KINGSTON, Jamaica - The Council of Voluntary Social Services (CVSS) will be hosting a series of workshops to strengthen Civil Society Organisations (CSOs) and improve their ability to deliver outputs that contribute to national development plans while increasing their ability to represent marginalised groups so they can impact policy at the national level.

In a release on Friday, AnnMarie Kirlew, programme manager at CVSS said that the first set of workshops will be held on June 8 and 15. She said the aim of the workshops is capacity strengthening of CSOs to improve their ability to contribute to national development plans and policy.

“Civil Society Organisations have positively impacted Jamaicans through numerous types of programmes and interventions for which they seek funding from local and international donors. However, some CSOs are less able to demonstrate effectively that their social interventions align with the goals they intend to achieve, that the linkages are plausible and that the money budgeted are spent is justified. These monitoring, learning and evaluation workshops will help increase CSO’s ability to utilise data, monitor, evaluate and communicate their programme effectiveness,” Kirlew said.

Zahra Miller, monitoring and evaluation expert, is set to conduct the workshops in person at the National Volunteer Centre at 2D Camp Road, Kingston 4.

The June 8 workshop will be done in modules with the first model focusing on ‘hacks to becoming a learning organisation’ where participants will be exposed on what it takes to be imitated, anxious or stressed about Key Performance Indicators (KPI) and learn practical approach to recalibrate learning to become data driven.

Model two will look at ‘managing results, not activities’ and will help participants to understand results-based management and how it differs from typical management. Participants will learn how to showcase their results through storytelling with data visualization.

The workshops are being supported by funding from the Caribbean (NGO) Policy Development Centre (CPDC) which awarded the Council of Voluntary Social Services grant funding in February 2023 towards Enhancing CARIFORUM’s Civil Society Capacity to participate in national and regional development programming and policymaking.

The workshops will be free. Interested persons or CSOs can register for the workshop by contacting the CVSS at 876-906-0065 or by email at projects@cvssja.org.