Djirra

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Region
Victoria

About this project

Djirra is an Aboriginal Community Controlled Organisation which provides holistic, culturally safe and specialist legal and non-legal support to Aboriginal women across Victoria. Djirra works to prevent and address family violence through community education, early intervention and prevention programs, and policy and advocacy work to improve Aboriginal women’s access to justice, safety and equality.

Evaluation Needs Assessment

In 2018, Lirata partnered with Djirra to undertake an Evaluation Needs Assessment within Djirra’s Aboriginal Family Violence Legal Service. An Evaluation Needs Assessment enables us to identify the capacities and areas for development in Monitoring, Evaluation and Learning (MEL) within a team or organisation. Lirata developed an innovative needs assessment framework which assesses evaluation capacity through three lenses (individual capacity, team and organisational capacity, and MEL life cycle) and 11 domains.

Lirata then worked with Djirra to gather needs assessment data through a staff survey, desktop review of documents, mapping of reporting requirements and analysis of data system use. We conducted interviews and focus groups with staff of the Legal Service and other areas of Djirra, to understand information needs, people’s experiences of MEL and ideas about how it could work best within an Aboriginal Community Controlled context.

Outcomes

The needs assessment report provided a clear picture of strengths and areas for development across the evaluation capacity domains, plus a range of options for how Djirra to consider. We facilitated a collaborative findings workshop which further explored these themes and developed a clear action plan to build capacity.

Djirra has been able to implement key recommendations, leading to greatly improved data systems, and more efficient and meaningful data capture and reporting. Djirra is now proceeding with further actions including development of a Theory of Change and MEL framework. The needs assessment has provided an important baseline from which to measure success of evaluation capacity building work as it proceeds.

Djirra has been able to implement key recommendations, leading to greatly improved data systems, and more efficient and meaningful data capture and reporting.


Specialist focus

Activities

Evaluation needs assessment
Evaluation capacity building

Sectors

Family violence
Justice and legal

Population groups

First Nations people
Women

Project team

Project Lead

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