GOI Re-union and Data Party

The College of Agriculture and Life Sciences through CALS Global recently hosted a Global Opportunity Initiative (GOI) alumni reunion and evaluation data party. GOI is a CALS Global signature initiative that targets faculty for international research capacity building and collaborations. The program advances the use of collaborative and design-thinking tools such as challenge mapping, systems thinking approaches, stakeholder and network ecosystems, among others, to define global research and development challenges and collaboratively design solutions. GOIs culminate in capstone visits to CALS international anchor partners; recently being Egerton University in Kenya. The May 2023 event brought together 1st (2018), 2nd (2019), and 3rd (2021) GOI cohorts to engage in interdisciplinary deliberations and reflect on the future of GOI. The GOI interdisciplinarity encompasses diverse agricultural and life science research themes; prompting a partnership with the Virginia-Maryland College of Veterinary Medicine for 2019 and 2021 GOI cohorts. 

The main purpose of the GOI alumni reunion and data party was to introduce different GOI cohorts to one another while reflecting on the program’s value and worth. The data party was proposed and co-facilitated by Dr. Natalie Cook who was part of GOI 2021. The data party helped provide further insights and in-depth reflections on emerging GOI evaluation themes. First, CALS Global ran an online survey to collect views from GOI participants and identified key outcomes to guide the data party. The evaluation outcomes were classified into (i) collaboration benefits challenges, benefits, challenges, constraints, and assets; (ii) GOI in-person virtual and in-person modalities; (iii) GOI capstone ideation; (iv) the GOI roadmap and future prioritizations and anchor partner identification; (v) GOI tools and their applicability; (vi) celebrating GOI wins; and (vii) GOI program cost and investment plans. 

These data party themes were designed in posters where participants reflected and provided feedback using sticky notes and voting dots. The data was then collected and summarized to complement the original evaluation outcomes. Look out for the evaluation outcomes and summaries in the upcoming CALS Global newsletter.