Feedback will change your life. I’m not talking about your life as a member of civil society. I’m not talking about your life as an employee of a non profit organization. I’m talking about your life as a human being.
The Sarathi Development Foundation aims to empower children, adolescent girls, women, and communities by placing them in the driver’s seat of the development process. Beginning as a technical resource organization, we grew to focus on supporting and facilitating a process for our constituents to command the development process on their own by integrating the wisdom and resources of the children, adolescent girls, and women that we serve.
It cannot be disputed any longer: citizens’ participation in governance is vitally important. Integrating citizen voice into decision-making practices has established a feedback framework between citizens and development practitioners.
In our first blog of 2017, we shared our Feedback Resolutions with you. It was a fun and useful exercise, a way of sharing a little bit of our personalities on the blog and a chance for each of us to reflect on what it takes to keep improving our personal feedback practices. And it was heartening to see others in our network take up the idea, sharing their own commitments to feedback in the new year.
“Imagine a ladder with steps from 0 to 10, with 0 being the worst case scenario and 10 being the best; on which step of the ladder do you currently stand?”
A few years ago we had a novel idea—what if we could reward organizations that were actively focusing on learning and improving with more funding from GlobalGiving?
Sometimes gathering feedback from those we seek to serve can feel like a selfish thing. It can seem like an investment in our projects, our goals, ourselves. I need to listen to feedback so I know how to convince villagers in Malawi to sit on my village committee.
Many of us have already given up on our New Year’s’ Resolutions and we are only two weeks into 2017. If fewer than 10% us are likely to succeed in meeting our individual New Year’s resolution goals, how many of us are likely to succeed in our public sector transformation initiatives, like affordability, open governance, and homelessness?
Here at Feedback Labs we are always looking for ways to incorporate feedback into our work. It isn’t always easy to ask for, hear and act on honest feedback, and we are constantly striving to improve our practice. In honour of the new year, we share with you our 2017 Feedback Resolutions!
“Feedback is great but if you just lived and breathed it – it’s hard to hear.”This insight from one of my clients perfectly captures a major barrier to closing feedback loops. Hearing feedback is hard. Accepting the feedback someone gives you, really considering it and then incorporating it into your actions, is a scary and deceptively difficult thing to do.