Engagement with service providers