The Balancing Act: Using Your Agency as an Evaluator to Engage with and Navigate the Best Practice of Community Data Share-Backs

Abstract Information: Community-level data collection and research has a long history of being exploitative and extractive, particularly within under-resourced communities. Part of the role of the evaluator is to confront and combat this history to better represent community voice and produce richer, more nuanced evaluation findings and narratives. The best practice of sharing data back to the community actively works against an extractive framework and requires that data be provided back to those involved in the data collection. Incorporating the data share-back best practice can foster more mutually beneficial partnerships, in turn creating more meaningful collaborations and encouraging community-driven research and evaluation frameworks. This Ignite presentation will provide insight into the evaluator's role in implementing the vital best practice of sharing back data. While essential for any evaluation team presenting community voice, this best practice often feels like a balancing act between data synthesis and presentation, community partner priorities, available resources, and evaluator-program contractual relationships. The Institute for Social Research (ISR) is a self-supported applied research center at California State University, Sacramento that partners with government entities, community-based organizations, university departments, and businesses to find data-informed answers to their most pressing questions. Within a wide variety of project scales and research topics, the social researchers and evaluators at ISR have engaged with the best practice of sharing back data with varying levels of success and effectiveness. The presentation will explore lessons learned from engaging with this best practice using several visual examples, and spark conversation about both the power and pitfalls of the community data share-back best practice. Additionally, the presentation will discuss both the responsibility and the opportunity for evaluators to use their agency within project design and management—including having courageous conversations within teams and with clients—to reject extractive evaluation frameworks.