Listening, Learning, and Silver Linings in the Era of COVID-19
/by Sonia Taddy-Sandino and Jennifer Garcia
Over the last several months, COVID-19 has caused unimaginable human suffering and launched us into an uncertain future. Like so many, we’ve spent this time settling into our new reality of physical distancing, homeschooling kids, caring for elders, and processing the magnitude of this moment. We’ve also sought to hold space as a team to reflect on how we can best support the many nonprofit organizations and diverse communities that are profoundly and disproportionately impacted by this pandemic.
In times of crisis, we often default to doing the things we do best. As evaluators, we are wired to ask questions, interpret information, and translate it into actionable insights. Our immediate inclination has been to focus on listening and supporting our families and communities. We’re also thinking about how our response at this moment connects to the medium and long-term. How will we get through this crisis and what are we learning that will help us navigate the uncertainty that lies ahead? What are the silver linings and opportunities to re-imagine our institutions, to innovate our approaches, and to transform ineffective and broken systems?
Indian novelist Arundhati Roy recently wrote about COVID-19 in The Financial Times, noting, “Historically, pandemics have forced humans to break with the past and imagine their world anew. This one is no different. It is a portal, a gateway between one world and the next.” As we contemplate the journey through that gateway, we’d like to take a moment to share some concrete strategies and ways our team has been adapting to meet immediate needs while considering how we can contribute to a better and more equitable world on the other side. We invite you to share your ideas and strategies too — knowing it will take our collective power and resilience to imagine our world anew.
Getting grounded with mindfulness, memes, and mantras
During this time of uncertainty, we’re all searching for the space and grace to process and re-ground ourselves. We’ve been listening to concerns and taking time to acknowledge how people are feeling. As part of both internal and external meetings, we’ve created virtual post-it boards where people can anonymously pose questions about how COVID-19 is impacting our work. We’ve also incorporated mindfulness exercises and somatic pauses into virtual meetings to keep us grounded and reduce stress. Internally, we’ve used team calls and Slack channels to share home-schooling highs and lows, post our favorite memes, exchange resources, and recipes, and discuss thought pieces that help people cope.
We’re also making space for fun and laughter by organizing virtual happy hours and using more light-hearted conversation starters (aka icebreakers). While acknowledging the heaviness of this crisis, we are infusing hope and levity into our interactions with external partners too — knowing humor is a powerful tool for healing and self-care.
Recently we posed one of our favorite polling questions (using Slido) as part of a virtual town hall with over 200 attendees participating in the We Count LA Census campaign. We bookended a content-heavy meeting with lighthearted polling questions to bring some laughter. As it turns out, COVID-19 is transforming our wardrobe and at least half of our “safer at home” poll sample is wearing their pajamas or sweatpants to work meetings.
Exploring new and innovative ways to promote authentic engagement
In this time of physical distancing, people are hungry for social connectivity. We understand that Zoom-fatigue is real and we’re all legitimately distracted. We need to do a better job of engaging people in meaningful ways with new tools and intentional approaches. As a virtual organization, we’ve been building our virtual facilitation skills long before COVID-19 but this crisis has us thinking more deeply about the ways we engage stakeholders and gather data in this new context. We’re stepping up our facilitation game with interactive online tools and sharing them with external partners.
But authentic engagement is about more than tools. It’s about asking meaningful questions that encourage deep connection and creating “brave” space for diverse voices to uncover new ideas and possibilities. While it’s natural to ask people how they’re doing, it’s such a loaded question these days. We’ve become increasingly more mindful of the questions we ask and how we facilitate learning to support genuine connection and reflection.
Learning and evaluation questions
What do nonprofits and communities need most right now?
What are nonprofit grantees learning about their organizations in this time of crisis?
What strengths have been a source of resilience?
What vulnerabilities have been illuminated?
How are organizations, networks, and ecosystems innovating or experimenting with new strategies and approaches?
We’re also working with our nonprofit and foundation partners to identify new evaluative questions that capture the extraordinary learning, sense-making, and innovation that emerges in difficult times (see sidebar for examples). We are recalibrating our evaluation activities and timelines, and pursuing “low-burden” data collection strategies like instant polling and pulse surveys that lift up actionable insights and provide immediate value to stakeholders. We’ve found success as participant observers in various meetings, webinars, and virtual townhalls - often serving as conduits of information by making connections and sharing ideas and innovations across efforts. Rather than interview people one-on-one and report back highly synthesized information, we are designing listening sessions that allow service providers, organizers, and policymakers to share, learn, and strategize together with documentation that can be accessed in real-time by all participants.
Identifying silver linings and preparing for the road ahead
Like many others, we see this moment as a call to action and an opportunity to lean in and double down on our efforts to advance equity and inclusion. This health pandemic has magnified the structural inequities and racial disparities that disproportionately impact communities of color and vulnerable populations. As Grant Oliphant of the Heinz Endowment noted in a recent article for the Chronicle of Philanthropy, the reimaging stage following this pandemic will be deep and difficult as we seek to answer “searing questions about our national commitment to public health, how we view the right to health care, the importance of air quality, the wages we pay the frontline workers we call heroes, and why racial and other inequities revealed by this virus are allowed to persist in the first place.”
Many have said nothing will be the same after this and maybe that’s a good thing. On a recent Zoom call with human service organizations from around the country, a colleague reminded us of age-old advice from architect and designer Buckminster Fuller who said, “you never change things by fighting the existing reality. To change something, build a new model that makes the existing model obsolete.” As we listened to these frontline organizations talk about the immediate focus on saving lives, we also were heartened by their focus on silver linings and their fight for an equitable and inclusive economy. Several participants noted how COVID-19 has accelerated the systems change work they’ve been fighting to advance for years and others were rallying around a collective policy agenda to reshape the economic recovery.
We can’t help but remain hopeful and committed to a better world on the other side of Arundhati Roy’s portal where broken systems are left behind and replaced with new models that work for everyone. We know the road ahead will be long and hard but we’re focusing our sights on ways to build evidence, strengthen the field, and contribute to a more equitable and inclusive society where everyone has the opportunity to thrive.
