The project team consisted of: Rich Janzen, CCBR Executive Director; Sarah Switzer, CCBR Senior Researcher; Jean De Dieu Basabose, CCBR Researcher; Madeline Docherty, CCBR Student Intern (and Grebel MPACS student!); and Paul Heidebrecht, Director of the Centre for Peace Advancement. Throughout the past year, this team facilitated a series of local workshops and national webinars, and also co-hosted webinars with Impact Hub Ottawa and the Tamarack Institute.
Funded by Employment and Social Development Canada, the workshops and webinars were successful in educating a wide range of organizations on the importance of community-based evaluation and how it factors into realizing the SDGs. Recordings can found alongside a plethora of SDG community-based evaluation resources on the project’s new website.
The project, formally known as “Evaluation Capacity-Building to Advance Sustainable Development Goals,” emphasized three Sustainable Development Goals in particular: SDG 4 (quality education), SDG 5 (gender equality), and SDG 16 (peace, justice and strong institutions), and included two overarching objectives. Firstly, it aimed to enhance the community-based evaluation capacity of organizations that are currently trying to promote equitable and peaceful societies. Secondly, the project aimed to reinforce the effort to achieve the SDGs.
"The SDGs can seem lofty and detached from the reality of everyday life. Community-based evaluation is one way for actors to make sure that whatever is done is grounded in the lived experience of those at the center of the issue."
Community-based evaluation consists of integrating multiple sources of knowledge provided by differing members within a community, and thus can help address challenges that arise when trying to localize SDGs. Indeed, for many community organizations, the SDGs can seem overwhelming. As CCBR Executive Director Rich Janzen notes, "The SDGs can seem lofty and detached from the reality of everyday life. Community-based evaluation is one way for actors to make sure that whatever is done is grounded in the lived experience of those at the center of the issue."
According to Janzen, collaborating through partnerships with community members, local peacebuilders, and organizations like the Centre for Peace Advancement “can help people to understand the complexity of the issues they are facing, and provide the collective experience and expertise necessary to address them.”
This project is an example of how changemakers pursuing peace and justice can approach the SDGs in an innovative, meaningful way. These goals are difficult to achieve on a grand scale, though a magnitude of small changes can lead to wide-reaching results.