Capacity-building with a capacity-builder

My last blog back in April, about building a regional workforce monitoring system using Excel, was done for Toi Economic Development Agency (Toi EDA), a small non-government organisation in the Eastern Bay of Plenty sub-region of New Zealand.

More specifically, my client contact was Toi EDA’s Workforce Development Manager Barbara MacLennan. I first met Barbara in the late-1990s when we worked together in the policy area of Rotorua District Council. Since then, we’ve been involved in various joint projects, along with many more projects on our own separate paths, with an underlying theme of ‘capacity-building’.

One of Barbara’s key interest area’s is in community-led development (CLD), including ongoing involvement in the Inspiring Communities group of CLD advocates and practitioners.

Inspiring Communities’ mission is “Increasing the capacity of communities through community-led change”. The group focuses on principles such as connecting people, projects and places; learning about how positive change is created; and continually sharing this to build capacity and strengthen wellbeing outcomes in local communities.

Toi EDA is an example of the type of organisation that Inspiring Communities works with, and is itself a capacity-building organisation. Operated by a charitable trust and serving one of the lowest socio-economic sub-regions of New Zealand, Toi EDA has developed a broad range of workforce development and other initiatives. Most recently, Toi EDA has been developing a labour market monitoring programme of monthly, quarterly and annual data reporting along with ‘deep dive’ reports on specific topics.

This short blog post is about how Barbara and I recently worked on a capacity-building project for Toi EDA, which in turn helped build our own capacity – a virtual layer-cake of capacity building.

The project: Eastern Bay Youth Survey 2021

Our approach: Review other youth surveys, design a questionnaire, put it into Survey Monkey, collect responses from young people, report the results

The result: 370 responses, representing around 10% of all Eastern Bay young people in the target sample of senior school students, told EDA about their plans after leaving schools, preferred job or career path, level of confidence in achieving goals after finishing schools, perceived barriers to achieving goals, current paid and unpaid work, types of jobs or industries of interest, and preferred way to learn about industries, jobs and opportunities

What I learnt: All sorts of things about how best to design a survey using Survey Monkey, including setting up the questions on separate pages to enable ‘skipping’ of irrelevant questions; a formal approach to data-cleaning as suggested by Survey Monkey; and various Excel tricks to make analysis easier, such as the ‘Countifs’ function (follow the link to learn more)

To learn all about what Eastern Bay young people thought about work, careers and next steps, check out the set of reports on www.toi-eda.co.nz/Workforce-Development.aspx