Our Approach
CDA Collaborative Learning Project's approach:
- Is field-based and experience-driven (rather than theory or model-based).
- Develops a context and a process in which organizations learn from and with each other more than they can learn from their own experience alone.
- Produces tools and approaches that are broadly applicable and transferable across contexts.
CDA works with agencies and organizations that are operational in the field to identify problematic issues of broad concern and to organize the time and space in which these agencies, together, can address their shared concerns.
The process involves several stages.
- We gather the experience of multiple agencies in multiple locations through case studies of actual field experience. These are written by individuals or teams who have broad experience in the field, often including local and international people working together.
When several case studies have been completed, people engaged in the collaboration come together to compare and analyze them. From these sessions of collective analysis, we can identify issues and themes that cross contexts and have broad relevance. We assemble preliminary lessons and ideas about how to understand the issues and address programming problems.
- Using the lessons derived/learned from the case studies and consultations, CDA organizes a series of “Feedback Workshops”. Individuals and agencies active in the field come together to “test” the lessons against their own experiences and, by adding their analysis and ideas, to hone and improve the lessons learned.
These ideas and tools are widely disseminated in order to be used by people engaged in active programming in the field. Handbooks are published and training workshops are developed to help this dissemination.
- CDA follows this process by working, for some years, directly with operational agencies to take these lessons and apply them in their daily work, again adding to the learning and improving impacts.
The approach enables active international actors to learn from our past experience and, using this, to constantly improve our work so that our impacts are increasingly positive for the people in the societies where we work.
CDA does not maintain projects or programs in the field.