By Malaika Cheney-Coker My four-year-old son and I indulge in flights of fancy. Together we imagine flying cars that journey into the...

In the new results measurement landscape, implementing organizations, rather than donors, should lead By Malaika Cheney-Coker Other than boasting prolific acronym generating abilities (M&E, MEL, MEAL, MERL, MERLA, anyone?), the field of learning and results measurement is not typically known for its trendiness. Nonetheless, if you are congratulating yourself on having sorted out your outcomes from your outputs, your theory of change from your theory of action, now is not the

By Malaika Cheney-Coker The other day I exhumed the memory of something which really should have remained buried. But if specters of the dead can be roused in order to instruct the living then the lesson imparted from one of the earliest learning strategies I ever put together was that I shouldn’t have created a strategy in the first place. Having rattled the ghost of this strategy and a couple of others, I now see that the biggest issue was not that the act of strategizing i

How individuals and organizations inadvertently limit their creativity By Malaika Cheney-Coker “Well! I’ve often seen a cat without a grin,’ thought Alice ‘but a grin without a cat! It’s the most curious thing I ever saw in my life!” ― Lewis Carroll, Alice in Wonderland In the children’s book Alice in Wonderland , one of the many absurdities that the sensible young Alice experiences after falling down a rabbit hole into a fantastical world is a mad hatter at a tea party who r

Everyday life was escapism — until now By Malaika Cheney-Coker Verisimilitude is an ungainly Latin-derived word that describes an elegant concept: it means having the appearance of being true and describes the willing acceptance of what is contrived, as real. This is what happens when we enter into the sensorily textured experience of a movie or novel. In fact, this singular ability of fiction to draw us into an imaginary world and hold us there in a trance-like state, is on

It is possible to be a black person in America and not be “woke” By Malaika Cheney-Coker Source: Boonyachoat via istockphoto.com I grew up eating pigs feet. Broad-knuckled and tendon-bound, they were slave food, my parents explained. Our cuisine had rubbery tripe too, along with leafy greens that in other places would have been fed to ruminants. My parents, in discussing the peculiarities of this diet, explained that it was the creative usage of offal and humble vegetation th