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Dianne Rogers December 18, 2003 (819) 827-4088 Why Third Party Monitoring? Objective I To reach a common understanding of why it is important to monitor Objective II To understand the roles and responsibilities of third party monitoring Objective III To get a clear picture of the current context of third party monitoring Objective IV ID of functions that the NCA could undertake as a third party monitor Value Added of the NCA Recommendations Conclusion Appendix I Flip Chart Documentation Appendix II Workbook from the Roundtable Appendix III Third Party Monitoring of Canada's Promise to Children By Karen Kidder Why Third Party Monitoring? A complex dialogue exists between the third sector and the government. Monitoring has been identified as a priority area for the NCA to provide a data and evidence basis for advocacy and to hold the government responsible for their commitments and agreements. Please see Appendix III: Third Party Monitoring of Canada's Promise to Children by Karen Kidder The purpose of this forum was:
Why use social indicators as basic descriptors in monitoring?
What do we need? What do we want to achieve? Monitoring is critical if we are to understand the adequacy and distribution of resources as they relate to improving the lives of children and their families. By fostering positive change in healthy active living, healthy environments, individual practice in service delivery, quality of services and supports, accessibility, inclusion of services and supports, and effective public policy. We must de-mystify and value "monitoring". At the local, regional, provincial/territorial, and national level, we must simplify the approach to monitoring by asking ourselves to answer questions such as: How are kids doing? How are communities doing? How are governments doing? We need a broader range of social indicators to describe what we say we value but we do not demonstrate in practice. We say that we value working well with adolescents to encourage citizen engagement but the bottom line is that we do not. We also say that we value standardized testing in the public education system but this is a simple tool used extensively that is uni-dimensional by definition. Standardized testing does not illuminate the social context of the lives of children and youth, not does it reflect a host of talents, interests, and activities outside of the education system which add value and underline resilience over time in academic life. What does standardized testing really tell us about the depth and breadth of the capacities of the children being tested?
Resources came from the taxpayers' pockets to activate standardized testing across the province of Ontario. Standardized testing creates inequities amongst the student population and causes a rank ordering of children's academic life which further marginalizes those who are not high achievers. What is valued in a political atmosphere such as this is what can most easily be understood. However, these kinds of practices do not illuminate the capacities of children - they create inequities. We need to render visible that which is not. Organizations often do not know the extent of their reach or who their members really are. Periodic status reports are not comprehensive and "iffy" at best. There needs to be a way to describe the number of families reached and the social context of those families. Indicators are useful in evaluation practices, but attribution remains a problem in the health field as tracking and trends reporting do not come out of these indicators. We need to create value and dimensionality through monitoring with social indicators which illuminate lives.
We need to identify and track trends in monitoring practices so they can act as a complement to statistical evaluation methodologies. Quantitative and qualitative statistical evaluation is well known to us, but monitoring and tracking trends is a practice that once adopted, will allow us to describe children's lived realities in ways that traditional evaluation tools do not. For example, when one examines the indicators that are being used with children who are disabled, it is difficult to track these children because they are excluded from the outset. The lives of these children are not illuminated in existing data sets, but using them in tandem with the social context indicators related to monitoring will increase our persuasive capacities for advocacy. Another example of invisibility is legislation for home care and funding related to demonstration projects around the country. A young person with mental health issues is not qualified for home care. How then can service providers help protect this population from ending up in the criminal justice system? Monitoring can be used as an advocacy tool to increase the efforts to illuminate this issue and to inform not only health promoters but most importantly, legislators. We need a clear definition of monitoring. Using the United Nations convention on the Rights of the Child as a backdrop and point of departure for monitoring will begin to move the concept of a world fit for children forward. We can also use social mapping in monitoring to help highlight what is happening to children locally. Highlighting and tracking local trends is very important to move politicians. Combining readiness to learn information with community mapping will reflect how children are doing in terms of relative supports around them and can be used right across Canada. II. Objective: To understand the roles and responsibilities of third party monitoring. Canada's Promises to Children We must hold state parties accountable for what they have already agreed to do. We must demand an effective engagement mechanism with out governments. Many decisions are made behind closed doors. Transparency and monitoring are what is needed to transform systems as collaborative and democratic processes. The UNCRC is a tool to encourage citizen engagement from an early age. Please see Recommendations of Senator Pearson's Website: www.sen.parl.gc.ca/lpearson How do we make the information portable to the front line? Many frontline workers are overwhelmed with information and are experiencing communication fatigue. We must get the community to care again. A place to begin is to integrate the language of rights in practice into programs at the post-secondary level. Children and youth need this information and many successful programs exist which need to be shared. This kind of change takes a generation or two to be integrated into society. How do we get information out to children and their families who are the most vulnerable? If a family is standing in line at Food Banks, the last thing they are interested in is more rhetorical information. Even hunger has become so institutionalized, it is hard to make citizens or governments accountable - everyone has become dulled to the issue. Creating, supporting, and maintaining a rights-based personal and political living environment would reflect the rights of others and would be the true basis for a civil and civic society, each person respecting the rights of others. The impact of child reports and media coverage can be linked to potential outcomes, but the media focus emphasized sensationalized reports without documentation. The tone must be changed to reflect our obligation on an international level as Canadians by using a framework such as the UNCRC. We need to ask ourselves, "How do we do this?", not "Should we?" As a society, we no longer question whether we have the right to vote. Because we exercise this right, we organize around it. The CCRC is piloting a tool kit across the country emphasizing the need to reframe our progress in being accountable to agreements and honouring the rights of children. We must stress simplicity and build a bigger voice by sharing knowledge. It is easy to make monitoring an overwhelming and complicated process. We need to educate ourselves and others about the components of monitoring so we can begin to see where each of out organizations fit in and address this next level of capacity building collectively. We need this stage to be a low cost activity so as not to take the resources away from children's services and programs, especially for small NGO's. Monitoring is a strength building exercise when we are willing to ask ourselves what we want to achieve and come with some real solutions to take out objectives forward. We can use monitoring to establish outcome statements and identify early trends. There are many sources of information which can help us focus on the usefulness of monitoring to improve out programs and services: data sets, social mapping, and anecdotal stories. An opportunity exits to ensure that current knowledge continues to be built on and shared. We acknowledge that organizations such as CCSD, CICH, Campaign 2000, CCRC, and the Vanier Institute of the Family have been and continue to be engaged in monitoring efforts being available at a single source as a baseline to be built on. To do so, we would need to create national monitoring standards which emphasize an application and implementation process which reflects regional realities in a comprehensive communication strategy across the North and from British Columbia to Newfoundland. Collaboration will strengthen efforts locally and nationally to highlight best practices and the lived realities of children and families. For instance, there are amazing disparities across the country related to anti-bullying initiatives. We need to be able to analyze what causes these disparities, what is needed to adjust the disparities, and how to bring knowledge forward to those who do not have the resources or who are just beginning. Such an endeavour could be a very powerful development.
One of the challenges in working collaboratively with various government departments is the siloed nature of information sharing. Currently there is a lack of communication and infrastructure to share these kinds of information with one another. The system does not allow for comprehensive communication which opens an opportunity for NGO's. The creation of a central information cache that could be accessed by both NGO's and the government would create an environment conducive to collaboration. In order to change the way Canada does business, we all need to cooperate with one another, collaborate or information, and integrate knowledge. As knowledge brokers, we can bring together information for rural sites, cities, municipalities, regions, provinces, territories, and from the national and federal levels.
Research is too often not connected to practice, and there are agreements and policies which we are not even aware of or know very little about. Or job is also to know what documents and treaties state parties already have signed such as those agreements listed in the Workbook under "Canada's Promises to Children." We need a mechanism for the valuable intelligence and experience of any person, organization, or community to add to the national dialogue. We need to know how to use both national and international agreements to hold the government accountable to their promises and to raise public awareness about these agreements. For instance, by using the UNCRC tool hit, we can learn how to use a rights-based lens to monitor concrete applications of the articles of the UNCRC in the individual lives of children and youth at all levels of government. We must find levels of cooperation with the F/P/T as a civil society to implement a national play of action. The government will not move on this unless we become familiar with what the government said it would do and remind them of their moral and legislative promises. Out expectations must be collectively understood, spoken, and communicated. If not the National Children's Alliance, then who? We need to use our energies in solidarity to keep an educated and spirited discussion alive to bring about cooperation, coordination, and integration of not only moral obligations, but to hold the government accountable to legislative agreements. Using knowledge about the agreements substantially improves out ability to take action. Informing the public about what their government has agreed to is also critical. How can they ask for what is need if they do not know what they are supposed to have? We have a strong foundation of agreements, vision, and language to build upon. III. Objective: To get a clear picture of the current context of third party monitoring How are we doing as third party monitors? Challenges relate directly to courting alliances and supporting monitoring efforts across sectors. Access to date, heavy price tags, proprietorship, and hesitancy to see alternative ways to make data available cry out for a data liberation initiative for the voluntary sector and community-based organization. We need to build a sense of understanding data sets within our own organization and communities, but we must also see how national data can be applied at the local level. Using accessible and shared data sets, we can find out how kids, communities, and governments are doing. Many government sources at the F/P/T/ level and specific population groups will not release data so that can have a snap shot of the country as a whole, nor can communities really understand how they are doing in creating communities fir for children and youth. There is also a critical lack of research around good health indicators for out children. We need to monitor because the developmental stages of childhood and youth are important, and monitoring will enhance their opportunities, capacities, and life conditions. How do we monitor ECDI if you don't know what is going on in the provinces? In order to do so, we discussed a number of obstacles and concerns which need to be taken into consideration:
We need a very expansive approach to monitoring to highlight the interconnectedness of data sets and qualitative evidence such as stories about the lives of children and youth. Services are not at all where they need to be. Coordinated and collaborative monitoring identifies services and supports for children and families at the local level as well as informing the collective consciousness. Effective monitoring would create a clear, common understanding of what needs to be monitored in the future (i.e. monitor the monitoring)
Evaluation indicators do not tell us the programs are working, but we believe in the programs we are offering. Monitoring with alternative indicators could put the programs and services into a social context which would allow for us to understand the relevance and viability of programs for local clients better. Each organization generates data and stories that would be of interest to the rest of the country if we shared the information, to track policies, assess needs, identify service gaps, and share best practices and success stories inventoried in an accessible and centralized clearinghouse.
We need good descriptive indicators and we need data and research that can trap descriptive indicators. We must change the disconnect between data and reality. Good monitoring occurs over time and always comes back to the population. For instance, society is building and creating school environments that are convenient for adults but do not address the needs or rights of children and youth. Inclusion and correlating data are very important. Currently, data around disabled children barely exists - this has to change.
We must go back to the Agreements and check how those Agreements reflect out opinions and out mandates. We must also ask ourselves what is stopping us from holding out government accountable. Perhaps we don't know how.
Third party monitoring could open the way for a national health council and leverage attention for children and youth as members. In order to make such a process effective, we would have to define operational definitions of third party monitoring to reflect the full range of possibilities. We know that children and youth do not have a political voice in the democratic process. However, citizen engagement for children and youth can be conducted in a number of different ways so that their voices can be brought to bear on the political process such as publicizing heir stories and actions as agents of change. Another instance of youth engagement came about through the actions of a teacher who guided his students though the political process and voted according to their recommendation.
IV. Objective: Identification of functions that the Alliance could undertake as a third party monitor. What are the priorities of the National Children's Alliance?
What is the value added of the National Children's Alliance?
Final Recommendations
Conclusion The principles of the Alliance highlight mutuality and non-competitiveness with its members. The Alliance only leverages the strength of many voices for improvements for children, in the best interest of children, focusing on one cause and one cause only (i.e. never deflecting the discussion in favour of highways). This is what we heard from the participants at the meeting which allows the Alliance to move forward in the best interest of children and to guide submissions for funding to achieve our objectives around third party monitoring. Information at all levels must resonate synergistically with one another. The issue of the state of the art and science of monitoring is a collective priority, and HRDC has expressed potential to resource some initiatives around third party monitoring to be brought forward by the Alliance.
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