Accountable Now is an active community of practice. Our members participate in Peer Advice Groups to network with colleagues from other organisations and to share knowledge and resources in a trusted and confidential setting.
Approaching topics of governance, programming, organisational learning, feedback and complaints, safeguarding, impact measurement, stakeholder engagement, and more – our Peer Advice Groups (PAGs) give us the chance to work closely with our members and practitioners from other organisations to understand new approaches to common challenges across different themes.
2023-24 Peer Advice Groups
Learn more about our active PAGs, including how to join below. Follow us on social media for all updates on our peer advice groups – and stay tuned as we will be announcing the launch of a new group later this year!
Finance & Operations Peer Advice Group
Hosted by: Accountable Now & Accountability Lab
For this Finance & Operations Peer Advice Group (FinOps PAG), we aim to connect Heads of Finance, Governance, and Operations to discuss and share practical solutions on all accountability issues incurred in budgets, risk management, building internal capacity, quality assurance, and beyond.
Through regular online sessions, participants will explore a variety of topics (to be defined by participants) such as how organisations operate in an international environment (exchange rates, inflation, etc), how to operationalise policies, fundraising, effective hiring practices, how to meet donor requirements and more.
Interested in joining? Get in touch with Bao Han at [email protected].
Past Peer Advice Groups
Co-hosted by: Accountable Now & MERL Tech
The Participation & Accountability Working Group (P&A WG) of the Natural Language Processing Community of Practice (NLP-CoP) explored two interrelated goals (1) identifying key opportunities to enhance and enable new and more radical forms of participation through utilizing Natural Language Processing (NLP) and (2) seeking to better understand issues of accountability (to whom and for what) in applications of NLP for monitoring, evaluation, research, and learning of social change.
Check out this blog article from David Sada (Accountability Lab Mexico) and Bao Han Tran Le and Micheala Uruquart (Accountable Now) with insights from Accountability Lab’s #HackCorruption program – shared by Cheri-Leigh Erasmus, Co-CEO and Chief Learning and Agility Officer at Accountability Lab and David Sada, Operations Manager at Accountability Lab Mexico shared during the working group speaker series.
In the past couple of years, Civil Society Organisations’ (CSOs’) integrity has been questioned due to the surfacing of cases of misconduct within our organisations. Issues of sexual exploitation, harassment, and bullying have been exposed, despite the fact that organisations have policies and procedures in place precisely to prevent these types of abuse. Ultimately organisations in our sector have a responsibility to protect the safety and wellbeing of the people that we work for and with, our staff, partners and everyone else linked to our work.
To tackle what has been labelled as the safeguarding crisis, CSOs have responded by enhancing their safeguarding policies, procedure including strengthening the ways incidents are reported, making sure we are accountable when concerns are raised. However, we continue to question if this is enough.
- Will more workshops and training be enough to prevent incidents?
- How can we adapt our safeguarding procedures to the diversity of CSOs (small vs big and service delivery vs advocacy oriented)?
- How do we make sure that the people and communities we work with are confident to complain and communicate any types of violations?
- How can we guarantee that safeguarding is not only a procedure but that it is part of our organisational culture?
- How can we adapt our safeguarding procedures to the diversity of CSOs (small vs big and service delivery vs advocacy oriented)?
These are just some of the questions that the PAG set out to explore. To wrap the PAG and share learnings, Accountable Now – along with Accountability Lab, Educo, SOS Children’s Villages International and Oxfam – hosted a webinar on ‘Embedding Safeguarding in Programming‘.
Watch the webinar here.
Our latest Peer Advice Group was formed by individuals from Accountable Now Members Organisations, with an interest and curiosity on Impact Measurement. The PAG was facilitated by Natalia Gubbioni (Amnesty International) and Hector Payo (Accountable Now).
From July – October we approached the thematic areas within Impact Measurement: contribution vs. attribution; identifying impact indicators; impact awareness culture, and impact sharing & learning using peer learning and exchange to pave the way for a longer term CoP.
See outcomes and learnings here.
Receiving feedback from stakeholders and turning this process into a meaningful conversation is at the heart of every Accountable Now member’s work. However, putting theory intro practice can be difficult and it can confront implementors with many expected but also unforeseen challenges.
In 2019 we challenged six of our Member organisations to develop a fully functional feedback and complaints mechanism in 100 days. Over the course of the challenge, we discussed the difference between feedback and formal complaints, different online and offline mechanisms, safeguarding, tracking and responding to feedback, promoting the use of our mechanisms, and publicly reporting on complaints received.
Check out our lessons learned in our 12 steps to a great online feedback and complaints mechanism blog!
