Development action with informed and engaged societies

After nearly 28 years, The Communication Initiative (The CI) Global is entering a new chapter. 

Following a period of transition, the global website has been transferred to the University of the Witwatersrand (Wits) in South Africa, where it will be administered by the Social and Behaviour Change Communication Division. Wits' commitment to social change and justice makes it a trusted steward for The CI's legacy and future. 

On the transfer, co-founder Victoria Martin expressed her pleasure to see this work continue under Wits' leadership, knowing that co-founder Warren Feek (1953–2024) would have felt deep pride in The CI Global's Africa-led direction. 

As Wits, we honour the team and partners who sustained The CI for decades and look forward building from that strong base. This includes co-founders Warren Feek (1953-2024) and Victoria Martin as well as La Iniciativa de Comunicación (CILA), which continues independently at lainiciativadecomunicacion.com with links to The CI Global site. We are also eager to forge new partnerships and entertain new ideas as we consider how best to contribute to social and behaviour change in our rapidly evolving environment.

If you are joining the International Social and Behaviour Change Communication (SBCC) Summit in Panama, please join Wits and CILA on Monday, 22 June, to share your thoughts and suggestion for the relaunch of the Communication Initiative. We will be in Pacifica 5 from 12-1:25 for the Refuel, Reflect, and Renew Lunch Series: The Communication Initiative: celebrating a driving force for Communication for Social Change and the way forward. We will reflect on the legacy of Warren Feek and family in creating the Communication Initiative, consider the contributions of CI over the years and then turn our attention towards the future in this dynamic session. 

If you are unable to join us in Panama, we still want to hear from you. Please contribute your thoughts by following this link: https://redcap.link/CommunicationInitiative2026 or reaching out to ci_surveys@commint.com

You can also follow the QR Code:

 https://redcap.link/CommunicationInitiative2026

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Participatory Organisational Evaluation Tool (POET)

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POET is two concepts rolled into one: a tool, and a process. As an organisational capacity assessment tool, civil society organisations (CSO) and their partners use POET to measure and profile organisational capacities and consensus levels in seven critical areas, and assess, over time, the impact of these activities on organisational capacity (benchmarking). As an organisational development process, CSOs and their partners use POET to build capacity by bringing staff together in cross-functional, cross-hierarchical groups for open exchange; to identify divergent viewpoints to foster growth; to create consensus around future organisational capacity development activities; and, to select, implement and track organisational change and development strategies. Based on a methodology called PROSE (Participatory, Results-Oriented Self-Evaluation), POET focuses on the needs of a very specific user population, Southern CSOs and their partners.

What POET measures
POET produces two kinds of measures:
  1. a capacity score, which indicates how an organisation perceives its strengths and weaknesses with respect to the capacity areas
  2. a consensus score, which indicates the degree to which assessment team members agree on their assessment of organisational capacity.

These two scores reflect the key concept underlying POET: meaningful organisational development occurs at the intersection of two processes - identifying perceived organisational strengths and weaknesses and exploring differences of opinion regarding these perceptions.

Click here to download a copy of the "POET User’s Manual: Participatory Organizational Evaluation Tool".
Source
e-CIVICUS 16 - July 29 2004, Issue No. 227.

Comments

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Submitted by Anonymous (not verified) on Mon, 02/21/2005 - 01:40 Permalink

The link to the UNDP site said this: The page cannot be found
The page you are looking for might have been removed, had its name changed, or is temporarily unavailable.

I will try going directly to the UNDP site.

Thanks
Lauren