Internal evaluation practice – CDRAs experience.docVIP

Towards “better evaluation” – an account of one internal practice Key note address to the Australasian Evaluation Society (AES) Conference, September 2007, Melbourne Sue Soal, Community Development Resource Association, 2007 Hello everybody. It is good to be here. To start, and as a citizen of a country itself absorbed with living and dealing with the aftermath of colonialism and dispossession, I wish to acknowledge that the traditional owners of the land we are meeting on are the Wurrundjeri. I also pay my respects to the Wurrundjeri Elders and to the Elders of other Victorian Aboriginal communities. Further, I would like to thank the AES, most sincerely for the invitation to come here and talk about CDRA’s work. I would also like to thank Patricia Rogers for shepherding me through this whole experience. Thank you Patricia for your generosity and essential critical guidance. World Vision Australia was instrumental in bringing me here and I thank you too for supporting the voice of CDRA (and NGOs) in this conference. This morning, I am going to be talking about the internal, or self-evaluation, practice of my organisation, the Community Development Resource Association – CDRA. In so doing, I hope to offer an account of a very particular kind of organisational life. At CDRA we pursue internal evaluation, as an integral and continuous organisational function. It is an approach that permeates all aspects of organisational life: from the invisible formative heights of identity and values, through culture, strategy and practice, right down to tangible process and procedure; method and tool. The first thing I will tell you a bit about, for a few minutes, is CDRA itself. We are a 20-year old South African not-for-profit organisation serving social development and civil society initiatives around the world. Formed at the height of the anti-Apartheid struggle to provide organisation development services to development and activist organisations, we have our roots in prog