How to create long-term equity with ORSC™
CRR Global spoke with Betsy Baum Block about how she applies Organization and Relationship Systems Coaching (ORSC™) to her evaluation capacity building practice in the nonprofit field. Nonprofit program evaluation covers the collection of information about a program in order to understand its efficacy and promote thoughtful decision-making. This includes, for example, working with an out-of-school time program to see if and how it is working towards its mission of helping youth stay in school and improve their social-emotional learning.
Supporting long-term value creation in nonprofit program evaluation is a huge issue, and coaching has a tremendous opportunity to address this equity challenge to leave lasting capacity, according to Betsy.
Evaluators have started asking critical, challenging questions: how do we ensure our clients are able to retain the capacity for program evaluation after the “experts” leave? How do we guarantee meaningful use of evaluation findings? How do we incorporate equity into our practices where evaluators frequently fail to represent the diversity of the community that the nonprofit program serves and its staff?
To this end, evaluators are increasingly integrating non-traditional tools focused on the interpersonal side as innovative capacity building approaches, such as Betsy’s pioneering work utilizing ORSC principles.
Betsy believes that to achieve sustainable and equitable use of program evaluation in the nonprofit sector, all voices of a system need to be included in the conversation, not only the ones of the top leaders. With her clients, she focuses on the importance of finding the systemic view to raise the capacity of the whole team. Leveraging Relationship Systems Intelligence focuses on the team as the entity to coach, helping them tap into their collective intelligence to find solutions. The role of coaching is placing trust in the power and expertise of the clients, revealing that the system has all the answers in it — ultimately setting them up for long-term success.
If you’d like to read more about how Betsy infuses ORSC into her profession, you can read her paper, “Evaluation Coaching, Light Up Your Client’s Experience” which was released by the Center for Evaluation Innovation. It is a practical guide for applying coaching skills to evaluation consulting that can also be used for working with ORSC in any consulting practice.
Betsy Baum Block has worked with organizations across nonprofit, foundation and government sectors to achieve their best possible outcomes. She runs a consulting and coaching practice to work closely with clients on strategic projects, including research and evaluation capacity building.
Betsy can be contacted at betsy@b3consults.com. To learn more about her work visit www.b3consults.com.
