103 - An Evaluator’s Role to Support Quality Convening Facilitated by Public Health and Healthcare & Advance Collective Impact and Community Health

Abstract Information: Cross-sector community convening is an increasingly utilized strategy to improve programs and policies, and especially to understand inequities and strategize how to adapt approaches for historically underrepresented populations. This is evidenced in federally required Community Health Assessments (CHA) or Community Health Needs Assessments (CHNA) and the resulting Community Health Improvement Plans (CHIP) (CDC). Evaluators play a foundational role in convenings, ensuring the convened group strategically plans shared work and continuously reflects and improves. Our evaluation team, housed within an integrated health system, developed a framework and tool to implement and evaluate convenings facilitated by our internal community health colleagues. Since 2021, we have provided these services to several groups convened by our health system, including a statewide movement to increase parent and community support for early childhood brain development and a federally funded engagement award to convene diverse stakeholders to identify community-centered outcomes for whole child growth, to advance their collective impact. We have since expanded partnership to a local public health department to support their community leadership team’s work around mental health and well-being. In this session, we will share our framework for quality convening, discuss three case studies, reflect on our lessons learned, and discuss the relationship between evaluation and engagement.