Cecilia Conrad, Lever for Change CEO and Managing Director of 100&Change, discusses the Wise Head Panel and the diverse range of perspectives the external judges brought to evaluating proposals.
The 100&Change Wise Head Panel evaluation is sandwiched between the Peer-to-Peer review, in which each applicant scores five proposals submitted by other applicants within the same domain, and the technical review by a specialist whose expertise is matched to the project. The Wise Head Panel both provides a big picture perspective on the four evaluation criteria and mitigates against the conservatism of specialist reviews. Our Wise Head Panel of external judges leverages the wisdom of the crowd but avoids the pitfall of becoming a popularity contest.
Not everyone is comfortable reviewing proposals across multiple domains. Yet that is what we asked each judge to do. We asked members of the 100&Change Wise Head Panel to review proposals from a wide array of fields of endeavor, involving work all over the globe. We asked the judges to score each application based solely on our four criteria: impactful, evidence-based, feasible, and durable, setting aside any biases that they might have. And we asked them to provide constructive feedback on each application.