“Too boring for me"

“Useful but too complicated to do”

“Boxes and arrows cannot represent our complex programme"

There is widespread consensus that Theory of Change (ToC) is one of the best tools in town for facilitating planning, participation and evaluation in the social sector, but concurrently there is also a long list of reasons why it isn't perfect. At heart, ToC sets out to be a participatory and inclusive process, but in reality it is very often too confusing for many/most people. Looking across the sector and globally, ToCs have more or less been explained the same way and facilitated in the same fashion for the past many years. As facilitators of ToCs ourselves at Just Cause, we think it's time for an update.

With a burning desire to want to make ToCs more accessible and welcoming to everybody and anybody, we have decided that we cannot do this alone. We want to connect with like-minded practitioners, facilitators and users of TOC and embark on a journey together to collectively ideate and co-create alternative ways in which we can improvise on the classic ToC tool so that more and more people in the sector can benefit from it. In the next 6 months to a year, we want to gain a breakthrough. And so if you’re up for it - please join this session!

We'll start this session by sharing some of our own experiences and templates using ToC with non-profits across the region over the last six years. We'll share our own thoughts about what works, what are the challenges and some ideas for how we could update this methodology. Then we want to open up this discussion to brainstorm with you - hear your thoughts and experiences with ToC. Finally, we hope this session can kickstart a small working group to take this question forward next year.

This session is facilitated by:

• Carol Liew who doesn’t do well with anything that spells structure. Yet many years ago an Emily Perkin introduced ToC to her and the humanitarian NGO she works for then and boom, she now even uses ToC (in her brain at least) to unpack life’s biggest problems. Having facilitated multiple ToCs in the field with villagers, non-profit programme managers and policymakers from the Philippines to Cambodia, she can’t help but think that there must be a more fun and dynamic way to deliver ToC workshops - a card game perhaps?

• Emily Perkin who has had the privilege of seeing inside quite a lot of non-profit organisations over the years - often as facilitator of a ToC workshop. Emily feels like she finally understood herself when she took a Myers Briggs test a few years ago and was categorised as INFJ: apparently the rarest group of people who live an awkward paradox that combines dreaming big with pedantic attention to detail and is typically characterised by a messy desk. Emily loves working with Carol, who has helped to bring so much more fun and engagement to Just Cause's ToC work with non-profits. Her question now is where to next?