March 19, 2014 Workshop: Demonstrating Value for Local Food Funders
Vanessa Lam
Registration here http://www.eventbrite.ca/e/demonstrating-value-for-local-food-funders-tickets-10623293557
Demonstrating Value for Local Food Funders
Garth Yule, Engagement Manager, Junxion Strategy
Wednesday, 19 March 2014 from 9:00 AM to 4:00 PM (PDT)
Vancouver, BC
Do you fund projects or organizations in the local food sector in British Columbia? Do you find it challenging to evaluate and communicate the impact of your work and the work of your funded organizations?
It's time for a new, refreshing approach to impact evaluation and reporting - one that builds capacity and engagement on both sides of the funding relationship.
Garth Yule of Junxion Strategy is offering this full-day, hands-on workshop to introduce local food funders and their funded organizations to the Demonstrating Value framework. Junxion Strategy is offering workshops like this one to serve the specific and evolving reporting needs of social sector innovators.
Shorter versions of this workshop were delivered at Social Venture Institute Hollyhock in 2012 (where it earned the highest participant rating) and at the Social Enterprise World Forum in Calgary in 2013, where the room was packed to capacity.
How Demonstrating Value Works
Potluck Cafe used the Demonstrating Value framework to show Vancity Community Foundation (and other important stakeholders) how their business was supporting people with barriers to employment, feeding nutritious meals to people in the neighbourhood, purchasing and sourcing from other local social enterprises, and still covering a very significant proportion of their expenses with earned revenue. Other forms of grant reporting had failed to capture all these dimensions of Potluck's value and made them simply look like a nonprofit with a not-quite-profitable catering business.
What Will Happen at the Workshop
In the workshop Garth will lead participants through a simplified version of the process that Potluck Cafe (and dozens of other social enterprises and nonprofits) have followed to create a "performance snapshot". Participants will leave with a draft snapshot design for their enterprise, a comprehensive list of related metrics and indicators, a detailed plan for developing evaluation and data collection systems (including rough costs and timeline) to support ongoing use and updates of their snapshot, and referrals to resources for data visualization, performance management, impact evaluation and more.
We assume that workshop participants either manage or are closely involved in a non-profit or enterprise that will be the subject of the "enterprise snapshots" we will create together. While Demonstrating Value can provide benefits to a standalone social enterprise or nonprofit organization, it adds the most value in the context of a funding relationship. To get the most from the workshop, we encourage funders to reach out to one or more of their funded groups (or vice versa) and register to attend the workshop together.
Getting Foodies Together for a Feast of Ideas
Communicating impact is a relevant topic for any kind of mission-driven organization. By focusing on one sector, group discussions in the workshop can go more in-depth on food system issues without losing relevance for other participants in the room. Throughout the workshop Garth will choose illustrative cases and examples from food-related organizations and enterprises. Even within the local food sector there is a huge diversity in organizations and roles, and workshops like this are a first step towards developing shared evaluation platforms for collective impact projects (although that level of organizing is outside the scope of this workshop).
How Funders Use Demonstrating Value
Bryn Sadownik, Manager of Evaluation and Community Impact at Vancity Community Foundation (VCF) will speak about how the framework was developed and applied in VCF's Social Enterprise Portfolio, how it supports their strategic funding objectives, and why they prefer it to other available options for grant reporting. Bryn is the primary creator of Demonstrating Value and will share expert knowledge about how it relates to other emerging impact evaluation tools and frameworks.
Junxion Strategy has a history of working with funders and foundations to develop their strategies and engage their stakeholders. More information about Junxion Strategy's service offering in outreach and engagement for social sectors organizations is here.
Junxion Strategy is the official consulting partner to the Demonstrating Value Resource Society and offers customized consulting support to funders who would like to add Demonstrating Value to their program evaluation activities. For example: in 2012 Garth developed a customized application of the Demonstrating Value framework for the BC Association of Farmers Markets, which became theFarmers Market Impact Toolkit.
Demonstrating Value Resource Society is an independent non-profit organization, and is the community and resource hub for the Demonstrating Value framework and tools. In addition to their respective roles at Junxion Strategy and Vancity Community Foundation, Garth Yule and Bryn Sadownik sit on the Board of the Demonstrating Value Resource Society, whose mission is to share the Demonstrating Value framework with a broader audience of mission-driven organizations. More information about Demonstrating Value in general is here. For more detail on the framework specifics, see the Demonstrating Value Workbook, which is the core of the workshop offering.
Vancity Community Foundation is the founding and leading user of the Demonstrating Value framework, and has used it as the reporting framework for its social enterprise portfolio program since 2009.