Lessons learned from the CIP
Learning and evaluation: A CIP cornerstone!
Documenting the CIP’s lessons is essential
Learning has been central to the CIP from the outset
As this is an experimental project aimed at implementing new collaborative approaches between philanthropic, institutional and community partners, it is essential for the latter to have the means to step back and reflect on the project's deployment, as well as its processes, limits and spin-offs.
Credit: Valérie Paquette
Learning has been central to the CIP from the outset
As an experimental project aimed at testing new collaborative approaches among philanthropic, institutional, and community partners, the CIP requires space for reflection. Partners must have the opportunity to step back and examine how the project is unfolding, including its processes, limitations, and broader effects.
Learning has been a core component of the CIP since its inception. Our assessment and learning approach focuses primarily on strategic learning—that is, fostering a shared, ongoing practice of stepping back, drawing lessons, and continuously adapting our actions. It is grounded in a bottom-up, dialogical approach that builds on existing CIP spaces (meetings, governance bodies, and events) to gather insights and support analysis and validation. This process is led internally by the Head of Knowledge and Learning and supported by an expanded Evaluation and Learning Committee, which helps cross-reference perspectives and reduce blind spots.
At the neighbourhood level, teams implement learning processes focused on the issues that matter most to them—whether related to evaluation, research, or strategic clarity—and receive support and training to address these needs. Lessons generated across all levels of the project are then shared and reinvested within and beyond the CIP community, through governance spaces, events such as the Carrefour des apprentissages, and publications.
Read on to see how this learning approach is being put into practice in the mid-term review.
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This mid-term review brings together the main findings and lessons learned since the beginning of Phase 2 in 2022: what sets the CIP apart, the outcomes it has helped generate, as well as the key levers and challenges that have emerged. Beyond reporting on results, the review situates the CIP within a broader context and offers recommendations to inform reflection and discussion on the future of the CIP. It is grounded in an approach rooted in dialogue and existing CIP spaces, with the aim of supporting continuous improvement without adding to the workload of the initiatives.
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During work on the review of phase 1 in 2021, a number of observations quickly emerged, such as the fact that the potential for collaboration between regional players and neighborhood initiatives had not been sufficiently exploited. As a result, the coordination team, in collaboration with the partners, developed a vision for phase 2 in which a relational approach, experimentation and learning are key .
During the summer of 2024, the ICP Evaluation and Learning Committee worked on the development and publication of the evaluation plan for phase two. evaluation plan for phase 2 (Section: Evaluation and learning reports and publications). Among other things, this plan will make it possible to :
step back, capture and share advances and challenges;
reinvest learning to adjust practices;
and share learning at all levels of the CIP and beyond.
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The CIP stakeholders have learned many things and adapted a great deal since the project started. A key action of theirs has been constantly stepping back to take stock of the project’s strengths and challenges. This is why documenting the lessons learned has been emphasized from the start.
From the early years of phase 1, thanks to the collaboration of partners, the CIP supported the production of research and evaluation reports on the project, based on the experience of stakeholders.
These reports had two objectives:
Understand how far we've come.
Compile the lessons learned to guide the project's next steps.
Over time, the CIP has adjusted, for example, by modifying its governance structure to include broader representation from the community sector.
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To bring phase 1 to a close, we felt it was essential to take stock of the experience as a whole. In addition to the reports produced by the neighborhood initiative leaders, research and evaluations, the PIC Knowledge and Learning Manager held 23 individual and group interviews with 35 people involved in the project.
In order to take the pulse of the partners and incorporate their comments into the final publication, the preliminary results of the assessment were presented and improved by some 50 partners on June 1, 2023. The report was published in autumn 2023. To consult the report, click here (Section: Evaluation and learning reports and publications).
Neighbourhood support for learning
Since the start of phase 1, training and coaching aimed at strengthening learning and evaluation skills have been offered to people involved in neighborhood initiatives. Learning is a central notion in the collective impact approach, and training and coaching vary from impact measurement to strategic learning to meet the needs of the community. During phase 1, a strong emphasis was placed on evaluation processes as a learning method. These processes were aimed at evaluating collaborative practices or the effects on individuals. Some neighborhoods, such as Centre-Sud, have made these evaluations available to the public.
However, with phase 2, the notion of evaluation was revised to place greater emphasis on learning, with the aim of removing a weight that was weighing on the neighborhoods. As a result, the service offering was expanded to include coaching so that neighborhoods could choose for themselves which issue they wished to pursue further, be it an evaluation or research process, or one of strategic clarity. In a difficult post-pandemic context, and with the growing influence of of trust-based philanthropy, these are processes that require considerable investment, so it's a good idea for initiatives to address the issue that's most important to their successful development.