Case Study: CAFOD’s Voice & Accountability Tool

Mindful Maps is currently helping CAFOD (Catholic Agency for Overseas Development) to develop their Voice and Accountability monitoring tool.

CAFOD is a development agency with sustained economic justice work in countries around the world. CAFOD builds long-term partnerships, funding partner organisations to promote social change, for example partners monitoring government implementation of infrastructure budgets in East Timor. In the UK aid scepticism is on the rise; one of the greatest challenges facing organisations like CAFOD in the coming years is demonstrating impact in order to gain funding to support partners in Latin America, Asia and Africa. Therefore CAFOD is developing a new kind of monitoring tool. This will be used to report on its use of funds but is also a tool for partners abroad and others looking at this type of work. Our aim is to create an adaptable tool that can be used in a variety of contexts to facilitate reflection about the wider context of advocacy work as well as the achievements. CAFOD also hopes this tool can become part of planning and strategic development of advocacy programming.

Through conversation, co-design and collaboration between the policy and design department, the V&A tool has evolved from an excel spreadsheet to a visually accessible tool and will continue to evolve into increasingly appropriate design solutions.

In phase 2 of the project, Mindful Maps co-designed a workshop involving visual facilitation to help participants interact with the data, illustrate what they were talking about and identify emergent patterns.

Mindful Maps has been involved in illustration, co-design, workshops and visual facilitation in the ongoing journey of this project. You can download one of the project outputs (Voice and Accountability case studies) here.

Sisters in Conversation

On Saturday 28th January I was graphic harvesting at Sisters in Conversation; part of the Ubele Initiative. The workshop took place at the Women’s Resource Centre and attracted 24 African and Caribbean community leaders, activists and change agents, plus a hosting team of six of our women, drawn from all over London and beyond.

As one participant wrote on her Facebook page this morning:

“It was a fabulous day and I even changed my plans to stay until the end! I met a potter, writer, singer, entrepreneurs, business advisor, film-maker, photographer, graphic recording artist, administrators, consultants, an academic and university graduate….. and we feasted on fruit, ‘Cummin Up’ lunch & ‘Black River’ chocolates!”

Mindful Maps has provided support to Ubele since it’s conception nearly a year ago, and has documented several of the critical friends sessions. Images of these are in this flickr set. 

Comparing this event’s visual to those created in past sessions, it’s clear to see the language generated in a female-only session is very different. Anger and aggression were still extremely present, but the overarching vocabulary seemed to be about reconnection, trust, healing, empathy and support. Things that struck me particularly were:

• The parts of the conversation about storytelling, people wanted to tell their stories and find a home for them. This would preserve oral history and pass on important information to future generations. The women also wanted to be able to access stories of people like them so that they felt less isolated.

• A statement I found written on the back of a napkin (which I fed into the main visual). It read: “begin the journey of self healing, self discovery and self empowerment“. This isn’t the same kind of statement which came through in the mixed gender conversations.

• A language of parenting, nurturing and cultivation. Again because of the female environment this element was much stronger. This resonates with the project’s inter-generational nature.

• A need to be vulnerable. Several women mentioned vulnerability and how the image of the strong black women sometimes is unhelpful as it limits space to be vulnerable. Here I am reminded of the work of Brené Brown’s and Deborah Ravetz.

• A desire to find a sense of the whole, not re-inventing the wheel all the time but pulling together things people are already doing, and their stories. At the same time I felt a strong urge for a radically different approach. Could it be that Ubele is part social technologies such as World Café and the Change Lab (Reos) for moving conversations forward and initiating action), and part pulling together what is already out there and has already happened?

• The empathy and expression in the room. Being around so many strong women freely expressing their emotions and stories was awe-inspiring, deeply moving and personally healing.

Sisters in Conversation has got me thinking about how a group of women can co-design a change process and co-create a future that is very different to those imagined by mixed groups. This article on Theory U and the feminine principle was distributed in the welcome packs.

Although there was a process planned for the workshop, certain parts of it expanded to fill the day. For the facilitators Yvonne Field and Yvonne Christie (or Yve x 2 as I like to call them), it didn’t feel right (or indeed possible) to push participants through a pre-defined process when people were having such passionate and emotional conversations.

As the author of the above article, Arawana Hayashi writes:

“There is a habitual tendency for many of us to focus our attention on content – on the words, on the figures, and on the actions. Feminine principle invites us instead to notice the space or the background. It expands our attention to the atmosphere or the environment. It invites us to notice the space out of which expressions arise.”

It is feminine qualities within the hosting of space and conversations which allow real connections to happen.

Organisations often pretend that gender is a neutral issue but I don’t believe this is helpful to creating a balanced future (which of course involves the masculine principle too), quite simply because it isn’t neutral. One of the next steps for Ubele is to host a Brother’s conversation, then a mixed one. The outcomes of this will be interesting to compare to this session, and I hope that visualising these meaningful conversations will continue to help Ubele evolve and grow.

Read more about this event on the Ubele blog.

Visualising the Big Sustainability Summit

Last month Mindful Maps was invited to graphically record at the Big Sustainability Summit; an event to mark the end of the Sustainable Development Commission and an opportunity to ask the question ‘How can we take sustainability to scale?

The summit, co-organised by Futerra and the SDC, hosted a diverse range of speakers who responded to this question. Amongst the speakers was Jane Davidson from the Welsh Assembly Government (very fitting as the event took place on St David’s Day!) who spoke about how Wales has embraced sustainable development.

The group also went into open space sessions for a large portion of the day where groups went off to discuss their ideas and projects. One of the open space sessions (hosted by Futerra) looked at the idea of a ‘people’s SDC’ to continue the work of the SDC in a more participatory, bottom-up way. This initiative is being taken forward by Futerra as a result of the session. All of the open space topics were captured in the image:

One of the most resonant themes from the day seemed to be connecting vision and task. This image kept appearing in conversations throughout the day.

Building the bridge between vision and task is a frequent barrier to action. Visually documenting a process can be a powerful way to synthesise and make sense of key information; serving as an aid to memory which is more instant than a classic report. The final image is now in the capable hands of Futerra, who will use the material to illustrate and inform the evolution of the People’s SDC.

Mindful Maps ventures into HR

Last month I was asked to work with graphic harvesting at an internal HR event for a construction company, facilitated by Tetra LD. We harvested some very rich material from the process, visualising how employees would like to restructure their department and participate in organisational changes set to take place over the next five years.

The graphic recording was as interesting as always, but there was part of the event I found particularly fascinating. During the breakout sessions where groups were working on different things I was being asked to draw or visualise ideas by the groups; therefore making the visual process much more participatory. The ideas generated in these sessions actually went on to influence the outputs of the day.

To close, this was one of my favourite metaphors for the day. The group was talking about innovation not always being something new, when someone came out with the phrase ‘dinosaurs used to be innovative’. Quite right too.