Monitoring & Evaluation...the next stage

Here at Quest we've just held our annual staff training days - important for keeping everyone up to date, sharing experiences and insights about leadership, and of course, messing about in the woods and having fun!

On the monitoring & evaluation front as well, we've been getting our leaders ready to carry on the great work started by our teams and leaders last year - gathering data, getting the volunteers, and importantly, also getting the community involved in the process too.  This is vital if we are to hold ourselves accountable to the people and environments we are supporting.

Just one great tool to try - play along at home kids - is participatory mapping....here's a quick run down:

1. Gather your group of people in a circle, everyone seated all at the same level around a large piece of paper so no one feels they are more or less important than another (including the facilitator).
2. Describe the activity, its purpose, and how it will work.
3. Remind participants that this is a group learning exercise, and that it is not necessary for everyone to agree on everything. However, everyone in the group deserves respect. 
4. Distribute markers to all participants.
5. Ask participants to work together to draw a map of their community/school. If they have never seen a map, explain that you are asking them to imagine how their community would look to someone flying over it, and draw that image on the paper or on the ground.
6. Ask the participants to draw all the resources in their community in the form of simple drawings on pieces of paper or post-its, then to place these where they are in the community. e.g. houses, health facilities, schools, religious building, wells, markets, doctors, etc.
7. Ask the group to identify what is good about the map and resources (perhaps suggest they come up with 5 good things) - record this.  This can help to build pride in the community.
8. Ask the group to identify anything they would like to change about the map - moving around the papers and adding in new ones if there are more resources people would like to see.
9. Generate discussions on how this could happen as an individual, and as a group? What can you and others do in your community to change the situation?

This is something that can be really good fun to do with a group of schoolchildren in particular, and can help to develop a plan for school development or change of use.  But it's important to make sure people know that doing this map isn't a promise to bring about the changes mentioned, though they will be used to inform future work.

Have fun!