How a community of practice can strengthen partnerships and build capacity in emerging evaluators to support locally-driven system-level strategies to address cancer disparities

Abstract Information: There is a call to liberate and diversify the field of evaluation. Wisconsin not only lacks in the number of evaluators both internal to organizations and external with the experience to evaluate complex initiatives at the systems level, but it has very few evaluators of color, evaluators from the LGBTI community, or from other underrepresented groups. There are also very few pathways to learn about and enter the evaluation field. At the same time, the underlying challenges that confront many Wisconsin communities demand equitable and just solutions that cannot be led successfully only through the lens of a predominantly white evaluation community. In Wisconsin, a local health foundation funded a project to study breast and lung cancer disparities i and design community-level solutions using a transdisciplinary approach. This approach brings together members of the community, organization representatives with an interest in breast or lung cancer, and researchers and clinicians working in academic medicine. The project established four community-based “collaborative work groups” where evidence showed significant cancer disparities based on race in breast or lung cancer. A core value guiding this project is to ensure equitable partnerships between community and academic medicine in all phases of design and implementation. A core component of the project model is a developmental evaluation approach led by a dedicated facilitator and sensitized evaluator pair. Their leadership is intended to (1) develop strong equitable partnerships and shared ownership over implementation across a diverse workgroup, (2) nurture shared learning by using data and assumption checking methods, and (3) develop transdisciplinary leadership pathways at the community level and in academic medicine to build new fields of research, action agendas and emerging technologies to better address cancer disparities. While the project alone elevated voice in evaluation in many different places, the focus of this panel is on how this project challenged itself to act on its values and commitment statements of equity and sustainable community capacity building -especially in developing the capacity for communities to lead their own evaluations. In doing so, we sought to recruit and retain evaluators of color from the local communities, who were not on a traditional path for an evaluation career, embed them in a community-based organizations without existing evaluation resources, and create training and technical assistance to support them in this new role. This demonstration, which includes: a seasoned evaluator, two emerging evaluation professionals, and one of the community partners supervising an evaluation-facilitation team. Together we will discuss what we learned during the two-year design period culminating in funding of implementation proposals. We will also share candid results from an externally facilitated after-action-review that highlights where we succeeded in working with emerging and underrepresented evaluators, as well as where in our approach we did not meet our expectations, and how we are seeking to address those during implementation. While we will present some initial information about the project to set the context for our learning, we will leave plenty of room for discussion and questions.