Telling the Story of Systems Change – the Foundation's Perspective

The Foundation’s Director of Systems Change and Learning, Freya Bradford, will discuss RC’s use of storytelling and other learning and evaluation and ECB methods to improve RC’s evaluation and reporting of the outcomes and impacts of its systems change initiatives. She will discuss the updating of RC’s array of ECB programs for RC staff, board, grantees, and other stakeholders, including the Foundation’s Learning Fund, Systems Change Coaching, and Systems Change Community of Practice programs.
She will discuss RC’s use of storytelling practices to tell the Foundation’s story of systems change, including its most recent project, “Stories of Change: How a Systems Change Approach is Transforming a Region. The project included a publication of case studies of multi-stakeholder systems change initiatives in the region and a February 2023 convening that featured stories presented by the initiative and an interactive training session for audience members on systems change and evaluation.

She will also discuss the adoption and training of RC staff, board, grantees, and stakeholders on other new methods, including community capacity assessment surveys such as the Collective Community Capacity (C3) survey, and Ripple Effect Mapping (REM) – a story-telling-approach to assess the outcomes and impacts of systems change initiatives at different (transactional, transitional, and transformational) levels.