CeaseFire was thrilled to be named in the Global Journal’s inaugural ‘Top 100 Best NGOs’ list last week joining Ashoka, Oxfam, Human Rights Watch, International Rescue Committee, CARE, and others.

“It is a great honour to be receiving this distinction, recognised as one of the best worldwide, along with so many other reputable organisations,” stated Dr. Gary Slutkin, CeaseFire Founder and Executive Director, responding to the release of the list.

For the Global Journal this first of its kind international ranking was a research odyssey. Their team faced assessing thousands of non-governmental organisations in hundreds of different sectors around the world to determine the top 100 best. In an effort to make the process more rigorous they subjected each organisation to eight qualitatively determined metrics, including Effectiveness, Impact, Efficiency & Value for Money, and Strategic & Financial Management (Read more on their methodology).

As the list was going to publication, CeaseFire’s score for “Effectiveness,” defined by the Global Journal as an organisation’s “delivery against objectives,” as well as, the “quality of external evaluations” also went up. Johns Hopkins University completed the first rigorous external evaluation of a CeaseFire replication and demonstrated successful results for reducing violence in all four neighbourhoods where it was implemented.

While these favourable results (pdf) were not factored into the ranking that ultimately landed CeaseFire on the list, they certainly validate The Global Journal’s endorsement of the programme. Dr. Daniel Webster, lead author of the study and deputy director of the Johns Hopkins Centre for the Prevention of Youth Violence, presented the three year study at a press conference held January 11, 2012 of four historically violent neighbourhoods—McElderry Park, Elwood Park, Madison-Eastend, Cherry Hill—showing a statistically significant decline in either homicides or nonfatal shootings or both in each of the communities.

Eventually, the team over at Global Journal narrowed the list to 1,000 possible NGOs, then, they rolled up their sleeves and really got to work. Two group reviews began investigating NGO after NGO with a focus on finding those with the best all around scores in each of the informally weighted criteria. They produced a 400 NGO short-list followed by an unranked list of the top 100 leading actors in the global non-profit world. The final stage of the process was to sort them according to the aforementioned metrics.

Wikimedia Foundation topped the list, but CeaseFire was rated first among conflict resolution organisations and ranked #30 overall.