107 - Amplifying Lived Expertise on your Team

Abstract Information: Why is it critical to include people with lived expertise on your evaluation team? In what ways does it increase the quality of an evaluation’s end products? What needs to be in place to ensure Lived Experts are successfully integrated and supported? Come hear directly from Lived Expert Consultants about their experiences as integral parts of evaluation teams.

In this session, Lived Expert Consultants will share how having similar life experiences to program participants enabled them to provide key insights into the design, implementation and analysis of the evaluation process. They will offer lessons learned about their process of joining an evaluation team with no evaluation experience and what was most helpful or should be avoided to ensure their success. We will discuss why this is critical and how it has significantly improved the quality and focus of our work, as well as the bumps along the way.

Join us as we share our journey over the last 5 years employing the methodology of Lived Expert Consultants, where members who are part of the impacted community bring their particular expertise based on their lived experiences into the evaluation process as full team members.

Then, we invite you to share with us the past, present, and future ways that you incorporate LECs into your practice as we reflect on questions that probe effective evaluation design, tips and tricks to effective implementation at various stages of the evaluation process, and the lessons learned along the way.

This discussion will be highly interactive, so bring your perspective and enthusiasm!