1030 - Engaging with Community Members for Equitable Evaluation: A Hands-On, How-To Workshop

Abstract Information: Engaging and collaborating with community members is more than conducting interviews and focus groups. Authentic community engagement happens when community members’ voices are centered and amplified and when community members drive the design, implementation and the evaluation of solutions to community needs and asset-based activities to create stronger, more resilient communities. This interactive workshop will use fun, engaging methods to teach evaluators to 1) assess how equitable and inclusive their current practices are; 2) authentically engage with natural (non -“professional”) community leaders; and 3) learn how to use strengths-based participatory evaluation methods to increase collaboration. This hand-on, experiential workshop will engage participants to co-create knowledge and skills they can use to apply a participative, equitable, and community-empowered approach to evaluation. The facilitators will engage participants with Technology of Participation (ToP)© methods and employ a variety of teaching/learning strategies to engage adult learners. Each participant will receive a workbook with workshop content, exercises, templates, and resources. In groups of 8 to 10 individuals, participants will work alone, in pairs, and in small group activities in order to accommodate participants’ varying needs and abilities. Accommodations will be made for participants who are not comfortable engaging in interactive exercises as we have encountered this during past workshops. Workshop facilitators will use multiple engagement strategies including: · Think, Pair, Share small group discussions. · Interactive, liberatory exercises including simulations of exercises participants may use with communities. · Individual exercises that allow for personal reflection. · Facilitated large group discussions using the Technology of Participation© methods.

Relevance Statement: Evaluation can play an important role in reducing inequities and systemic racism. The AEA Guiding Principle of Common Good and Equity requires evaluators to strive to contribute to the advancement of an equitable and just society. It also includes that we promote transparency and active sharing of data and findings, mitigate biases and power imbalances, self-assess our own privilege and positioning within the context, and identify and make efforts to address he evaluation's potential risks of exacerbating historic disadvantage or inequity. However, to do so, we need to change the way we work. Work by Guba and Lincoln (1994) and Shawn Wilson (2008) provide a framework that is helpful to examine paradigms that guide our inquiry and how each paradigm relates to colonizing research and evaluation practice. Traditionally evaluation methods have been rooted in positivism and post-positivism, both of which result in the evaluator designing, analyzing, and interpreting evaluation results through their lens rather than the lens of the people who are participating in the focal initiative. As a result, evaluation results and their results tend to favor individuals who are external to the community rather than community members. Reducing inequities and systemic racism requires decolonizing white-supremacy based practices, including evaluation practices (Wolfe, 2021; https://aea365.org/blog/decolonizing-evaluation-week-decolonizing-evaluation-it-starts-with-examining-the-paradigm-by-susan-m-wolfe/). One way we can decolonize our practice and promote equity is to collaborate with community members as evaluation partners. Such participative evaluation ensures amplification of community members' voices rather than the evaluator's viewpoints. True community collaboration begins with self-reflection and reflecting on our practice. It also requires being comfortable with letting go of being the "expert" and embracing the co-expertise that true community engagement elicits. This workshop will begin with discussion and use of a tool for self-reflection and reflection on the evaluator's practice. Then, using hands-on and practical experiential methods, shares methods evaluators can use to work collaboratively with communities for the evaluation design, implementation, analysis and interpretation of evaluation findings. Evaluators will learn techniques for true community engagement to obtain more valid information that truly represents the benefits to and experiences of the members of a community who engage with the focal initiative. Guba, E.G., & Lincoln, Y.S. (1994). Competing paradigms in qualitative research. Wilson, S. (2008). Research is ceremony: Indigenous research methods.