Review of Wheel conference
26th May 2011
Today I attended The Wheel's annual conference entitled Innovating For Good. It was a very full and interesting day with good speakers and chaired marvellously by Fintan O'Toole.
In her opening address, The Wheel's Deirdre Garvey was uncompromising in her description of the needs of the sector in the current climate and over the coming years (which are likely to be even more burdensome). The new Minister for the Environment, Community and Local Government Phil Hogan TD made all the right noises about mutual interests, partnership and the independence of the community and voluntary sector; demonstrable action on these will be eagerly awaited by all.
The first session was about person-centred public sector reform. Sean Healy of Social Justice Ireland argued that we need to move beyond representative and even participative democracy to a model of deliberative democracy and Ivan Cooper of The Wheel focused on the important custodial role of trustees in the community and voluntary sector. I was particularly impressed by the contribution of Eddie Molloy of Advanced Organisation, who expressed the need for substantial and rapid change in the face of both technical challenges (the modernisation agenda) and cultural challenges (the reform agenda) - the latter is particularly difficult to tackle.
I had been especially looking forward to the second session, which was about measuring and communicating outcomes and impacts. Although some attempts were made to clarify terminology, there appears to me to be ongoing confusion between outcomes and impacts, and between quality assurance models and tools for measuring outcomes and impacts. Sean Coughlan of Social Entrepreneurs Ireland described current Irish initiatives in this area of work and Stuart Etherington of NCVO in the UK, whilst recognising the absolute importance of demonstrating effectiveness, rang warning bells about funder-driven evaluations, overelaborate systems, attribution difficulties, timelines for change, costs, etc.
After a very nice lunch and a mooch around an impressive marketplace of corporate stands, there was a showcase of sectoral innovation in action. The scene was set by Gert Ackermann of The Wheel who relayed the results of the latest membership survey. This was followed by presentations on the Code of Governance (Ava Battles, Carmichael Centre for Voluntary Groups), Advocacy Initiative (Mike Allen, Focus Ireland), Irish Nonprofits Knowledge Exchange (Patricia Quinn, INKEx), and the Collaborate to Innovate project (Ivan Cooper, The Wheel). We even had the pleasure of a de-stressing exercise facilitated by Carol Conway ...
In all, a good day.
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