Embedding Equity within the Process of Building a Community Advisory Board

Abstract Information: Community advisory boards (CABs) offer a mechanism for prioritizing diverse perspectives in our evaluations through inviting community members to have representation in and contribute to our work. Engaging a CAB allows evaluators to include stakeholders from inception through dissemination. One of the guiding principles of our work at the SEIU 775 Benefits Group (BG) is centering caregiver voices to ensure our benefits and programs meet their unique needs and reflect their values and lived experiences. To embody this guiding principle and ensure equity, we are currently working to develop a CAB to foster participatory relationships with the caregivers we serve and offer increased avenues to our community to co-design our evaluation and research. From the outset of this work, we are intentionally embedding equity within our development process, to ensure that diversity, equity, inclusion, and justice are built into the foundation of our CAB.

Our year-long process of developing our CAB included the following steps:

1. Identifying relevant regulations and organizational policies that may impact the structure and function of the CAB;


2. Reviewing the literature to identify best practices for embedding equity throughout all stages of recruitment, development, and engagement of the CAB;


3. Interviewing community organizations with CABs to learn from their experiences;


4. Interviewing our internal organizational stakeholders to learn about their goals and expectations for CAB engagement and impact;


5. Designing the operating procedures, including an evaluation plan that will both assess the experience of CAB members as well as the impacts of the CAB on our research, evaluation, and organization overall.

Our goal with this intentionally staged approach is to establish a sustainable initial CAB structure where CAB members feel included, respected, and meaningfully involved in organizational work. Additionally, we wanted a structure CAB members can respond to and expand upon. All steps of this development process helped us identify and prioritize key structural aspects for the initial iteration of our CAB, and envision CAB impacts on our organizational, evaluation, and research in the long-term. Through the intentional structuring of our CAB, we are working to build a sustainable, long-term structure of engagement with community members that will offer us guidance for better serving the diverse groups our organization serves through the equitable, inclusive design of our evaluation and research.