Culture is Mental Health Project: Using a culturally responsive, intergenerational approach to elevate community stories.

Abstract Information: As partnerships continue to develop between academic evaluators and diverse community-based organizations (CBOs), using culturally responsive evaluation (CRE) becomes increasingly important. Evaluation professionals seeking to implement strength-based and CRE practices with CBOs to enhance meaningful and sustainable evaluation, can begin by building trust. They can also promote these goals by engaging partners to better understand their evaluation experience, what they value as ‘evidence’, and the organization’s existing evaluation capacity and expertise. In this way, informed consultative relationships are built and ultimately aim to lead to more relevant evaluation efforts for, and by, CBOs. With this approach in mind, the Northeastern University Public Evaluation Lab (NU-PEL) partners with CBOs to evaluate a collection of place- and strength-based initiatives designed to address adverse childhood experiences (ACEs) and promote mental health in their community. One of these initiatives, Sacramento Region County Foundation (SRCF)’s Culture is Mental Health Project (CMHP), funded eight community organizations working with, and often led by, populations that are impacted by high levels of historic, systematic, and societal trauma, including Latinx, Native American, Black and African American, and housing insecure populations. Since Sacramento is one of the most diverse cities in the United States, the communities that CBOs serve through SRCF’s CMHP cannot be thought of as an ethnic or cultural monolith. CRE is well suited for this evaluation specifically because given this diversity, CBOs have differing evaluation goals and initiatives for their respective communities. In this presentation, we will describe our approach to, successes in, and lessons learned from strengths-based and CRE consultations with the eight SRCF-funded organizations. Presentation attendees will learn practices for both evaluating funder-driven goals, and ensuring early-career evaluators take a central role and contribute valuable perspectives in CRE-based evaluation. We will highlight our philosophy, including cultural humility, importance of relationships, and recognition of organizational expertise, as well as our practices, such as leadership by early-career evaluators, on-site relationship building, evaluation skills development, and community driven and culturally responsive co-design efforts. For example, across organizations, on-site visits by our NU-PEL early-career evaluator revealed tensions between outcomes driven by their funders and the interests of the CBOs. To provide meaningful support, we cultivated partnerships to understand what organizations wanted out of evaluation and what impact looked like to them, and developed strategies to enhance lasting evaluation capacity. Furthermore, offering community partners the opportunity to share their mission and goals in their space, a place where they dedicate much time and work, emphasized that we, as evaluators, are the visitors. In summary, through this relational leadership of an early-career evaluator, the CMHP evaluation aims to uplift CRE outcomes and increase the capacity of the CBOs to continue placing their own voice at the center of their evaluation efforts. Ultimately, as evaluators, there are lessons to be learned through this presentation from NU-PEL's early-career evaluator about engaging community partnerships in a way that strives to empower communities to reclaim their narrative while maintaining methodological rigor.