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On May 15th, the United Nations recognizes the International Day of Families. Blue Marble Evaluation is not just a network or an evaluation approach, we are a family of over 570 people committed to transforming evaluation to evaluate transformation. If you have not yet become a member of the Blue Marble Evaluation family, we hope you will do so. Membership remains free and open to anyone. Click here to join. As we look ahead to the second half of this year, we are…

This month, we are happy to introduce you to Blue Marble Evaluation's new Global Advisory Council. This group will be supporting our network as we work to build the capacity of Blue Marble Evaluators and build demand for Blue Marble Evaluation globally. We are also celebrating the 1 year anniversary of the Transformation Systems Mapping and Analysis Group, formed one year ago on Earth Day, with a webinar on Relational Systems Thinking. There are many more opportunities…

Last week, we passed the one-year mark of COVID-19 being declared by WHO as a global pandemic. Blue Marble Evaluation calls us to zoom in on the local impact of this milestone and zoom out to see the global trends and impact. We see that there are disparities both within and between countries in how the COVID-19 vaccine is being distributed, just as there have been disparities in both infections and deaths. Join us this month as we explore our role as Blue Marble…

In 2021, UN Secretary-General António Guterres will convene a Food Systems Summit as part of the Decade of Action to achieve the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) by 2030. The Summit aims to support transformation of the way the world produces, consumes and thinks about food. It aims to be inclusive by bringing together scientists, policy makers, business leaders, farmers, indigenous people, youth organizations, consumer groups, environmental activists, and others. The Summit aims to develop principles to guide governments and other stakeholders in transforming food systems and establish…

February is full of celebrations and observances: Black History Month, Lunar Year, Valentine's Day, Mardi Gras to name just a few. We started the month with another song from MQP to the tune of Season's of Love and have been thinking a lot about love and how important…

From our Gulf of Maine Blue Marble Hub in Portland Maine, we have a Love Story about Nature. In today's world, the dominant worldview is one where humans have control over nature. What if our love for the abundance that nature provides can be translated as legal status as a living being, not a bundle of ecosystem services that we quantify and sell like a commodity? The Latin word anima (source of the word animal) is actually translated as spirit, breath, life. By re-imagining the life and vulnerability of the natural world, we can transform our seeing nature as a “resource” to be used and…

Blue Marble Evaluation Context The first overarching Blue Marble Evaluation principle is the Global Thinking Principle: Apply whole-Earth big-picture thinking to all aspects of systems change. The World Food Programme (WFP) epitomizes that principle.  The pandemic, as a global challenge, requires Global Thinking. In evaluating WFP’s response to the pandemic, global thinking is critical. Working in 88 countries, WFP also manifests the GLOCAL Principle: Integrate complex interconnections across levels. The global-local interface means that evaluation must examine what is happening at…

  Happy New Year! We spent much of last year introducing Blue Marble Evaluation to our members and friends. Now that we have built a foundation together, we plan to offer a number of opportunities for you to deepen your engagement with one another and with the…

Founded in 1991, Tostan is best known for its outstanding contributions to the movement for the abandonment of female genital cutting and child marriage in Africa. Tostan is widely recognized as a leader in building community well-being grounded in human rights. Tostan realizes its mission of empowering African communities to bring about sustainable development and positive social transformation through its non- formal, holistic, education program, the Community Empowerment Program (CEP).  Tostan was so pleased to be asked to share with the Blue Marble Evaluations community on November 23…

Kim van der Woerd and Michael Quinn Patton worked together in 2016 as part of a team that created the Evaluation for Social Change and Transformational Learning Program at Simon Fraser University. This interactive blog illustrates and updates the kinds of conversations that framed the generation of that program MQP: This is the time of year when people and pundits are looking back at 2020 and trying to capture what it has been like. A common assertion is that it has been “an unprecedented year.”  I quoted the Oxford Dictionary using that phrase in a recent blog on words of the year. You…