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Exploring the Real Work of Social Change: Seven Questions that Keep Us Awake

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Leading and Managing in the Social Sector

Part of the book series: Management for Professionals ((MANAGPROF))

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Abstract

This chapter captures the work the Community Development Resource Association (CDRA), in Cape Town, South Africa, has been doing over the past 20 years with a wide variety of people, from rural and urban communities and movements to networks and alliances, local and international NGOs, and donor agencies to government. Reflecting upon seven important questions that guide CDRA’s work, Doug Reeler describes how CDRA designs and facilitates transformative practices and processes of social change. He  concludes his article with a challenge to obsessively detailed planning, monitoring, evaluation, and other technical systems to manage and control social change.

An earlier version of this article was originally published in the OD Practitioner, 2015, 47(1), 15–24.

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Notes

  1. 1.

    Logical Framework Approach (logframe) is a management tool used for designing, monitoring, and evaluating international development projects.

  2. 2.

    Some twenty years ago we used the phrase Planning, Monitoring, and Evaluation, seeing it as a continuous cycle. The dropping of Planning from common discourse reflects this outsource to M&E experts.

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Correspondence to Doug Reeler .

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© 2017 Springer International Publishing AG

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Reeler, D. (2017). Exploring the Real Work of Social Change: Seven Questions that Keep Us Awake. In: Tirmizi, S., Vogelsang, J. (eds) Leading and Managing in the Social Sector. Management for Professionals. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-47045-0_5

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