🛸 Future-First Evaluation: Tracking What Can Emerge

Most evaluation asks:

📊 What happened?

But in times of rupture, uncertainty, and systems transition, we also need to ask:

🌱 What future are we helping emerge?

This session explores future-first approaches to systems change evaluation that focus less on proving past success and more on sensing where genuine transformation may be emerging.

Together, we’ll examine how networks, movements, and funders can recognize early signals of change, distinguish transformation from “innovative” incrementalism, and use imagination for evaluation and strategic learning.

You’ll learn:

• 🛰️ How to identify early signals of transformational change before outcomes are fully visible
• 🚦 Ways to recognize when “innovative” strategies are reinforcing dominant systems instead of shifting them
• 🧃 Practical approaches for bridging futures thinking into movement strategy, network learning, and philanthropy

Hosted by Malaika Cheney-Coker, whose work bridges literature, systems change, and organizational learning to explore how creativity and imagination can reshape how we understand transformation.

🫀 Other Impact Evaluation Sessions

This is part of a three-part series exploring how evaluation can move beyond being practices that are extractive, burdensome, and disconnected from lived reality.

It includes:

• Session 1: 🐋 Evaluation That Restores Energy, Trust, and Possibility
• Session 2: 🛶 Systems Evaluation: Sensing the Signals Beneath the Spreadsheet
• Session 3: 🛸 Future-First Evaluation: Tracking What Can Emerge

Together, these sessions explore how evaluation can become a living practice for fostering healthier systems, navigating uncertainty, and strengthening relationships.

We encourage you to sign up for all three!

But if you just want to dip your toes in 🌊, you’re warmly welcome to join one or two.

💸 Financial contributions for long-term spaces

Festival sessions are using a gift economy model. 

Fito contributes coordination and infrastructure as a gift to the network. Your contribution, if you decide to give, goes towards supporting collaborative experiments that emerge across these three sessions! 🎨

For each session, there are three tiers:

• Accessibility — 0–30€ | contribute what you can.

• Sustainability — 30€ | meets the needs of the hosts and the track.

• Supporter — 45€+ | helps others attend and supports the hosts' work.

Give the most you can without overstretching or resentment. 💚 

Model based on the work of Miki Kashtan.

🎪 About the Networks Festival 2026 (spoiler: it’s different from the last year! 👀)

May 18 – June 26; fully online

The Networks Festival is a place to relate, exchange lived experience, and rewire how change happens.

This year, we are mixing it up a bit! You’re invited you to play in 6 topic tracks, which have three sessions each.

🚨 You’ll still need sign up for each individual session to get calendar invites & reminders.

🎤 2026 Festival Tracks

• 🌱 Impact Evaluation
• 💸 Funding Networks
• 💦 Ripple Effect Mapping
• ⚖️ Equitable Collaborations
• 🫶 Healing-Centered Leadership
• 🖥️ Tech for Collective Organizing
• 🧭 Decision-Making & Governance

Each track will kick-start a longer-term experiment 1-2 months after the festival.

Pretty neat, huh?

For now, just feel which topic tracks speak most to you.

See you on the dance floor! 🕺💃