DESIGNING LEARNING & EVALUATION FOR IMPACT · NEXT INTAKE Q3 2027
Learning that tells
your story.
Eight weeks for the people who hold learning, monitoring and evaluation in community-rooted organisations. You leave with a learning agenda, a learning journey your partners and communities can actually walk, and the thinking of a Chief Knowledge Officer, built on methods that start from what your community already knows and already has.
Join the 2027 waitlist
WHY THIS PROGRAMME EXISTS
Your story is being told in someone else's language.
Community-rooted organisations learn constantly: in the kitchen after a session, in the WhatsApp group, in the conversation a youth worker has on the walk home. Very little of that ever reaches the report. What reaches the report is a set of indicators somebody else chose, counted to satisfy a framework somebody else wrote, describing the work in a language nobody inside the organisation recognises.
Funders are noticing too. The better ones are no longer asking for more numbers; they are asking what you learned, what you changed because of it, and how the people you work with shaped the answer. Most MEL training has not caught up with that question, and most small organisations have never been given the time, the tools or the budget to design an answer.
This programme builds learning infrastructure that belongs to you. A learning agenda rooted in your community's strengths, a clear learning journey from first contact to exit, and a way of telling your story that is rigorous enough for a funder and true enough for the people in it.
What you leave holding.
01 · A LEARNING AGENDA
The questions worth answering
Three to five learning questions your organisation actually holds, an asset-based outcomes framework that starts from what your community already has, and a clear line from each question to the decisions it will inform.
02 · A LEARNING JOURNEY MAP
Where learning happens, step by step
The journey a partner, participant or community member takes with you, from onboarding and check-ins to convenings, reporting and exit, with the learning moments designed in and the data burden designed out.
03 · COMMUNITY-ROOTED METHODS AND DATA GOVERNANCE
Including a community veto
A small set of participatory, creative and story-based methods matched to your context, and a one-page data governance agreement setting out who holds the data and where the community holds the right to say no.
04 · AN IMPACT STORY FUNDERS CAN HEAR
Told on your terms
A learning and impact narrative, and the reporting language to carry it, that answers what donors increasingly ask for without translating your work into something it isn't. And a clear sense of the point where translation becomes co-optation.
Eight weekly live sessions of 90 minutes, one 1:1 with Jess, and a critical friend alongside you for the whole programme.
Your critical friend is an experienced learning practitioner to think with as your system takes shape, not a marker and not a supervisor. All applied work is on your organisation's real learning system. Sessions run across UK, African, South Asian, European and Latin American time zones, and are recorded.
THE EIGHT WEEKS
Eight weeks with a
Chief Knowledge Officer's thinking.
The programme moves the way a senior learning lead would move if they sat beside you for a term: from what evidence has been doing to your organisation, to what you want to learn, to how you will learn it together, to how you will tell it. Every fortnight ends with something you can use on Monday.
WEEKS 1 AND 2 · UNLEARN, THEN SET THE AGENDA
We start by examining what evidence has been asked to do to your organisation, and whose knowledge it has left out. Then we write your learning agenda: the handful of questions that matter to your community, your team and your funders, and what each one is for.
WEEKS 3 AND 4 · OUTCOMES AND LEARNING JOURNEYS
An asset-based theory of change and outcomes framework that starts from community strengths rather than deficits, with indicators that shift power rather than count compliance. Then we map the learning journey itself: onboarding, check-ins, convenings, reporting and exit, with learning designed into each.
WEEKS 5 AND 6 · METHODS AND GOVERNANCE
Participatory, creative and story-based methods your community would recognise as its own, costed properly so that participation is paid rather than extracted. Then data governance: consent, ownership and the community veto, written up so your board and your funders can see it.
WEEKS 7 AND 8 · MAKE SENSE, THEN TELL IT
Co-analysis, so that sense-making happens with the people whose lives the data describes. Then articulating impact: a learning and impact story, and the reporting language to carry it, that meets what donors are asking for and stays true to the work.
A learning system is not the end of the work. It is how a community gets to tell its own story, and make the next demand.
TRACK RECORD
We have run this before. Eight times.
Six cohorts ran between 2023 and 2025 as a Continuing Professional Development strand of the STAR project, in partnership with the University of East London and the University of Bristol, funded by the Office for Students and Research England, under the name Rebellious Research for Social Action. That UK programme drew 202 applications with almost no promotion.
Alongside it we ran two global cohorts of self-funding and organisation-funded participants, joining from eight time zones across Africa, Europe, the Americas and the Caribbean.
Designing Learning for Impact is the 2027 evolution of that programme, rebuilt around the question our alumni kept bringing back to us: how do we build learning that tells our story, and still satisfies the people funding it?
8
cohorts delivered
2023 – 2025
175+
practitioners
UK and international
8
time zones
across four continents
9.2
out of 10
average recommendation score
Who was in the room
Learners came from organisations working at the sharpest edges of social justice — racial justice, migration, disability liberation, gender justice, housing and community health — in the UK and internationally.
Among them: The Open Society Foundation · Oxfam IBIS · Birthrights · The British Library · The Welcome Trust · Runnymede Trust · Shelter · Refugee Council · Disability Rights UK · Scope · Birthrights · Helen Bamber Foundation · Rape Crisis South London · Black Women Rising · BLAM UK · SARI · Trans Legal Clinic · Newham Community Project · Positively UK · People's Economy · Women & Girls Network · Reset UK · The Advocacy Academy · London Borough of Hackney · Renaisi — among many others.
Try the work before you commit to it
The programme produced eight open-access guides and four how-to videos, free to any community organisation under a Creative Commons licence — covering trauma-informed research ethics, intersectionality in community research, creative and grassroots methods, co-design, co-analysis, resisting funder extraction, and knowledge justice.
Nothing is gated and no email is required. If you want to know how this programme thinks before you join a waitlist, start there.
EXPLORE THE FREE RESOURCE HUB“Highly recommended for anyone hoping to inspire change in research design.”
Nina Rivera
United Domestic Workers Association
“I can't begin to explain how useful it's been — to the point that I'm starting a new community research role.”
Elio Yague
Course participant
“I am excited to be applying my learning to our community movement-building work.”
Bhavika Patel
Power & Integrity
The learning arc.
Eight weeks, one capability each. Every week ends with something you hold, and the whole thing builds toward evidence infrastructure your organisation can run without us.
Week 1 — What counts as evidence here, and who decided that
- Map the evidence demands landing on your organisation: who is asking, what they are asking for, and what that framing assumes about you
- Leave with a starting position, not just a critique
Week 2 — Reading your own evaluation frameworks back
- Run the Language Audit on your own logframes, indicators and reports — where does the language locate the problem, in people or in structures?
- Put the history back into one indicator you are currently reporting against
Week 3 — Whose knowledge governs
- Audit the knowledge infrastructure of your enquiry: whose frameworks are governing, whose have been erased
- Apply epistemic sovereignty to one live design decision — after Tuhiwai Smith, and guarded by Tuck & Yang
Week 4 — Designing with, not on
- Work with critical participatory action research, photovoice and community cartography — and know which one your question actually calls for
- Learn the facilitation moves that make participation real inside a funder's timeline
Week 5 — Numbers are political
- The QuantCrit reframe: who counts, who is counted, and what your dataset is quietly asserting
- Build quantitative measures that survive scrutiny without flattening the people in them
Week 6 — Governance, consent and refusal
- Draft your data governance one-pager, including a community veto over collection and use
- Establish when refusal of data extraction is legitimate and defensible — and how to hold that line with a funder
Week 7 — Co-analysis, budgets and the money question
- Facilitate analysis as a shared act rather than a specialist one — including the SHOWED method for collective sense-making
- Budget with care: what it actually costs to pay community researchers properly, and how to write that into a bid
Week 8 — Evidence into organising
- Organise what you now hold into a case that moves resources and decisions
- Leave with your evidence infrastructure plan, and a map of the funders who actually resource this kind of work
Design for Social Impact has worked with dozens of organisations, including:
Whose work this is built on
These tools are adaptations, and saying so is part of the politics. The thinking below does real work in the room, not as a reading list but as the method itself.
- Asset-Based Community Development (Kretzmann and McKnight): start from what a community has, not from what it is said to lack
- Tara Yosso: community cultural wealth; assets where deficit framing expects to find need
- Most Significant Change and Outcome Harvesting (Davies and Dart; Wilson-Grau): learning from stories and observed change rather than targets set in advance
- CARE Principles, OCAP® and Te Mana Raraunga: Indigenous data sovereignty, and refusal as a designable position
- Linda Tuhiwai Smith: research as one of the dirtiest words in the Indigenous world, and what it takes to change that
- QuantCrit (Gillborn and colleagues): numbers are not neutral; data regimes decide who counts and who is counted
- Ruha Benjamin: the New Jim Code, and how discriminatory design hides inside measurement
- Tuck and Yang: decolonisation is not a metaphor; the guard against borrowing the language without moving anything
- Sasha Costanza-Chock: design justice; who designs determines what gets designed
- Erica Kohl-Arenas: the self-help myth, and how funding channels dissent into measurable, manageable forms
- Ruth Wilson Gilmore: you cannot redistribute power you will not admit you hold
- Afro-Futurism: learning about what could exist, not only what already does
WHO YOU LEARN WITH
Guest scholars, not guest speakers.
Each week brings a community conversation with a practitioner or scholar working at the intersection the session covers. Across cohorts we have deliberately built this around Global Majority research and learning leadership, not as a diversity gesture but because the people who have navigated racialised institutional barriers have the most precise things to say about how research and evaluation reproduce them.
Scholars who have taught on this programme include Siza Dube (Black feminisms and reproductive justice, University of Bristol), Amanda Chappell (QuantCrit and racial inequalities in commissioning data), Mónica Sánchez Hernández (art-based and decolonising methodologies), Chiedza Chihanu (performance and social change), Dr Michelle Harewood (healing justice and cultural storytelling) and Dr Temidayo Esenou (Afro-Futurism as qualitative inquiry).
Faculty is confirmed per cohort. We don't name people before they have agreed.
WHAT IT COSTS
These are the current rates, shown so you can plan. The live cohort runs once a year, and in 2027 a self-paced version joins it for anyone who needs to work through the programme on their own timetable. We confirm 2027 rates with the waitlist first, and waitlist members get the early-bird price before enrolment opens to anyone else. Parity pricing by location applies at every tier: we price this way because we pay our facilitators and collaborators properly, and that shapes who is in the room.
The 2027 live cohort opens in Q3.
We run one live cohort a year, and places go to the waitlist first, with the dates and the early-bird rate, before this page goes anywhere near LinkedIn. The self-paced version also arrives in 2027, and the waitlist hears about it first.
Joining costs you nothing and commits you to nothing. You will also get our guide to the Design for Social Impact framework straight away.
Join the 2027 waitlist
No spam. We write when the dates are confirmed, and when places open.
For foundations funding this for partners
Grantee partners are repeatedly asked to evidence their work using frameworks they did not write, and funded to buy learning capability in from outside, where it leaves when the contract ends. Meanwhile the foundation's own learning agenda rarely connects to what partners are learning on the ground.
We run this as a closed cohort for a single portfolio, scoped with your learning team, so that partners design their own learning journeys and the foundation gets a portfolio learning picture built from what partners actually know. Parity pricing is built into the design.
If that is a conversation worth having, write to Jessica directly at [email protected].