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About R&L

On this page:
R&L Rationale
R&L Purpose
How Can R&L Help You
Using R&L Resources

Rationale

Organizations in the government and non-profit sectors are under pressure to be accountable to their stakeholders. Citizens, governments, and donor agencies are increasing demands for measurable results, organizational performance standards, and a strategic allocation of resources.

The organizations we have worked with over the years have expressed a strong desire to improve their performance and, at the same time, a need for comprehensive frameworks that could help them to reflect upon their work.

Universalia, the International Development Research Center (IDRC), and Fundación Acceso created Reflect & Learn (R&L) in 2000.  Initially designed for civil society organizations (CSOs), the website compiled and organized different approaches to organizational self-assessment.  Universalia, with the support of IDRC, redesigned and revamped the website in 2008 in order to meet the needs of a broader range of organizations - primarily in government and non-profit sectors - and of organizational assessment/organizational development practitioners.

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R&L Purpose

The purpose of Reflect & Learn (R&L) is to help organizations improve their performance by using organizational assessment (OA). OA is a tool that supports an organization in its quest to learn more about itself. The process of reflection in OA is based on providing an organizational diagnosis that allows organizational stakeholders to learn from experiences and results, in order to facilitate decision-making and foster a more strategic vision, more effective programs, stronger governance, etc.  Organizational assessment can be part of a process of change and capacity building.

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How Can R&L Help You

R&L aims to engage diverse organizations in the use of organizational assessment for learning and improvement.

We also aim to support the beginning of a learning community that focuses on organizational evaluation, learning, self-assessment, and their links to organizational change processes.  The website provides a comprehensive database of frameworks and tools that can be used for organizational assessment.  These are illustrated through a number of examples of "real" OA experiences. The site also offers and facilitates a discussion area where individuals and organizations with an interest in organizational assessment, change management, learning and capacity development can share their experiences and ask their questions.

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Using R&L Resources

We have grouped all information and resources about organizational assessment (OA) under the website section entitled "Discover Organizational Assessment (OA)". In that section you will learn all you need to know about OA (its definition, rationale, users, frameworks, specific terms, etc.), and you will find a set of resources to help you conduct a self-assessment.

We also invite you to check in periodically to our Discussion Area, where we will have periodic debates on specific OA issues.

To facilitate your use of this website without overloading your email inbox with updates, we have made an RSS feed option available on some pages so as to keep you updated with any new changes on the Reflect & Learn site.  R&L provides RSS feeds for the following pages of the website:

  • Monthly Polls
  • OA News & Upcoming Events
  • Recently added to Reflect & Learn
  • Recent OA Publications
  • Discussion Area

All the above-mentioned RSS feeds can be subscribed to simultaneously by clicking on the RSS logo RSS logo appearing in the url address bar of the R&L home page. 

If you only wish to subscribe to the discussion's page instead of subscribing to all of the available R&L RSS feeds, you can do so by going in our Discussion Area and clicking on the RSS logo RSS logo appearing in the url address bar of that specific page; you will then be notified each time a new discussion is added to the R&L website.

Click here if you need to learn more about what an RSS is and how it can be used.

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Share your Organizational Assessment experience 

Visit the blog section.