On Thursday June 2nd the M&E Thursday Talk series was hosted by Michael Quinn Patton & Charmagne Campbell-Patton who led a discussion on Evaluative Efforts in Peacebuilding: Thinking Globally, Holistically, and Systemically.
M&E Thursday Talk: Evaluative Efforts in Peacebuilding – Thinking Globally, Holistically, and Systemically from DME for Peace on Vimeo.
Global challenges like conflict, massive cross-border movement of displaced persons, virulent super-viruses and contagious diseases that threaten world health,climate change, dying oceans, global terrorism, global food insecurity, global economic interdependence, and multinational capitalism, to name but a few examples, operate beyond national borders and regional or sectoral domains. Technology knows no national or agency boundaries. Moreover, these global systems and challenges are interconnected and dynamic. Global innovators and global systems change initiatives are beginning to think and act from the perspective of a complex, dynamic, and interconnected world system.
Peacebuilding evaluators need special perspectives and competences to engage and evaluate these global change efforts, to monitor, improve, help develop, and ultimately judge the effectiveness, efficiency, relevance, and sustainability of these global change efforts.
Michael Quinn Patton, evaluation leader and Utilization Focused Evaluation founder and Director, and Charmagne Campbell-Patton, Director of Organizational Learning and Evaluation, Utilization Focused Evaluation, will talk about thinking globally, holistically, and systemically; in essence, thinking of the world and its peoples as the evaluand. This means thinking beyond a world of nation-states and what this means for peacebuilding evaluation.
About the speakers:
Michael Quinn Patton is the Founder and CEO of Utilization-Focused Evaluation, an independent organizational development and program evaluation organization.
After receiving his doctorate in sociology from the University of Wisconsin–Madison, he spent 18 years on the faculty of the University of Minnesota (1973-1991), including five years as Director of the Minnesota Center for Social Research and ten years with the Minnesota Extension Service.
Patton has written many books on the art and science of program evaluation, in which he emphasizes the importance of designing evaluations to ensure their usefulness, rather than simply creating long reports that may never get read or never result in any practical changes. He has written about evaluation, and worked in the field beginning in the 1970s when evaluation in the non-profit sector was a relatively new development.
Patton is one of only two recipients of both the Alva and Gunnar Myrdal Award (awarded by the Evaluation Research Society and subsequently by the American Evaluation Association) for “outstanding contributions to evaluation use and practice” and the Paul F. Lazarsfeld Award for lifetime contributions to evaluation theory (awarded by the American Evaluation Association). The Society for Applied Sociology honored him with the 2001 Lester F. Ward Award for Outstanding Contributions to Applied Sociology. He was President of the American Evaluation Association in 1988 and Co-Chair of the 2005 International Evaluation Conference in Toronto sponsored jointly by the American and Canadian evaluation associations. He sits on the Editorial Advisory Board for The Foundation Review.
Charmagne Campbell-Patton is the Director of Organizational Learning and Evaluation at Utilization-Focused Evaluation. In this role, Charmagne works to support organizations working for social justice by embedding evaluative thinking across programs and operations. She brings eight years of program design, implementation and evaluation experience to this work, including work on youth civic engagement programs with Innovations in Civic Participation, peacebuilding programs with Creative Peace Initiatives, Women Waging Peace and Femmes Africa Solidarity, and global competence education programs with World Savvy. Charmagne holds a BA in Political Science from Grinnell College and an MA in International Peace and Conflict Resolution from American University’s School of International Service. She co-authored the article “Conceptualizing and Evaluating the Complexities of Youth Civic Engagement” in the Handbook of Research on Civic Engagement in Youth. She has lived, worked and travelled in North and Central America, the Caribbean, Central and Eastern Europe, West and East Africa, and South Asia, but remains a loyal Minnesotan. She has served on the board of several local organizations, including the Global Learning Advisory Board at Minnesota Department of Education, Citizens for Global Solutions and First Universalist Foundation.