“Yikes! You Mean Crises Aren’t One-off?”: How Critical Moments Reflection Helped Us See the Trend-line

By  Malaika Cheney-Coker (Ignited Word LLC/Atlanta malaika@ignitedword.com)

Everyone working in the social impact sector takes complexity as a given (or should). But what happens when complexity morphs into full-blown crisis? What are the implications for MEL when, on top of a system’s chronic disease, there is a heart attack to contend with?

This blog shares the experience of WomenStrong’s outcome evaluation (October 2024 – May 2025), which measured the health and resilience of grantee partners during a period of dramatic cuts to foreign assistance and women’s rights funding.

Context and MEL challenge

Measuring organizational health—the "beating heart" of an organization—is notoriously difficult in the NGO sector because it is abstract, multifaceted, and lacks standardized tools. While financial health can be read on a statement, organizational resilience across 19 diverse organizations requires a deeper dive.

WomenStrong provides unrestricted funding and organizational strengthening support, but they needed to understand how partners were faring after shifting to a more equitable, partner-led action planning approach. The challenge was to design an evaluation that was valuable for both the foundation’s learning and the partners themselves, even amidst a burgeoning global funding crisis.

The Approach: Critical Moments Reflection (CMR)

To capture the "grey areas" of complex environments, the evaluation team proposed a qualitative design combining outcome harvesting with a modified version of Critical Moments Reflection (CMR).

Originally developed by MIT’s Center for Reflective Community Practice, CMR is a reflective dialogue tool where participants collectively plot a timeline of "critical moments". For this evaluation, the team adapted the method for a digital environment:

  • Platform: Used MURAL for online collaboration across English, Spanish, and French-speaking partners.
  • Process: Nine organizations were invited to 90-minute sessions to build timelines of key events (internal/external, positive/negative) from 2022 to the present.
  • Three-Step Dialogue: 1) Identify moments (e.g., new partnerships, awards); 2) Explain why they mattered; 3) Discuss influencing factors.
  • Analysis: Evaluators guided partners to select their "top three" moments, which were then analysed for patterns and situated within global socio-political developments.
Key Learnings / Insights in Action
Organic Contribution

References to WomenStrong’s support emerged naturally during the timeline building, reducing confirmation bias.

Adaptability in Crisis

When technical issues or power outages struck, the team allowed asynchronous input on MURAL boards, ensuring no partner was left out.

Complementary Data

CMR generated insights that did not surface in the outcome harvest but were congruent with other results, providing a more holistic view of organizational evolution.

Aha! Moment: From Acute Crisis to Chronic Condition

The most significant insight gained through CMR was the ability to observe patterns over time. The team realized that the 2025 funding crisis was not an isolated event; it was merely the latest point in a long history of recurring shocks, including the pandemic and previous political shifts.

This shifted the perspective: "funding crisis" is not just an acute event—for women's rights organizations, it is a chronic condition. Recognizing this trendline underscored the partners' growing resilience and fortitude, proving they were better prepared for the current crisis than they might have otherwise appeared.

Advice for Practitioners

If you are looking to move beyond traditional MEL limitations in complex environments, consider CMR because:

  • It reduces the pressure to predict: By identifying milestones retroactively, trends emerge organically.
  • It weaves context into the narrative: It intentionally balances internal achievements with external environmental factors.
  • It prioritizes "Dialogue-First": As a qualitative tool, it furnishes the rich data necessary for understanding true complexity.

WomenStrong has now added CMR to its repertoire for future evaluations and encourages partners to use it as a participatory method for assessing their own organizational evolution.