Event: What does it take to be ready to listen to communities?
Earlier this year, The MERL Tech Initiative started work on a project about tech-enabled community listening with The Rockefeller Foundation. One of our goals with this work is to gain a better understanding of what it takes for philanthropic organizations to be better prepared to listen to communities, and where AI comes into the picture.
While we know that listening to communities can help to balance power more equally, it can only do so effectively when it’s accompanied by action. But the ability to respond to feedback and act on listening insights isn’t a given.
On September 09, at 12pm ET, The MERL Tech Initiative is bringing together Ayawa Fiagbedzi (The Rockefeller Foundation), Megan Campbell (FeedbackLabs), and Katherine Haugh (Convive Collective) for a conversation about philanthropy, listening to communities, and acting on feedback and insights. Together, we will explore how organizational readiness may influence or inform how organizations are able to respond to insights generated through listening efforts.
We’ll also discuss how technology could play a role in listening, exploring questions such as: Can AI make listening more scalable and less costly? If so, how can it be used to support the relational nature of listening processes? How might the use of AI in listening efforts be detrimental to the very communities we’re trying to support? And more.
Get to know our speakers
Ayawa Fiagbedzi is Manager, Strategic Learning & Impact at The Rockefeller Foundation, where she helps shape how the Foundation uses evidence to drive strategy, improve performance, and deepen impact. With experience spanning philanthropy, government, and global development, she brings a systems-level perspective to embedding evidence into decision-making and building organizational learning capacity.
Megan Campbell is Managing Director of Programs and Strategy at Feedback Labs, where she helps partners make feedback the norm across the social sector by strengthening the ecosystem of incentives and supports for nonprofits and funders to listen well. A systems design engineer by training, Megan has over a decade of experience promoting responsive listening by nonprofits, funders, and governments. Previously, as Co-Director of Engineers Without Borders Canada’s Malawi program and later as Portfolio Manager for Sub-Saharan Africa, Megan helped scale innovation and management support for local governments across Malawi and Ghana. More recently, Megan helped establish the Global Delivery Initiative at the World Bank to promote a common language with which to explore responsive service delivery. Megan is an Action Canada Fellow and cheers with futility for the Toronto Blue Jays. She is a graduate of the University of Waterloo and Princeton University’s School of Public and International Affairs.
Katherine Haugh is CEO & Founder of The Convive Collective. She leads philanthropic change, writes, and speaks about how philanthropies can unlock and measure their impact through strategic learning. Having begun her career as an evaluator, measuring the impact of philanthropic initiatives, Katherine became interested in helping organizations digest data and make sense of it through visual storytelling. Before launching Convive, Katherine worked at UN WFP (Innovation Hub for East Africa) as an Evidence and Learning Specialist, where she co-created the Hub’s theory of change, strategy, and learning framework. She has worked at several related organizations, including the Global Knowledge Initiative, USAID Learning Lab, and Innovation Network.