CARE Failing Forward

Telling the Truth in Love

Rachel Wolff talks about the journey to cede power to local organizations, and continuing to push to center people in the most marginalized communities as the leaders, responders, and decision makers in their own lives. We need to put more power and more voice for impact into our partners, and be accountable for impact. Rachel talks about Nepal's Humanitarian Partnerships Platform, and how much faster partners are at stepping into the lead. Mutual respect, being flexible, and telling the truth in love so we can all get better are powerful tools. And speaking of power--remember when you have it, and step back to leave room for others.

Don’t Feed the Zombies

Kevin Starr talks about his article "Don't Feed the Zombies" and how if we focus on measuring reach, instead of caring about impact, we end up doing harm in the world. His vision is a world where you can't get taken seriously if you can't talk about real, measurable change in the lives of people we serve, and the evidence to back it up. "The minute you commit to impact, and a definition thereof, you're starting to be part of the solution." What's a definition of impact? Evidence of change that happened in someone's life, and a plausible description about how your part in that change worked. If we (especially donors) are not accountable for impact, they end up supporting groups that aren't accountable to the people they serve, and are not driving for the full potential of what we can get done in the world. Here are some other links to check out:

• Making Ourselves Accountable
• Strategy: Go Big or Go... Oh, Just Go Big
• The Seven Commandments of Funding
• The Lazy Funders Guide to High-Yield Philanthropy

Life Happens: Balancing Rigor and Lived Truth

Anne Sprinkel talks about trying to implement, translate, and apply learnings from a Randomized Controlled Trial (RCT) in the middle of a pandemic. "Communities are not laboratories, and they deserve so much more." She talks about how to combine qualitative data and triangulate different perspectives in an RCT, and all of the learning around it. "Simply taking one person at their word...that is truth." Anne first joined the podcast in 2019, talking about Square Pegs and Round Holes and fitting research to community needs. Nearly four years later, she's talking about what their RCT told them, social norms findings, and balancing people's lived truth with "rigorous" research findings.

From $2 to $20: getting more impact for the dollar in international development

Mark Muckerheide talks about what it would take to close the gap that international development aims to work on. Right now, Mark's team estimates that many programs get $2 for every dollar they put in. To truly close the gap, it needs to be $20 per dollar in. So how do we get 10 times better? Focus on putting "money in her pockets" and think about measuring efficiency by the benefits to women who make less than $4 per day. That means we need to think about the bigger system, and fixing the market failures that prevent women from participating fully.

Why Resilience Beats Sustainability

Sustainability fails because it assumes progress is a straight line, and things will always be getting better. Gloria Steele talks about why our thinking about how COVID, climate change, and conflict show us that we need resilience, the ability of people and systems to bounce back. Sustainability is continuing to do what others define as progress. Resilience is being able to choose the path that works for you. What's an example of resilience? Refusing to allow gender norms to define who has capacity, and what capacities they have. Another tip she has is "we are only as good as we are able to learn."

Stop Analyzing and Act

Crystal Simeoni, the Director of NAWI Collective, shares tips for decolonizing, deconstructing, bravery, and joy in development. International development gets so much wrong, but there are ways to be better. Some of Crystal's tips include: align your operations with your values, give up power, center care, and just get it done. You know what you need to do; stop analyzing and act. A few other key pieces of advice: "slow it way down," "pull your head up from your laptop," and "the narrative of capacity is a lie." Crystal helps think about redefining success, and who gets to build the future. And if she could wave a magic wand, Crystal would have a feminist audit firm take charge of operations.

Perception is Everything

When you're leading a change to have more equity in your staffing practices, people who hold privilege will feel that they are losing power, no matter what the data says. You also don't usually get to such a profound organizational change unless you REALLY have a problem. Listen to Esther Watts talk about how CARE Ethiopia had to change it's policies and practices so the staff was no longer 26% women--the worst equity rate of any office in the CARE federation, and what they had to do to get there. Diversity makes a difference, and you have to have a lot of courage to get there. Esther's advice? "go go go. Stand by the courage of your convictions."

Sit in the Failure

We learn more when we have to sit in a failure than we do when we succeed. Listen to Sarah Eckhoff talk about what happened when we offered and opt out to CARE's Gender Marker. It showed us a lot about commitments to the process, data overload, and when reporting is optional. It also changed our approach to supporting teams in the gender marker process.

Get Over It: Learning from Failure 2022

"If failure is uncomfortable, get over it." Rebecca Rosetti and Tara Ross talk about CARE's 2022 Learning from Failure, and how their background in laboratory sciences helped them learn early that failure is inevitable. "Failure is just data." They talk about what CARE sees as big gaps this year--partnerships and sustainability--and how we can now see that projects are improving over time. Gender and M&E have been two big areas of improvement since we started.

The Data Belongs to Them

In part 2 of her podcast, Kalkidan Yihun talks about how to make sure that data transforms into action--and especially that women and girls who contribute data get that data back in ways they can use themselves. Instead of extractive processes that feed into a black box that communities never see, think about how to format and share data so women can act. Who needs to see it? Who will take action? What ways make sharing that data safe for people who provided it? Kal coordinates the Women Respond project, and offers tips and lessons about what doesn't work (and does) in putting women's voices first.

We should not be a burden

Kalkidan Yihun talks about how to redesign data collection so it centers what people--especially women--want and need, instead of being a burden on their time and lives because of what's easiest for the data collectors and researchers. Kal coordinates the Women Respond project, and offers tips and lessons about what doesn't work (and does) in putting women's voices first.

Always Have a Plan B: How to Assess Risk within Partnerships

What do you do when your pursuit of a necessary program partner falls through? Don’t waste time on pushing a failed strategy, and don’t be afraid to move on. How do you guarantee commitment from partners early on? Assess interest from partners to ensure equal buy-in on both sides.  Naureen Chaudhry identifies two challenges and the resulting lessons experienced by the CARE Pakistan team while working with female entrepreneurs through the CARE Ignite Program.

Know Your Partners

Tran Thi Minh Nguyet discusses her experience with working to increase access to finance for local micro and small women-led businesses in Vietnam through the CARE Ignite program. Partnerships with microfinance institutions can prove to be very difficult in these contexts. How to work against experiencing potential failures with these partners? Build in flexibility in financial product development that allows for pivots in the face of issues. Additionally, have a deep understanding of your partner from the start and develop output based contracts with potential partners to prevent failures during product rollout.

What we think we know: why cash didn’t work without addressing GBV

Cash transfers designed to help women re-enter markets after COVID-19 lockdowns lifted worked really well, AFTER we added programming to address GBV. Partway through the project, gender dialogues showed that women were facing so much violence that even cash was not enough to get back into the market. So the project re-designed their work to include social norms and addressing GBV, and helped more than 1,400 vendors get back on track. Media Matyanga talks about what the team learned, how they learned it, and what they did next.

La conversación difícil e incómoda (en español)

Como trabajadores humanitarios/as la conversación difícil e incómoda es muchas veces necesaria, si de verdad queremos tratar a fondo temas como el antirracismo, la descolonización y la igualdad de género.  

 

Resumen: Considerando temas mencionados entre los diferentes podcasts anteriores y en vísperas de la Vision 2030 decidimos realizar nuestro primer podcast en Castellano con el fin de hablar sobre temas como lo son la aceptación de los errores, el antirracismo, la descolonización y feminismo. Y cómo crear espacios de reflexión dentro de los diversos equipos que promuevan el reconocimiento de los errores, la deconstrucción y análisis sobre interseccionalidad es crucial para llevar nuestro trabajo humanitario... a un nivel más humanitario.

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English:

Title: As humanitarians, the difficult and uncomfortable conversation is often necessary, if we really want to deal in depth with issues such as anti-racism, decolonization, and gender equality.  

Summary: Considering the topics mentioned in the different previous podcasts and on the eve of Vision 2030 we decided to make our first podcast in Spanish in order to talk about issues such as the acceptance of mistakes, anti-racism, decolonization, and feminism. And how creating spaces for reflection within the various teams that promote the recognition of mistakes, deconstruction, and analysis on intersectionality is crucial to take our humanitarian work... to a more humanitarian level.