Learning & Evaluation

Change Elemental joins changemakers across organizations and movements to collaboratively learn and re-imagine strategies and systems to remake our world.

At Change Elemental, we believe that growth and change toward love, dignity, and justice involves a necessary and strategic cycle of learning and unlearning, shaping and reshaping, and trying things out in a clear and intentional direction. Our learning and evaluation projects support organizations and networks in surfacing and harnessing the critical learnings needed to sustain active cycles of learning that advance, amplify, and continually deepen their impact. 

We design learning and evaluation, research, and storytelling projects that view learning not only as retrospective but as active—a crucial ingredient for effective decision-making, real-time adaptation of impactful strategy, and understanding and communicating impact. Our approach involves guiding groups in emergent learning practices, twining learning and strategy, and employing active experimentation, action learning, and reflection to spark meaningful change. 

Our efforts are grounded in liberating practice, co-creation, and deep partnership with communities impacted by injustice. We make meaning, engage storytelling as data, and learning rooted in the diverse ways in which people experience and make meaning of our world, including cultural and ancestral wisdom, as well as artistic ways of knowing. We partner with changemakers to share their learning with the field, inviting movements to deepen our collective learning and practice toward love, dignity, and justice together.

Offerings

• Design robust, rigorous, and creative learning, evaluation, and storytelling processes that utilize emergent learning principles, inform decision making and strategy, and advance liberatory visions while living them today. 
• Create and facilitate design teams to develop learning frameworks rooted in shared analysis, vision, and ways of making meaning of the world.
• Co-create offerings to share learning with your audiences and the field, partnering to shift conditions and practice in the field toward justice.

Learning Projects

Navigating Change Initiative

Launched in 2021, the Navigating Change initiative was developed by Aurora Commons and Change Elemental in partnership with the Ford Foundation’s Civic Engagement and Government program to explore how groups in the civic engagement field are building …

John W. Mack Movement Building Fellows Program

Jump here for Spanish translations & reports / Dar clic aquí para ver traducciones e informes en español

“We need marathon runners for justice and equality.”
– John W. Mack

Over the last six years, forty movement leaders have participated in the John W. …

Leveraging a Network for Equity (LANE)

Once upon a time, across kitchen tables, front porches, conference tables, performance spaces, and workshop sessions, a big conversation was happening at the National Performance Network (NPN). The network was in a quandary: BIPOC-led and BIPOC-serving art…

Northstar Network

The Northstar Network was a home for long-term power-building (personal, organizational, and movement) grounded in analytical rigor and inspired by radical hope for a feminist, multi-racial democracy. Coming together in the midst of climate, democratic, a…

Intermediary Design Lab

Launched in 2019, the Intermediary Design Lab was an 11-month cohort that brought together fiscal sponsors and donor intermediaries to reimagine their work in serving constituent-led groups that do not have formal 501c3 and/or 4 tax-exempt status and are often led by youth, people of color, members of the LGBTQI community, immigrants, and other historically oppressed groups.

Network Weaver Learning Lab

Launched in 2017, the Network Weaver Learning Lab was an 18-month program that created a space for leaders to develop their thinking and practice, and to explore and experiment together on ways to advance the movement to end relationship-based violence.

Change Elemental Governance Experiment

About this time last year, our board was reflecting on living into our vision of a world with love, dignity, and justice and the elements of a thriving justice ecosystem. At the same time, Change Elemental staff were letting a million flowers bloom – through new partnerships and networks, work in communities of practice, and commitments to strengthening our own organization.

Network Leadership Innovation Lab

The Network Leadership Innovation Lab grew from a realization that social justice leaders and organizations are increasingly building movement networks that enable them to increase power over time and attain long-term systemic change on levels that no organization alone could achieve and sustain.

Engage, Experiment, Emerge (E3) – A Creating Conditions Lab

Engage, Experiment, Emerge (E3) was a project initiated by Change Elemental (then Management Assistance Group (MAG)). We call it a Creating Conditions Lab because its aim is to support and grow conditions that enable social justice actors (including MAG, our clients and partners) to create transformative progressive change.

“One of the reasons we chose Change Elemental was their multiple ways of knowing and equity values. That is an ongoing way that [we] operate, and to not have to explain that to other people and have it already built into the process was a great reassurance.”

Houston BIPOC Arts Network and Fund (BANF)