Five Learnings for Navigating Evaluation in Communities and Cultures Not Your Own
/At Engage R+D, we conduct evaluation and learning projects across a wide variety of issue areas and community contexts. In the process, we help people grapple with tough questions that are often very specific to place and people. Some examples of questions we’ve helped to address on recent projects include:
What do movement leaders at the local and national level believe is needed to end mass incarceration in states like California, Michigan, and New York?
How can practitioners in Hawai’i ensure early childhood services and systems are culturally responsive and trauma-informed?
What will it take to increase COVID vaccination rates across the state of Missouri?
How can clinicians and community leaders in North Carolina work together to support neighborhood-level public health improvements?
As we prepare to address these questions, we often do not have an immediate or holistic understanding of all of the circumstances and dynamics at play. By definition of coming into work in progress and communities not our own, we lack a fulsome view of the historical, systemic, and current cultures and conditions in which our learning and evaluation efforts will take place. That work is an important part of the evaluation journey.
Our Engage R+D team recently held a learning session where we explored our experiences and impacts working across communities that were new to us. We discussed the challenges of working in different contexts, strategies for building connection and trust, and overall lessons learned. That conversation showed how much evaluators can and should learn through place-based inquiries at the outset of a project. It also highlighted the importance of self-reflection on our own positionality (e.g., our race, gender, or political views) and how it impacts our experience working in different communities. The questions we explored were wide-ranging, practical, and foundational, such as:
When we are new to an area, what learning might we need to do beforehand?
How can we enter new spaces respectfully and honor existing ways of being, thinking, knowing, sharing, and gathering in our evaluation practice?
How can we build in time and budget to dig deeper into the historical and cultural contexts of the communities in which we work?
How might we collaborate with local evaluators or community leaders?
How might we advance equity through evaluation in communities where there is political division?
How can we both leverage our role as outsiders to support meaningful change and be mindful of the limitations of that role?
Here are some of our initial learnings from that session and how we’ll act upon them:
1. Prioritize relationship building
Building relationships is a central value of our evaluation practice. In this case, we talked about the importance of asking local contacts and project leads questions about what to know about neighborhoods, politics, and significant historical events that could impact our work. Including a relationship-building component in early evaluation activities allows more time for these early conversations and helps to build rapport. Inquiry in the beginning is only the beginning; these questions can be re-visited throughout the course of a project as our connections expand.
2. Do your homework
Conducting research about the people and places we will be working with and in can be critical to developing a fuller understanding of local context. We discussed that this type of discovery can take longer than we anticipate, and thus it’s helpful to ensure these activities are built into evaluation timelines and budgets. When we take the time to do this type of research in advance, it makes our work more attuned to local context. For example, scanning local media articles, compiling information and data on the history of a community, or attending community meetings = at the outset of a project can enhance the relevance of our work. It can help us to ask better questions, dig deeper, and reflect the nuances of the work in each community.
3. Partner with local experts
When conducting local work, it can be helpful to partner with leaders who hold deep knowledge about local communities and context. Partnering with these individuals, and paying for their contributions and expertise helps not only to build trust and shift power to local experts, but also ensures we capture the nuances of local context to support learning. Local partners can understand how to ask questions that will build rapport quickly and result in deeper insights. In addition, our clients sometimes overlook the capacity that exists locally and we can play a supportive role in helping to honor and support local community leadership.
4. Be transparent and open
We discussed the value of showing up as co-learners in our work in general, but particularly when working in communities that are not our own. This includes finding connections to the work that align with our own personal values, experiences, and background, and being open to sharing those connections with others. For example, who are we, beyond “a Research Consultant from Engage R+D,” matters. Do we have connections to the geographical region? Cultural affinities as members of a broader diaspora? Personal or professional experience with the issue at hand? It can also be helpful to ask honest questions when we are unsure about cultural norms or nuances and whether we should adopt them. Being transparent and open in this way can help to build rapport and reminds program staff and community members that evaluators are humans, too.
5. Maintain feedback loops
Feedback loops, which are important in most evaluation efforts, can be even more critical when there is a physical (or other) distance between us and the individuals involved in our data collection. Are participants engaged in helping set the agenda for our work? Do organizations have the opportunity to participate in sensemaking and preview drafts? Will we provide products and tools that support them in sharing insights from learning and evaluation activities? Keeping those who are closest to the issues at hand in the loop ensures their contributions are recognized and keeps us as evaluators accountable to their feedback.
Lastly, while we discussed a range of strategies for working in communities not our own, we also acknowledged that there are times when a presence in and deep understanding of local communities is central to the work. In such cases, we may be best suited to pass on those opportunities and defer to others who bring deeper community knowledge.
In the end, this session reinforced our commitment at Engage R+D to learning, unlearning, and reflecting with one another as part of our own shared equity-driven community of practice. We lifted up people-centered strategies for sensitively approaching learning and evaluation work that stretches into communities that were new to us. Our practice evolves with each learning and evaluation experience, allowing us to test traditional notions of evaluation practice and understand what it means to deepen relationships with the communities where we work.
