On August 6th, LLSP participants learned how to build a good plan to accomplish their personal or professional goals. In his course, “The Theory of Change,” Farhan Latif, president of the El Hibri Foundation spoke with students about ways to hone their professional goals and their personal talents to maximize their outcomes.
Mr. Latif began his course by laying out the reasons why a Theory of Change (TOC) is needed, saying, “after a while you start to forget what’s happening and why you’re doing the work that you’re doing.” A TOC, he described, can help individuals or organizations refocus to make their end goal a reality.
Mr. Latif discussed with participants the difficulties inherent in running a nonprofit or any organization, including: deciding who should receive funding, how to measure a program’s impact, outside forces that can influence priorities, and even how to define the goals of a program or organization. A TOC helps to clarify those issues, and “represents an organization or an individual’s collective belief about the causal relationship between certain actions and desired outcomes.”
After walking through the steps of creating a TOC, he had participants create their own TOCs, either for themselves or the organizations with which they work. Though many students struggled at first to put their TOCs into words, they found the activity both useful and eye-opening.
One student remarked at the end of the course: “this is really a turning point in how I see my own organization…for sure I’m going to make this the moment I get back home.” Another noted: “I feel like I need to do this with the organization I work for…I didn’t know that this model, the Theory of Change, existed.”
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